family in Buenos Aires

This past week my parents, Judy and Richard, and my sister Amy and her husband George came to visit Buenos Aires! It was really fun.
I had a great time planning how to fit all of my favorite things and places into one week. I feel like I could write a tour guide now. Here’s the general outline:

SUNDAY
we had a big brunch (fresh raviolis filled with cheese and nut, and squash, mmm!) at my house and then went out to San Telmo to see the Sunday festivities and the flea market in Plaza Dorrego. There were lots of great tango groups and dancers performing along Defensa.

After a little rest time, we had a giant steak dinner at La Cabrera, in Palermo Soho. Aside from the typically delicious Argentine steaks (especially the thyme-rubbed bife de lomo!) they serve a zillion little side-dishes, such as squash puree, couscous, vegetable salads, and candied garlic, with every meal.

MONDAY
we went out for coffees and lunas con jamon & queso, and then set off on a self-guided walking tour (from this website) along Avenida de Mayo, starting at the Congress building and Plaza Congreso and continuing past the Barolo Building, across 9 de Julio, until Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada.

We ate lunch, of course, at Cafe Tortoni.
After lunch we had some tasty dark-chocolate-and-candied-orange-peel ice cream! and then did some resting, shopping, and wandering.
We had delicious and exciting tapas for dinner at De Olivas i Lustres on Gorriti in Palermo Soho, near our old apartment.

TUESDAY
we went to Recoleta Cemetery and then visited the church next door, the Basilica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. There is a neat little cloisters museum upstairs with a nice view looking out over the cemetery.

We had lunch at one of the cafes on the terraza at the Design Center (but avoided going inside!) and then looked at a few of the many interesting contemporary art exhibits at the Recoleta Cultural Center next door. Then we squeezed in a quick trip to the nearby Decorative Arts Museum, housed in a historical mansion on Libertador, before heading to the Alvear Palace Hotel for a very very very fancy afternoon tea, served by waiters wearing white gloves.

Stuffed with 14 courses of dainty sandwiches and fanciful, divine desserts and champagne (and, of course, tea), we dragged ourselves to tango classes at Luciana’s house.

I had never seen Judy and Richard dance, ever. As far as I know they have not danced in at least 30 years, probably more, but they seemed to have a great time at their first tango lesson with Luciana. This is an amazing testament to our dear Luciana’s delightful enthusiasm and skill as a teacher.

WEDNESDAY
we got up early and took an 8:30 ferry across the river to charming Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay.

Most of the day was spent wandering the shady cobblestones and lunching in a leafy courtyard at El Mesón de la Plaza. After sitting by the water for a bit and climbing the lighthouse for a view of the town, we headed back to the ferry.
Back in Buenos Aires, we stopped at Milion for mojitos at the alabaster bar, and ended up staying for a very tasty dinner in the courtyard under the full moon.

THURSDAY
In the morning we went to the Japanese Gardens in Palermo, and then walked over to the Botanical Garden, which was a huge hit with Judy. It is pretty exciting to realize that we’re way down in South America and all the plants and flora and fauna are completely different from what we’re used to!
We had a disappointing lunch at Sudestada, while a wild rainstorm turned the streets into high seas. Amy and George explored the fancy shops in Palermo Soho and found a truly amazing suede jacket at the Mariano Toledo store. We had another great tango class with Luciana and a tasty vegetarian meal at Artemisia.

Then some of us went on to La Catedral, where Amy and George danced! There was a surprise tango music performance by two guys, one singing and one playing guitar, they were really good!

FRIDAY

on Friday morning we went for a walk in the Ecological Reserve. I thought it would be a great opportunity for everyone to enjoy some natural beauty and bird-watching without leaving the city – but in fact it was pretty hot and muggy even in the morning, and there’s really no shade in the Ecological Reserve – it’s all tall grasses and shrubs but not many trees. We enjoyed cool breezes when we could get them by the waterside – then made a premature retreat back to civilization, feeling rather wilted and beaten by the heat.

We decided to just drink tea and rest for the afternoon, then in the evening we had a dinner date at Casa Saltshaker, a “closed-door” restaurant in Recoleta. The chef is Dan Perlman, a transplanted New Yorker who concocts a menu and cooks and serves dinner in his home, two nights a week, to a group of about 12 people. We chose to do the wine pairing menu, which was a great choice, we really enjoyed the various wines with each of the six courses. I can no longer remember exactly what we ate!! But I do remember was a fun evening, the food was tasty and Judy and Richard really enjoyed the experience.

SATURDAY

We took a trip to Tigre, one of my favorite areas around Buenos Aires. We went out for a boat ride around the delta on one of the beautiful wooden tourboats, and had a nice wander about the market. We took the Tren de la Costa home, which is supposed to be the fancier, touristy option, although I don’t really understand exactly what’s so special about it (except that it costs about five times more than the normal commuter train). Anyway, it turned out to be a bad choice, because our train struck a motorcycle and rider at one of the street crossings! So we got stuck waiting in the train for a long while, as the police came and cleared the wreck. It was sad and a bit confusing because the train conductor didn’t tell anybody what was going on, and all the train passengers were kind of freaking out while we were stuck there waiting. We finally got back to Buenos Aires later than planned, just in time for dinner in Palermo.

And then Sunday morning… everyone headed back to the USA! What a great trip! It was really really fun hosting the whole family here in Buenos Aires, I wish we could all do it again. Now that we’ve seen all the basics in Buenos Aires, next time I would definitely try to get out of the city and see more of the natural wonders that Argentina has to offer…

SNOW IN BUENOS AIRES!

Snowfall in Buenos Aires!
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

Yesterday was 9 de Julio, Argentina’s independence day, so we planned to spend the holiday at the Ecological Reserve but the weather turned out to be freezing cold and drizzly and then it started SNOWING!!! Mike did not believe me at first when I said it was snowing but then the little flakes got bigger and whiter and fluffier and started piling up into little tiny snow-drifts everywhere and there was no doubt about it. This is the first snowfall in Buenos Aires SINCE 1918!!! As night fell, the streets were completely full of people running around like crazy and dancing in the snow and every single person was taking pictures with cameras and cell phones and camcorders. There were flashes coming from every direction at once. Almost every window and door had people hanging out of it watching the snowy action! We got in a cab and the driver told us that at age 47, he had never ever seen snow before in real life. The snow was a nice diversion from the unfortunate fact that most buildings here are not adequately or heated to deal with anywhere near freezing temperatures. Last night we sat down to dinner inside a parilla with our coats and mittens on, and our breath was coming out in clouds over the table!

Amy Sawyer on homelessness in Asheville

Asheville & Mountains

Wow!
kudos to the fabulous and eloquent Amy, whose editorial I just read in the pages of the Asheville Citizen Times.

The Root Causes of Homelessness Are What To Attack

mauricio macri

Macri

Buenos Aires just voted for a new governor and the winner is Mauricio Macri, who is currently president of the city’s famous Boca football club and represents Buenos Aires in the Lower House of the Argentine Congress. Yesterday was a run-off election between Macri (who won with 60%) and Daniel Filmus, who currently serves as Secretary of Education, Science and Technology, and had the backing of President Kirchner. Voting here is mandatory for every citizen. Some have said that because of mandatory voting, lots of people go to the polls without knowing anything of the candidates, and just pick whatever name they’ve heard of, so this system tilts the results towards any celebrity such as Macri. I don’t know a lot of facts about the candidates but I’m slowly gathering facts from reading newspaper articles in spanish, and meanwhile I’ve heard plenty of opinions and hearsay, which I will repeat here in lieu of substantiated facts. Everyone I’ve talked to says that Macri is a bad choice for a number of reasons. He’s the son of a wealthy, powerful businessman, Franco Macri, and most of his business experience comes from working for his rich daddy’s companies. His popularity and name recognition are generally attributed to his association with the popular Boca team, not his position as a public servant or any past interest in public welfare. During his current term of public service, he has allegedly missed 280 out of 320 voting sessions. So, vamos a ver. We will wait and see how this turns out, and meanwhile I will try to learn more facts!

sauces of Buenos Aires

Aderezos

I thought i would be writing more in this blog about design and art and projects and creativity, but it turns out I am too obsessed with food. Hopefully I’ll make more entries about visual things in the near future. Meanwhile, living in a foreign country has made me realize how much my life revolves around SAUCES.
There is a limited range of sauces available here. They do sell ketchup in grocery stores, but it is not reliably available in restaurants, even ones that serve hamburgers and french fries. At first, I was puzzled to see 4″x6″ pocketbook-sized ketchup pouches for sale at the grocery store, but now I realize, due to the lack of ketchup in restaurants, this is for Americans and other ketchup addicts to carry around at all times in case of a french fry emergency.
Salad dressing is a bottle of vinegar or lemon juice and a bottle of olive oil and a salt-shaker. Everyone here can dress their own salads! It seems incredibly sophisticated and civilized, but I can never seem to get my oil/vinegar balance quite right and I do miss the wide variety of creamy options available back home. I saw a bottle of Newman’s Own creamy ranch salad dressing at the Jumbo Almagro mega-supermarket, but it cost $18 pesos which is ridiculous because $18 could buy you at least 3 salads, complete with oil & vinegar, in a restaurant.
Salsa Golf is a gluey, bright-orange-pink creamy sauce, vaguely simlar to a mixture of ketchup plus mayonnaise, or more like a very thick Thousand Island dressing without the pickle chunks. People eat this on raw vegetables, sandwiches, fries, whatever. It’s not a bad stand-in if you’re really missing some ketchup, and it’s got a nice tangy sweet flavor though the consistency is kind of thick and gluey. If I had to choose one sauce to be The Sauce of Buenos Aires (like the state bird or national anthem), it might be Salsa Golf. Wikipedia offers a plausible story about the origins of the sauce with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Luis Federico Leloir.
hot sauce is hard to find. Most restaurants will bring you something they call “salsa picante” if you ask for it, but it’s not hot!! even at the mexican restaurant, the hot sauce was not hot at all. If you’re willing to pay a high price, you can buy tabasco sauce from the import section of a big grocery store.
Chimichurri is a delicious mixture of chopped parsely, oregano, garlic, onions, peppers, oil and vinegar! It’s primarily used for steaks and sandwiches or spreading on bread. It can range from soupy to thick, sweet to spicy.
Mayonnaise is everywhere! I noticed the same thing in Mexico, perhaps this common to all of Latin America? There is a huge mayonnaise section in the grocery store, they sell it in giant vats (or in big squishy foil pouches), and it is served quite generously in all kinds of circumstances. Last week I ordered an “Ensalada Gregory” which was a bowl with vegetables on one side and on the other side, a wide quivering lake of mayonnaise, at least 2 cups of it. I stirred it all together and added salt, but then it was just salty mayonnaise soup. I do like mayonnaise a lot, but not that much. Yuck.
Mustard nuff said.
Lemon Slices are served in many situations when I would expect some sort of sauce or dressing, for instance with a breaded chicken filet. It’s good!
that’s pretty much it. In bigger grocery stores, you can also buy Salsa Barbacoa, Salsa Ingles (that’s worcestershire sauce, sort of), and Salsa Soja (soy sauce!). The sauces/spreads I miss the most are peanut butter, hummus, sweet pickle relish, real hot sauce, maple syrup, Annie’s salad dressing in a bottle.

food

We made a reservation to try out something new for dinner. Casa Salt Shaker is a “restaurante de puertas cerradas,” a dinner party hosted by a chef in his home. Each night has a different theme; we are signed up for a celebration of “Republic Day in Guyana… an interesting cuisine… a blend of the cuisines of the Caribbean, India & the East Indies…” It sounds super delicious. He was also just written up in the New York Times amongst a bunch of other places that sound completely stupid.

This is a very funny and astute synopsis of Argentinian eating habits:

“The classic beginner’s mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it’s the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone. The midnight second steak might be more the glamorous one, standing as it does a good three inches off the plate, but all it has to do is get you up and out of the restaurant and into bed (for the love of God, don’t forget to drink water).”

(click the link and read the whole thing!!)

the strange and the familiar

Milanesa
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

En Argentina, hay algunas cosas diferente de los Estados Unidos. It’s pretty comfortable for a North American here. Aside from the language thing, Buenos Aires isn’t very different from living in the US. I think that the Argentinians have a slightly different relationship with their country’s institutional corruption. So far the most apparent evidence of this is the postal service. I haven’t received any mail yet, though my mom says she’s mailed me 3 envelopes. Anecdotally, everyone I’ve met has a story about mail that has been opened, pilfered, stolen, lost, held for ransom at the central post office (until the recipient bribes a postal worker to release it), or just disappeared. Aside from the corruption issue, I think this is a symptom of the local economy and the incredibly steep import tariffs on everything.
On the other side, Mike gets health insurance from his job and I GET TO BE ON HIS PLAN TOO! I haven’t tried to use it yet, but it is allegedly some of the best health insurance / health care in the world. I can’t wait to get sick so I can try it out!
Other things that are strange to me:
-MATE. This tastes like creosote and makes me have to poop, but I keep trying it anyway, because I like the accoutrements. It seems like a really appealing local custom.
-FRESH-SQUEEZED ORANGE JUICE. US$1. everywhere. holy awesome.
-GRAPEFRUIT-FLAVOR EVERYTHING. from soda to gatorade to chewing gum, I like it!
-ICE CREAM. It’s pretty different. It’s stickier and meltier and creamier and has SO MUCH flavoring it makes your lips pucker and sometimes obscures the delicious creaminess. Usually a cone comes with at least 2 different flavors and a bowl comes with at least 3. My favorite so far is Dulce de Leche with Brownie Chunks.
-DULCE DE LECHE. Argentinians are not afraid of sticky, gooey sweetness. Usually I’m not either, but I’m startled by the ubiquity of this caramelly stuff. You can get Oreos with Dulce de Leche filling or Dulce de Leche flavored schnapps. Any dessert in any restaurant is guaranteed to come with at least one ginormous mouthful of this gloopy sweetness, either displayed proudly on top (with powdered sugar too!) or hidden deep inside to get you when you don’t expect it.
-SWEETNESS. aside from the dulce de leche, things here tend to be sweet. such as sushi and sashimi with some kind of sweet glaze? I like lunas con jamon y queso, a ham & cheese croissant with sweet glaze. But sometimes already-sweet desserts are served with crunchy granulated sugar on top. I read about a syrup-drenched Thai dinner that tasted like dessert. And pastries! they are SWEET! i think that’s the way pastries should be. maybe not sushi though.
-ARTIFICIAL SWEETNESS. WTF?! this is hard for me to avoid since I am not familiar with the brands and words to avoid. They will put Sucralose in practically EVERYTHING, from soda to yogurt to fruitcake. blech!!!!
-NO SPICINESS!!! they don’t do it here. bring your own hot sauce.
-MANTECOL. It’s like halvah, but with peanuts instead of sesame seeds. I have considered trying to make a sandwich out of this, because they do not have peanut butter here.
-WINE. MMMMMMMM good.
-JACARANDA BLOSSOMS. every park is full of huge bright purple trees! pretty. they scatter their leaves all over the ground and it’s so cute when Emmy frolics in the fields of purple.
-DOGS. I had no idea there was a place in the world where everyone has a dog! They’re very well-behaved. They sleep under tables at sidewalk cafes and wander the sidewalks without leashes and sniff each others butts with cool detachment. Everyone is quite used to dogs here. It’s nice to take the dogs for a walk without getting undeserved dirty (or terrified) glares from dog-phobic bypassers. There is at least one veterinarian on every block here! You can’t spit without hitting a shop that sells dog food, dog toys, and dog beds. There’s also this crazy dog-walking scene, where one guy will be trotting down the street holding 40 leashes with 40 dogs trotting along beside him. On the down side, there’s dog poo *everywhere* so watch your step.
-TANGO. I don’t know anything about Tango, but they love it here! They say that every tango song is about some kind of heartbreak, whether it’s horse-racing or ladies. Last night we went to see this “rockstar” tango orchestra in a converted warehouse, with a dozen hairy hipsters playing raucous violin, accordion, bass, piano, etc. I loved it. They sounded like the Dirty Three but even more dramatic and bombastic. People were dancing and they looked like they were floating on air and spinning around without even trying. I had originally thought of Tango as an old-people thing, but it was super fun to see this youth-culture-Tango scene. Also, I realized how much I love accordion music. The more accordions, the better.
-THUNDERSTORMS. The best way to wrap up a 98 degree day is with a hair-raising, apocalyptic thunderstorm. It’s very tropical. I have never seen such awesome and terrifying storms with so much lightning, thunder and torrential rain. they last for hours and hours and really scare the dogs.
-KEYS. they all look cool. see picture.
-DESIGN. this is an incredibly beautiful city. architecturally, there’s lots of old French style, and fantastic art-nouveau, and lots of very 70′s-looking white geometric high-rise towers with varying degrees of kitschy style. Palermo Soho is full of little design shops, lots of young, start-up designers selling hand-sewn goods ranging from incredibly cute to sophisticated. More on this later, I won’t go into it all now.
-MULLETS. ladies here are looking good, and they have almost as many “sho-lo” haircuts as in Barcelona. I can’t wait for my hair to grow out so I can get one too.
-SEXISM. the international language of leering is easy to understand and hard to avoid. I’ve heard nasty stories from other women here but it hasn’t got under my skin yet. I think the common attitude is that a man’s desire is a compliment to a woman, and she ought to enjoy it whether she likes it or not.
-BLACK-FACE PASTRIES. holy crap. this is a very white city, and they don’t have the same kind of racial history or taboos as the USA. hence, cookies in EVERY BAKERY decorated like 1920′s-era black-face caricatures complete with fat pink lips and bulgy white eyeballs. Also, I have seen the same motif painted in the logo of the “Harlem” bakeshop and delicatessen.
I hear that it is not easy to be black here.

I can’t comment too much yet about porteños and their habits, because I’m still conversing with the locals at a nursery-school level. Pretty much everyone has been incredibly nice to me considering my handicap. Some people speak a lot of English, but for the most part you need some Spanish to get around here. I’ve talked most with taxi drivers, who are consistently kind and patient and chatty and willing to endure 20-minute conversations in level-one Spanish!

Buenos Aires

San Telmo, Buenos Aires
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

I’m living with Mike and Emmy and Zviah in Buenos Aires! It’s really fun. I love it. We arrived on Tuesday November 14th. We’re staying in San Telmo for the first few weeks, and then we’re moving into a long-term apartment in Palermo Viejo on December 1st. Buenos Aires is reminding me of every foreign city I’ve ever visited, all mixed into one! That is, Paris + Barcelona + Santo Domingo + Mexico City = Buenos Aires! It’s so beautiful and incredibly old, like Paris – but it’s also very bright with colors and patterns, and a bit gritty and shabby in spots. It’s spring right now so the weather is beautiful and everything is very green. I just wish I could speak spanish a lot better, I am getting around with beginner-level Spanglish and a lot of silly hand gestures. I’m just doing freelance work here, so I’m hoping to have more time to focus on all kinds of creative pursuits. I’ll have a studio in the new apartment and I’m excited to get set up and start making and doing! Hopefully lots more posts to come on this subject.