Day 5: Buenos Aires

 Day five has been a day. Dear lordie. Where to begin. At the beginning, I guess!

We left off at ungodly o’clock, I was awake, we weren’t too far off landing. Nothing to report here, we were slightly worried our baggage wouldn’t be with us but otherwise everything was smooth sailing. Off the plane and towards customs, where we are someone practically the first people in the foreigners queue (or only people in the foreigners queue?) and within minutes, after a brief line of questioning (and no bloody stamp) we were waved though. 

We now had an hour before our transfer driver arrived, so we set off to find an ATM. Due to the currency crisis in Argentina, people are Limited to 10,000 pesos (roughly Aus$80, Altho the currently can fluctuate quite wildly). It took me a few goes to get this right, and before long Dan and I had a few pesos each. 

Still running very early, our driver messaged and arranged to meet us as soon as possible. He was surprised we knew zero Spanish and so the drive was conducted in silence. The journey was about an hour and thanks to my weird foible with transport, I fell asleep. Or at least I sat there uncomfortably doing “the nod” and trying not to fall asleep. Eventually, after weaving in and out of very slow traffic, past glittery piles of trash as far as the eye can see (I assume revellers from the Argentinian FIFA World Cup win?) we were In the city centre, and deposited at our hotel door [name currently redacted until we have left]. 

Now most of this bit I’ll generally skip over because I’m still rather frustrated, but essentially the owner met us, was very rude, let us leave our things and demanded we return at 2pm. I’ll come back to this. 



It’s 9am and we have five hours to kill, no shower or sleep. We find a nearby coffee shop for a bite to eat and some caffeine and somehow an hour passed. 



Once the exhaustion shakes had passed, we realised we weren’t too far from El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a gorgeous theatre turned book shop. We spent some time here perusing the Titles and taking photos before setting a path for La Recoleta Cemetery, holding the remains of Eva Peron and generally quite beautiful. On the way we stopped at Starbucks for a cold drink / I tried the cafe du leche frappachio and almost passed out from the sugar. Was tasty tho.

Arriving at the cemetery, we didn’t realise it was pay to enter, so we aborted for another day and wandered into a nearby mall. By now we still had a few hours to kill before 2pm, so from here we went to the nearest subway station to figure out public transport tickets. 

“You need to go four blocks down to the next station”, the ticket attendant told us thankfully in English. Turns out it was five, but we got there. This attendant however had no English, so we had a bit of fun using Google translate to talk to each other. Dan and I eventually just nodded and said thank you, not thinking we had nearly enough on the travel card, to find out later a subway journey costs about 40c and a bus journey about 25c. Wow. No wonder she didn’t want us to load it up more!

Shortly after we decided to try the subway for the first time even though we still had a lot of time to kill. The subway works great! There’s one every 3 or so minutes, and getting from one line to the other was easy enough. A blind busker jumped on at one stage and started playing Christmas carols on a harmonica, using his cane as a percussion instrument. We popped up to find a little market! Mostly food stuffs, bread and grains etc but some of the pre made food looked tasty. 

We wandered into the Teatro Colon to see what shows they had playing (didn’t find this out til later - The Nutcracker, sadly sold out) and continued to meander our way back to the accom. It was about 1.35, so we sat in a nearby park to wait til 2pm.

 

So here we are back at the hotel. After much faffing around we were finally shown to our room. Or so we thought. We opened the door to see a tiny room with two single beds. I turned to the attendant and said “where’s the pool?”. He laughed and said “That room is a lot more money.”

Dan and I stared at him.

“I know,” I said, “We paid it.”

I’m starting to shake by this stage, and the attendant looked confused. Dan whips out the receipt we had handy and the look of dawning horror on the attendants face was (in hindsight) priceless. 

He scuttled off to investigate leaving us in what I can only assume is the worst room in their hotel. Cracked peeling paint, the shower was laughable with a door that only opened about a hand width and used soap, rust and dust everywhere. And two single beds. 

After an age, he texted Dan to say that yes, there had been an administration error and that they would let us know what to do about it. 

We continued to wait an age, and we finally received another text. It had been booked for tonight by someone else, we can stay in our room and receive the difference back and move in tomorrow. I exploded. First night free and we don’t have to leave and we go to the room immediately. 

Dan went downstairs. The bitch who saw us in in the first place had replaced the scuttling attendant, and thankfully I wasn’t there otherwise I would have made things worse. They wouldn’t give us any discount, but they conceded that they would call us around 12pm when the room was cleaned and we could stay in this shithole room til then. I did not want to have to go out and come back for a 2pm check in again. So that’s something. 

I was very upset, as yesterday was the hottest day, and we were so sweaty and gross and had had no sleep. We attempted to squeeze ourselves into the shower in this room (one st a time of course, the shower was literally the size of me and then had a much needed nap. 

We decided to make the most of the evening, and I wanted to try some local fare. Parrilla means barbecue, or steakhouse, and while there were many to choose from I had read and researched one called Javi’s Parrilla. It wasn’t the most convenient but reading the reviews of others, this one continued to stand out. 

It meant catching a bus, and we had a few to choose from. We joined a line and ambled onto a bus, and told the driver where we wanted to go. It wasn’t clear where Dan had to put the card for it to register, and the driver and people behind got a bit antsy. They could have shown us. In the end we were on and away.

The bus did not take the route it was supposed to. We discovered later there was a big protest happening on the main bus route (must remember to look this up) and the whole section was closed. We were just confused at the time but it ended up being a great little tiki tour. The drive was a jerky-stop-start affair, and I almost fell over a number of times  Hopping off, we still had a short walk ahead of us and as we walked down the cobbled street we passed many cool looking eateries and bars. 

We finally stopped at Javi’s and headed inside to be greeted by a lovely young man with very good English. He invited us to choose a table and as usual we dithered. Once we had looked at the menus I asked for his recommendations. 

“I am guessing you are here for steak,” he says. “I recommend the steak plate here, and it comes with a side of your choice.”

I balked a little at the price, as I thought it was supposed to be cheap, but then Dan reminded me that my 1:1 price change was more than the actual price. In the end, we chose the steak plate consisting of strip steak, rib-eye and sirloin, with roasted vegetables and a bottle of 2021 Cruz Alta Malbec. The wine list was a page of Malbecs, and then a handful of whites! The wine ranged from about $16 through to $80odd, so we chose one four up from the bottom at about $20. Some bread rolls with two little pottles containing tomato and onion salsa in one and a garlicky pesto and my word, worth the pain. I rarely eat onion and garlic but figured I’d suffer for this! 

The whole meal was fantastic. An absolute joy. I don’t often eat steak because it’s expensive and I usually get fairly average cuts of meat. To be able to experience the difference between different cuts was eye opening! The strip steak was delicious. Which was outdone by the juicy rib eye. Which in turn was overshadowed by the sirloin that simply melted in the mouth. 

As we were paying up, the young gentleman asked if we would like a complimentary limoncello and I think I said yes please before he’d finished asking. We haven’t really had limoncello since we overdosed on it in Amalfi in Italy in 2018. Just the right note to end the meal! In the end it came to 9560 pesos, which in Aussie $$ is roughly $70. The exchange rate through our Revolut card is considerably lower than what is displayed on xe.com. We aren’t sure quite why the discrepancy but it works in our favour. 

Having put a positive spin on the day we caught the bus back to our crappy room on a bit of a red wine and limoncello buzz, complete with meat sweats and ready for the food coma.