MarkandJim.com

Here we are at the start of a month-long trip down to Argentina, where eventually we’ll board a ship for Antarctica before coming up to Patagonia for six days of hiking. Having never been to Antarctica we’ve been pretty excited about the trip. First stop, three days in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is one of our favorite cities, though oddly we only came here once on our long nomadic adventure. It’s a city with great food, great wine, great restaurants, great neighborhoods, nice parks, and often a nice climate. It’s relatively inexpensive and yet has a distinctly European vibe to it. From the East Coast you fly nearly straight south, meaning there’s practically no jet lag. Lots to love about this place.

Now, having been here a few times before there wasn’t a lot that we needed to see or do. Still, we made an effort to be good tourists. In addition to doing a lot of walking around we spent one morning touring the Teatro Colón, BA’s opera house. I don’t think we’d ever been in it before but since we now spend so much time at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and since we’d heard great things about the opera house here, we figured we’d give it a shot.

Built at the end of the 18th century it has that old, grand European feel to it. Beautiful inside, lots of gold and pretend gold. Allegedly the acoustics are supposed to be great, but I suspect every opera house tells you their acoustics are great. All in all it was a great 15-minute tour but sadly they took 50 minutes to do it – just a lot of time standing around with kind of stupid questions. “Did you think it was beautiful?”, as though anyone would say that it was just OK.

The good note was that they warned us that since the crew was preparing for an opening on Saturday, the main theater would be dark. You’d be able to see inside but it wouldn’t be lit. And sure enough when we went in it was pretty dark. But after a few minutes of admiring it in the dark (maybe extra time just standing around wasn’t such a bad thing…) on came the lights as part of their testing. So we got to see it in its luminous glory and it was pretty impressive.

The other piece of culture for us was a morning in the Museum of Fine Arts. While there were lots of Argentine artists represented, the museum had its share of great artists: Monet, Picasso, Rodin, Van Gogh, Pollack, Goya, Tintoretto … you know, those guys. A fun little diversion.

There was one little crisis during our stay when Mark got a message that it was time to check in for our 5:00 AM flight to Ushuaia. What? We’d booked an 11:00 AM flight. Turns out they rescheduled that flight to a crazy early time and had a different flight going at 11:10. And instead of obviously moving us to the 11:10, there we were on this insanely early flight. It took Mark well more than an hour to rebook us – the new 11:10 flight was full so we had to do a 1:10 flight instead – which was obviously pretty annoying.

The highlight here, though, is the food and restaurant scene. We stayed in a cute little hotel, the Home Hotel, in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood which is ground zero for great little restaurants. Probably our favorite was a place called Heirro which, not entirely coincidentally, was in the space that once housed Mark’s favorite restaurant when he studied Spanish here for a month back in 2013. Lunch the first day consisted of a few appetizers, while dinner the last night was a couple appetizers, a big steak, and an arugula salad. All great.

And thus went the opening of this little adventure. It was great flying out of New York’s cold weather – where allegedly a big storm is brewing this weekend – into the ’70s and low ’80s with low humidity of a BA summer. Apparently it’s getting hotter here over the next few days but by then we’ll be in Ushuaia on the very southern tip of the continent. So far at least, off to a good start!