We did a bunch of other stuff too. We went out to Rosario for a day (ask me about the flooded hotel room), saw an opera at the Teatro Colon (awesome building, crap opera), and generally wore down our shoes while enjoying being somewhere else.

We've more or less decided on going back next year, this time to El Calafate in Patagonia. Mmmm. Glaciers. It oughta be swell.

I might even be ready for more cafe con leche y medialunas by then.

Chao!

Miscellany

We had our best conversations with cabbies. This guy played his harmonica, no hands, while careening through the streets of Buenos Aires. After regaling us with "When the Saints Go Marching In," he played a Carlos Gardel tango tune and told us about how he played his harmonica at the Teatro Colon at age 10. He was awesome.
This is a fantastic sculpture in the Palermo barrio of Buenos Aires.

There are sensors in it that make it close at night.


Seriously. This was on a highway feeder road in the Buenos Aires suburbs.



Our last day in Buenos Aires, we whiled away a few hours in a bar in La Boca.

One more from Iguazu

That red dirt stuck to our shoes until... well, I think some of it is still on them.

It was so quiet and peaceful here. I'm a huge fan.

Iguazu Falls

We were really lucky to get great weather. Look at the double rainbow!



That night we went out and got plastered with Peter and Heidi, two fantastic kids from England.

Yeah, I spilled beer all over myself.

Iguazu Falls

There are really a whole bunch of these pictures, but I'm getting super tired of waiting for Blogger to play nice.

These two are pictures of us before we went out to the very end of the walkway, which was about 20 feet from the waterfall. We couldn't take pictures out there, on account of the water.


Behind Chris on the left you can see how close we got.







Here's a coati. That's South American for "weird raccoon thingy."

Iguazu Falls

28 September -- Iguazu Falls

Once we got to the falls, we finally ran into the teeming hordes of tourists that had so far been missing in our travels. Most people belonged to tours led by Iguazu Falls staff. So there were wandering groups of like 50 people each, every one with a laminated card around their neck that said "Omar." There were lots of different tour guides but Omar seemed to dominate. The most impressive views were at Garganta del Diablo, but our favorite experience was standing in the spray of the falls at the end of the lower trail. We took a million pictures that tell the story pretty well.

Thar be snakes out there. Outside the trail. As clearly marked on this sign.

This is on the walk to Garganta del Diablo. Note the mist rising up from the falls in the background. If you can't read the sign, it's pointing out the catwalk destroyed by a flood in 1992.

More Puerto Iguazu goodness.

People here are so friendly. When we would run out of beer or water, we went across the street to a little kiosco. The guy who worked there was so great. His accent was really hard to understand, but he was patient and used lots of gestures -- he's probably used to dealing with English-speaking tourists.

He wouldn't sell us our liter bottle of Quilmes until he made us understand that he wanted his bottle back, so he could get the return fee. Which is fine. But when we brought it back, he (along with his wife and 2 or 3 kids) tried to give us half our money back since we returned the bottle. Half our money. The liter of beer was only $1.60 to begin with. Like we're going to take that out of his pocket.

For Aidy

As promised, here is the $10 meal you are buying us. Steak, and chicken milanese. Don't mind the fries, they come with the entrees in the nicest of places.

27 September -- Outta Dodge.

While wasting time before our plane to Puerto Iguazu, we went to the Japanese Garden, which is probaly a lot prettier in the summer, when everything is in bloom and they're not doing major consturction. But it was nice anyway.

Puerto Iguazu is a cute little town, where only the big streets are paved, you can hear treefrogs at night, and there's still more internet cafes per capita than you can imagine.





This is the Rio de la Plata, the big 'ol river in Buenos Aires. It's big, and it's brown.

Mmmm. Quilmes 'n' cheesy poofs in Puerto Iguazu.


Hotel Lilian was everything that Lonely Planet promised. Quiet, cute, and most importantly, quiet, it's a charming tin-roof building with a little garden in the courtyard. The weather was simply beautiful, and a little warmer than in BA.

26 September -- Buenos Aires

Rather than take a bus to Puerto Iguazu, which was our original plan, we decided to look into plane tickets, thereby cutting our travel time from 20 hours to 1.5. After checking into a new hotel, lovingly nicknamed "The Convent" for its spartan furnishings, we tracked down the AmEx office and listened to the worst "buy our package" sales pitch ever.

First she sold us plane tickets, which was fine. But the minute she started in on the 2 night hotel package that included "breakfast and dinner because the hotel is so far from town, but it's the only one available and it's US $300."

Um, no. Both Chris and I felt our ripoff Spidey sense going off, so we bought the plane tickets and went across the plaza to a locutorio. The first phone call we made to a US $20 hotel, in the middle of town, welcomed us with open arms. Lesson: never buy the package.

That night, to while away the forsaken hours between afternoon medialunas and dinner, we saw "Las Rompabodas," -- the Wedding Crashers. Great fun for $4.


Thanks, Lonely Planet. You provided us with a hotel that is offers a central location, safe neighborhood, and up to six inches of sunlight at a time. I'm serious. The metal shade didn't go up any further.

Nathan, this one is for you. At least this place has a TV.

Yay! Escolares! This is the most pimped out school bus that we had ever seen.

25 September -- and the rest.

After the cemetary, we had lunch at Munich de Recoleta, a Recoleta restaurant that turned out to have great German food and lots of locals. Our waiter had worked there since approximately 1927.

To walk off lunch, we walked all the way to San Telmo on the south side of town to look at the antiques fair that springs up on Sundays. They had some cool stuff, but since it's pretty popular, there aren't really that many bargains.

Dinner was with Javier at a trendy little Italian place in Puerto Madero, the recently refurbished dock area downtown. Trendy or not, they still played bad 80's music, a common theme in Argentina.

After Javier dropped us off at our hotel around midnight (we told you dinner is always late), we behaved like true locals and went right back out for ice cream at Freddo.

That's Javier and Chris, who I assure you just has bad eyelid timing.


Yay! Ice cream at midnight! A 5-year-old's dream!

25 September -- Recoleta Cemetary

25 September -- Recoleta Cemetary

She was one of my favorites. On account of the dog and the neat windows.






















The more well-kept tombs look like small chapels on the inside.

25 September -- Recoleta Cemetary

They're not all shiny and smooth. This one was was all made out of rough-hewn rock.



This is what happens when the family money runs out.

It's very weird to see "buried" caskets in the open air, but it's how they do it here.





Families use these tombs for generations. The caskets go down for quite some way.





















After we saw our fill of the cemetary, we did what we knew we had to do: we tracked down Evita's tomb. Hey, we are tourists after all.

25 September -- Recoleta Cemetary

They're not all ornate. There were a few that looked straight out of the Home Depot custom shower department.