The Accidental Explorer

BUENOS AIRES – Our first few days in Argentina have been highlighted by friends, food, lack of sleep, and a desperate quest to acquire small change.

Dale and SuperPaola

We arrived Sunday morning and took a circuitous taxi ride to the home of my friends Diego and Paola. Paola was my Spanish teacher for a couple of months when I lived here and we became great friends, and she insisted that we stay with her the moment we arrived. One of the highlights of my trip so far was when she greeted us with hot mate. For those of you who don’t know, mate is a tea-like infusion that is served in a small gourd and sipped through a straw made of silver. My father thinks it tastes like hay, but maybe it’s an acquired taste. All I know is that it went great with the big plate of medialunas that Diego put on the table.

I always joked that Paola’s name should be “SuperPaola” because she was such an amazing teacher, so we surprised her by bringing a SuperPaola t-shirt to make it official.  Now she can dress up like a real live superhero.

Drinking wine at a street side cafe

As expected the food has been amazing. On our first day here we went into the city with Diego and Paola and Mona had her first lomito, which is basically a steak between two pieces of bread.  More cuisine followed in the form of amazing coffee and medialunas at street side cafes, red wine (malbec!), dulce de leche, and alfajores (sandwich cookies wih dulce de leche). Mona is now addicted to dulce de leche and will need a twelve step program to get off the stuff.

At one point we dropped in at my old Spanish school, Academia Buenos Aires, to say hi to a few friends. Everyone giggled when I introduced Mona, and I remembered that down here she is going by the name “Moni” because “mona” is Spanish for monkey. Basically, I had just introduced her has my friend “Monkey.” Possibly accurate, but funny nonetheless.

We also discovered there is a serious shortage of “monedas” (coins) in Buenos Aires at the moment. Nobody seems to be quite sure why this is the case, but we spend a good part of our day trying to collect small coins and defending them from shopkeepers who want them at every opportunity. It’s not just that coins are nice to have, we ABSOLUTELY NEED THEM to get home on the bus. There are so few coins in circulation that the subway has been running free of charge for days because nobody has coins to pay for tickets. Welcome to Buenos Aires!