Days 17, 18, 19 and 20: Chilly in Chile

Day 17

When we woke up it was raining and, considering the previous day´s exertions, we decided to treat ourselves to a day slobbing in front of the hostel tv.

This did give me some much needed time to reflect on my impressions of Argentina so far. Firstly, Argentina is the most European country I´ve ever been to outside Europe. Whilst Sydney, Hong Kong, Israel etc. seem

to follow the American model, Argentina appears more Mediterranean; a cross between a Greek Island and the south of France. Secondly, Argentina is still rather bitter about the Falklands. There is a map of Argentina in the hostel and not only does it say the Falklands are owned by Argentina not the UK, it even renames the capital city; Port Stanley is thus Puerto Argentino. Thirdly, and linked to the above two, Argentina is a very proud country and sees itself very much as part of the (European) first world. Perhaps rightly so. It has been at various points in its history one of the richest few economies in the world and excels in art, literature etc.

I believe though that the heart of a country´s character can be discerned from within its supermarkets and, with our budgets gradually getting more and more streched, we have begun to spend rather a lot of time browsing their aisles. Centrally, Argentineans love their cows. The entire meat counter is given over to beef. It is touch to find even fresh chicken, let alone the holy grail that is fish. After having checked out near to seven different supermarkets I have come to conclude that Argentineans simply don´t eat the stuff. As for the sweet stuff, whole aisles are also dedicated to dulce de leche (which incidentally also infuses every sweet and savoury dish from breakfast through to dinner) and counter upon counter display the most elaborate cream and meringue cake creations all sold for a pittance (for instance a 12-person tiramasu costing just over a pound). Quite usefully, fruit is sold ready-to-eat (i.e. the avocados and peaches are perfectly ripe, which makes a great change from the tradition in England of waiting 2 weeks for your Tesco´s mango to get soft). Finally, pregnant women get to queue-jump at the check-out. While I applaud the sentiment, I did spend 45 minutes the other day cursing womankind as one pregnant lady after another wobbled merrily past me in the line. There were literally dozens. I tell you, Argentina does not need to worry about population stagnation or increasing dependency ratios!

Day 18

Waking up long before dawn we said goodbye to our lovely hostel and grabbed the 7 hour bus across the border into Santiago, the capital of Chile. The bus ride was an event in itself as it took us high up into the Andes, weaving inbetween cloud-covered peaks and greenish-blue lakes.

The amazing vistas gave a suitably dramatic background to our sad realisation that no food was allowed to pass the border into Chile. You could almost see the tears in the girls´ eyes as we had to bin our beloved packets of biscuits, adored cereal bars and highly necessary tic-tacs.

Arriving into boiling hot Santiago, we headed straight to our new hostel´s pool and jacuzzi. This hostel occupied an old mansion house and had impressively high stuccoed ceilings, wide corridors and more lounges than Heathrow.

Day 19

After beginning the day with a run round Santiago´s parks, we spent the afternoon seeing the city´s sights. Josie as ever managed ´accidentally´ to bring us to Santiago´s law courts, whilst I dragged us to the Congress building. The museum of Pre-Colombian art was unfortunately closed, but I do query the decision to rent the basement out to an adult cinema,

We visited Pablo Neruda´s house, with Tom being particularly impressed by the local intellectual graffiti;

We then climbed a couple of hills, each affording spectacular views of the city. Santiago is situated in a bowl, utterly surrounding by the snowy peaks of the Andes. The pictures do not really do justice to just how breath-taking the city looked from above;

For dinner we treated ourselves to a visit to Santiago´s oldest cafe, the charming Confiteria Torres. Photos of the presidents, writers and artists who had dined there graced the walls and I´m sure a photo of the four of us will soon be added to the list. To start, Tom had a beef consomme to start and the girls Pil-Pil shrimps;

Seeing my dismay that the kitchens had run out of Pumpkin soup, the chef specially prepared an alternative spinach soup for me which I can honestly say without any hyperbole was the best soup ever made;

For the main courses we had some classic Chilean dishes. I had a conger eel baked in butter, salt and pepper, with a light cream sauce of picarocos and shallots. This was my first time tasting eel and it didn´t disappoint. It looked like fish and had a texture in between that of cod and squid.

Josie had the chicken chochifrito, which was a chicken breast rolled with ham and asparagus, covered in a mushroom sauce.

Tom has a classic Chilean fish chowder - this was my favourite of the four.

And Lizzie had a Chiliean rice dish with what the menu called ´magical´ ingredients. We had no idea what it actually contained, but she seemed to enjoy it.

Day 20

Got a bus back to Mendoza and spent the afternoon sunbathing. We are about to get another bus now to take us to Cordoba

Days 13, 14, 15, 16: Mendoza - the wine, music and mountains

Day 13
Our last day in Buenos Aires was a lazy one spent walking around our neighbourhood, sunbathing and saying goodbye to the friends made in our hostel. We then boarded our overnight bus for the 1,050 kilometers to Mendoza.
 


Day 14
At 10am we arrive in Mendoza. Hugging the base of the Andes mountains, Mendoza is a stunning city with a relaxed atmosphere absolutely obsessed with wine. After our journey, you could not imagine how idyllic our hostel appeared to us with its vines (picking grapes from which is actively encouraged), swimming pool and free wine! I´m proud to say we did nothing else but lounge all day in the shade of the vines drinking glass after glass of the local Malbec. It was during this blissful afternoon that I finally finished Margaret Atwood´s Year of the Flood. I´ve now moved on to King Lear. The girls love nothing more than to hear Tom and I loudly acting out each scene.

(Grape picking)

That night the hostel hosted a wine tasting evening with Tapas.  I think the general opinion on the local varieties was that we all loved the Malbec, I loved the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Merlot was ok but not that special, the Chardonnay was surprisingly good (we had low expectations) and the Torrentes was way too sweet.

I got talking to a French family during the wine tasting and we ended up discussing the differences between the French and English versions of liberalism (as you do). Unfortunately, I´d had rather a few glasses of wine by this point and mid-conversation darted out the room whilst singing French nursery rhymes. I carried on down the street singing away, stumbling here and there in search of food. To my utter shame I returned to the hostel a few minutes later clutching my McDonalds and immediately fell into the wine tasting table smashing a very nice Merlot in the process. Collapsing on a chair I nibbled away at my Big Mac then was promptly sent to bed. (Note: Tom was actually much more drunk than me, but didn´t embarrass himself)


Day 15
We passed the morning strolling round Mendoza. After having been completely destroyed by an earthquake 150 years ago, the city was rebuilt with safety in mind resulting in wide tree lined avenues, delightful plazas and few buildings over two stories. One of the few buildings to break this rule though is the town hall which we climbed for some pretty impressive views of the town and the Andes mountains. The same evening we returned to the roof-top terrace of the town hall for a free cultural event which involved more glasses of the local Malbec, a band/singer playing tango music and a view of the sun setting behind the mountains. In the distance we could see a thunder storm and the forks of lighting appeared to illuminate the sky in time with the music. Thankfully the storm passed Mendoza by and we continued to bask in the warm evening air.

Back at the hostel I cooked my signature lemon risotto with chicken milanese and followed this with a shop-bought giant donut. From the sublime to the ridiculous! Needless to say this meal was accompanied by more wine...


Day 16
Grabbing a bus we arrive in the amusingly named village of Maipu - the gateway to the region´s vineyards. We rented some bikes and spent an unbelievably idyllic day cycling between various vineyards sampling their wines. The second vineyard even let us eat some of the grapes from their vines, which tasted so much better than those bought in the shops. With grapes that good the actual making of the wine can´t be that hard at all!

Our final stop though may have been a mistake. Following a recommendation we made our way to a vineyard specialising in jams, chutneys, CHOCOLATE and liquors. Having had our sense of etiquette weakened by the previous glasses of wine we somewhat devoured the samples on offer. I became especially fond of the almond-flavoured dulce de leche and could have drunk whole glasses of the balsamic vinegar on offer. The mistake though was Tom and my choice to try the local absinthe. Several hours later I can still feel the intoxicating burn in my throat.      

Having many left-over ingredients from last night, in the evening I cooked chicken Milanese again but this time with a pumpkin and roquefort risotto. Nonetheless I had some food envy when the mother of the French family made her own stock from last night´s leftover bones. Who has the strength to do that at home let alone on holiday!                                                    

Days 9-12: ¡Carnival!

Day 9
Following a well-deserved siesta, we headed out for Mexican. The place was incredibly kitch (Mexican wrestling masks on the wall, cactuses throughout etc.), the food cheap and the atmosphere great. However my initial belief that this was an authentic South American experience was challenged by the fact the Americans in our group reminded us that we are geographically as far from Mexico as Africa . Regardless, the tacos were great, the guacamole delicious and the spicy sauce best not touched! I had a drink called horcheta which was a rice-based milk flavoured with cinnamon and vanilla. Yum

Day 10
Today we headed to an area called La Recoleta (one of the poshest suburbs of BA). The absolute highlight was seeing the breathtaking cemetary where the city´s wealthiest have been building their mausoleums for centuries. It was more a city than a cemetary with streets and streets of multi-storey mausoleums all exploding with weeping angels, greeks columns and elaborate stained glass. Evita´s family mausoleum was surprisingly demure in comparison to some of the birthday-cake-esque creations. Pictures really cannot do the place justice.

Having worked up an appetite with all that grave-spotting we wolfed down our packed lunches and crossed the street to the art museum (Museo de la Bella Arte). This was a really really well put together museum which showed that you do not need to have the big important paintings in your collection to put on a good show. The highlight was the room of pre-Colombian Argentine art. What I found interesting here was the broad date ranges given to the artefacts (e.g. this was made sometime between 1500 BC and 1000 AD). This just shows how little is known about these cultures.

On the walk back to the hostel we finally indulged in a visit to one of BA´s patisseries. Entering the room we were confronting with a wall of Dulce de Leche - the soft caramel that appears to be as important to the Argentine diet as steak and red wine. Thus far Argentina has been a relatively expensive country, but boy were these pastries cheap! Giving into temptation I ate a little too many...

An afternoon of sunbathing on the roof terrace of the hostel led us to hear the rumours that Buenos Aires was having a carnival of its own that night. Not really knowing the time, place or content we grabbed the train to the town centre and followed our ears. After several false starts (and heading a long time in the wrong direction) we finally arrived at an explosion of scantilly clad, hip-gyrating, fiesta-filled fun. A little like the Notting Hill carnival but hotter, tourists, locals, young, old - all were bopping along to the drum beat. In what appears a local tradition, gangs of children ran around spraying shaving foam at anyone in their path. After lizzie and josie had been sufficiently drenched in the stuff, we declared war on the little brats and  Michael reduced dozens of children to crying, foamy wrecks.

Day 11
This morning I finally summoned the energy to join the others on their morning run around BA´s parks. The act of waking up early was more difficult than the run itself, which turned out to be rather pleasant as we got to pass the locals doing their local things at the start of the day - the old doing aerobics, the nuns on their rollerblades and the dog-walkers walking. Obviously the fact I arrived at the hostel long before the girls reflects the fact I was so much quicker than them rather than my giving up half-way through.

After a well-deserved shower we grabbed a taxi to La Boca which is a rather run-down working class area with an attractive few streets coloured in pastel tones full of street music and tango. It is amazing how the dancing that I find so boring on Saturday night tv can be so gripping in real life.

A short taxi later and we hit the Sunday antiques market at San Telmo. As ever I wanted to buy so much but I had to be strong as it was tough to justify carrying that gramaphone with me over the next 5 months.

Maybe it was the running in the morning, maybe it was dehydration, maybe it was the shock at seeing just how short a pair of shorts Josie had bought that afternoon. Whatever it was, only a few glasses of Argentine Malbec at a cool rooftop bar that evening was enough to make me rather ´tired and emotional´. Even a kilogram of steak at the brilliantly named ´Minger´ steak restaurant wasn´t enough to prevent my collapsing into bed around midnight.


Day 12
Another run and another trip to the patisserie later we were well prepared for our evening trip to La Bomba De Tiempo. Everyone at the hostel was talking about La Bomba and the staff were literally dancing through the rooms singing about how great it would be. The night turned out to be an utterly awesome rave in a converted warehouse with the main attraction being a troupe of drummers who brought the crowd to an utter frenzy. We all got utterly sucked in and danced crazily for hours, with the dancing continuing into the street, onto the bus and back in the hostel. I know the last few days have only been an approximation of the bigger show in Rio, but my God, Carnival is amazing!

Days 7, 8 and 9: Hello Summertime

Day 7

At midnight I caught my 14 hour flight from Madrid to Buenos Aires. The journey was pretty uneventful and the in-flight food surprisingly edible (paella). I am staying in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. The area is full of very cool, independent shops (mostly fashion, food and design), neat tree-lined boulevards and yummy mummies. Rather similar to Kensington in London (or more  accurately the posher parts of Tel Aviv in Israel), I could picture myself living here very happily for the rest of my life.

Having unpacked my bags I headed out for a walk around the parks near the hostel and basked in the golden glow of summertime.

At the hostel I met an incredibly friendly group who swiftly invited me out to try some local empanadas with them. These are rather similar to Cornish pasties, but the pastry is thinner and the fillings more exotic.

Our appetites wetted (sp?), we then headed out to dinner at a local steak restaurant. With the bread we were given a tomato salsa and olive tapenade. I ordered the local speciality of steak "de Chorizo" which was over an inch thick and arrived as the dictionary definition of medium rare. My enjoyment of the food was somewhat hampered though by the realisation that I was in the 48th hour of wearing the same dirty clothes (t-shirt and jeans) while the rest of the table were shining in shirts and blazers. Feeling somewhat inferior at this moment, I did what I do best - I massively overcompensated by speaking at 1000 mph.

Thankfully, several hours of drinking games later reduced the others to my sweaty, disgusting state and we ended the night on a level! 

Day 8

Today was the day when Tom, Lizzie and Josie were due to fly into Buenos Aires to join me. More importantly though, today was the day I was due to receive my cleaned laundry! To celebrate the arrival of both, we headed out that evening to a Buenos Aires institution - La Cabrera. Speak to anyone who has travelled to any part of South America and there is one restaurant they will recommend without exception - Palermo´s La Cabrera. Anyone who has spoken to me for the last few weeks will know that there is one place I have been  looking forward to above all else on my travels - La Cabrera!        

So what makes this restaurant so good? Firstly, it is near impossible to get into. We arrived at 8.45pm to find more people queuing outside the restaurant than sitting inside.  As we were rather a large group (9 people), we ended up waiting for just short of 3 hours. Secondly, whilst you queue the staff hand out free glasses of champagne. If I must fault this system, it is their overgenerosity. 3 hours of near constant champagne re-fills reduced me to a cartoon drunk, hugging everyone and proclaiming my love for the world. Realising that my stomach was now in a desperate state, I formed a crack squad of food raiders. We waited for people to leave their table and then attacked, stripping the leftover breadsticks bare. This backfired though at one point when I accidently attacked a freshly laid table and the posh customers sat down to find a crime scene rather than fine dining.

We eventually sat down and it was nearly 1am by the time our food arrived. The bread was served with an olive tapenade (a little too strong for my liking) and roasted garlic bulbs (one of the greatest tastes on earth). I ordered the Kobe beef for my main course, which arrived with an explosion of side-dishes. On the left-hand side you will find potatoes, mini sweetcorns with red peppers, a garlic hummus and an olive paste. Above my plate you will find a bowl of salad with a delicious dressing. On the right was mashed potato, mashed sweet potato, apple sauce and  a sweet onion chutney. The wine was a rather fine Argentine Malbec, packed full of strong caramel, deep fruit and tabacco flavours. The star of the show though was the steak. Or steaks I should say. Because in a moment of madness I ordered 500g of Kobe beef - enough to feed a small army. Words cannot do justice to the taste. Comparing the Kobe beef to the mere sirloins ordered by my friends proved to all present how the former was vastly more rich, more complex, and softer than the latter (and lets be fair, the sirloins were pretty yummy already). Kobe beef is made from selectively bred Japanese cows which are fed mostly on beer and massaged daily. You could almost hear the meat purr as you ate.

This was only 1/4 of my Kobe mountain.

Rather quirkily, the bill came with a jar of lollipops. I may have taken about 50.

Day 9: Tourism
I eventually fell asleep at 5am after a pretty amazing night and was up at 10am the next day to begin seeing the sights of BA. Arriving in the town centre, we let Josie commence the map reading. What was stop number one? Why one of the central legal courts of course! You can take the girl out of law school, but ... Dragging us back to the holiday, I took over the map-reading and led us to the Galleria Pacifica (a shopping centre akin to Selfridges) where we marvelled at the elaborate paintings on the ceiling. We then walked to the Plaza de Mayo to visit the Casa Rosada and reenact Evita underneat the famous balcony. Josie´s singing was particularly good.

(Look out for the three of us on the landing)

For lunch (and to avoid the midday scorching heat) we walked to the city´s docklands for a riverside meal. Reclining on some of the deepest sofas ever it finally began to dawn on us that exams were over, we were abroad and it was SUMMERTIME in March.

The girls had a vegetable tart. From the bits I stole from their plate this was a little too healthy for my liking, but it certainly looked the part.

Tom and I went for sushi, having sworn off meat for life after the previous night´s excesses.

We then decided to catch the train home in rush hour - not a good idea in Argentina´s heat. I ended up with my shoulder in Lizzie´s mouth, Josie vertically spooning my back and my hands cupping some poor Argentine man´s breasts.

I think now is the time for a siesta!

Days 5 and 6: A trip to the opera

Day 5
After the excesses of the previous few days, I felt some exercise was in order. Whacking Now 77 on the ipod I went for a run round El Parque Retiro. Bathed in Madrid´s bright sunlight the park was glittering and the combination of book sellers and old Spanish men playing chess gave the run a great atmosphere. Alas my run ended at a Patisserie and three bites later I had undone all my previous good work. The three bites are shown below. The top two were pretty boring (glorified biscuits coated in unnecessary sugar) but the bottom one was fantastic. From what I gathered it was a ball of ground almonds, eggs and vanilla (essentially a macaron) covered with pine nuts.

On the walk (or more accurately post-run stumble) back to the hostel I passed what must be my 10th political protest. It appears to be the main Spanish pasttime.

At lunchtime I went to a cafe and for the umpteenth time saw ´secreto´ on the menu. My dictionary only translates this as ´secret´ and I´m not sure that any meat that treats its origin as a secret is a good idea! For the benefit of you readers though I took the plunge and ordered it. It looked like chicken, but tasted more like pork. If anyone knows what it actually was please tell me! A lazy afternoon was then spent with some friends from the hostel, a bottle of wine and some jamon.

Dinner was then the clichéd, but necessary, Spanish staple of paella. I found my tastebuds were distracted somewhat by the gruesome tv programme being shown in the restaurant. It was evidently some sort of Spanish horror and involved several dead human bodies being minced and turned into food. Yum!

Feeling like I needed to do something cultural, I headed to the Teatro Real (Spain´s version of the Royal Opera House) to see the world premiere of an opera entitled ´La página en blanco´ by Pilar Jurado. The theatre does a last-minute student deal meaning I got a pretty fantastic seat for less than the price of una cerveza. The promised English subtitles didn´t materialise, but as opera-singing is so slow I actually found I had time to understand what was being said. I use ´understand´ in a loose sense though as this was experimental opera at its most experimental. The story focused around a composer stuck in a white room with writers´ block. He spent most of the time having epileptic fits on the floor (all the time singing about how bad his life was) and ripping the heads off various stuffed birds on the wall. That bit was easy to understand. Then followed a pretty confusing period where the composer´s brain is cloned and inserted into a Japanese robot which then begins to compose far superior music to the original. If the semi-racist attempt to make a robot look Japanese wasn´t sufficient distraction, on the side of the stage played animated images from Hieronymus Bosch´s painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights" - picture lots of fish with human legs running around and dismembered human ears holding knives stabbing each other.

Then the play got really weird when the area beneath the stage opened up and we saw the composer tied up in a chair with hundreds of wires coming out his head and spikes in his eyes. Picture the re-education scene from A Clockwork Orange. It turned out that the composer was in a coma and the white room above was a representation of the inside of his mind. His brain was being stimulated by a gang of evil scientists trying to be the first to commission an opera from inside the brain of a coma victim. The method chosen was to make him fall in love and so they created a femme fatale to tempt him. The characters in the ´reality´ part of the stage then started to sing-argue about determinism - "we choose our own path in life", "no, every moment of our life is decided before". Then the opera switched into Latin and from that point on I was lost. I´m never going to make the mistake of doing anything cultural again!!

Getting back to the hostel I met up with some friends and we went on a massive bar crawl of the city, ending up in a club. I understand this activity much better!

Day 6
My last day in Madrid! I spent the morning with some friends checking out the Templo de Debod (an ancient Egyptian temple moved stone by stone from the Aswan dam) and then met up with a Spanish friend. The Spaniard and I had lunch at what looked like an incredibly posh restaurant, but which cost only 5 euros a course. I had an olive risotto to start and my friend had a chickpea salad. The risotto was lovely, but I couldn´t help feeling (as I do with all risottos) that it would be so much better without the cheese. Why go to the trouble of creating a delicious and complex mixture of onions, garlic, white wine and stock and then drown it all with parmesan?

I then had some rabbit. Not having had much rabbit before I was rather shocked when it arrived on the bone. With larger animals this isn´t much of a problem, but the bones in the rabbit were so small and numerous that I was vaguely sickened when with every bite I pulled a bit more of the carcass out my mouth. By the end there was a full skeleton on my plate. Saying that, the taste was second to none and the balsamic reduction on the side was perfect. Could have done without the chips though.

We shared two deserts - chocolate cake and profiteroles. Yum

I am now off to the airport. My next post will be from Argentina!