Eric's Argentina Journal

First Day in Argentina, in truth we has a lot of issues with flights hotels, and everything on this excursion. I have decided that doing dual countries like this on a trip is no longer going to happen. It is to draining on something that is suppose to be fun and my relax time. I had kind of written off this day as lost, I figured since we did not get to sleep the previous night til 3AM that we were going to be tired and not up for much, we were tired and I believe we did not get up and moving for the day til after 1:00 but with that said we did have fun

Day started with exploring and getting our weekly grocery stash, which other than a credit card not working went smoothly, We then came back dropped of the groceries and got a better guage on where everything was.

We then tried to find some food and quickly settled on Empadanadas (Duh:)). We find a small restaurant down the street from us and let me tell you the empanadas were amazing. We got three different ones and they all were basic tasting but delicious. And amazingly for 3 empanadas it was maybe a dollar US? Crazy.

We walked to some areas I have already been in Buenos Aires, which was neat to see, and then found a city park, that was nothing short of beautiful. The park had endless trails t hike as well as t had platforms you could walk on some that actually went into the water. towards the end of the hike you came to an beach like area next to a river that we hung out and watch the locals chill and swim (personally don’t think I would swam in the water)

Being the last time i was here i was with a ton o nature nuts (locals) I was shocked that they would have not brought us to such a cool place.

Around the park there were other really cool city parks scattered throughout with people playing sports, and just enjoying the beautiful day. While i was impressed with the green spaces in Santiago i have to say that I do believe Argentina has Chile beat in this category.

Also it was packed full of fun vendors and things of that nature which is something i though was almost non existent in Argentina. I feel when I was here the first time they did a good job of keeping us isolated from the Buenos Aires of the common person and kept us to the more richy upscale areas.

We decided to take a down day today, It was sunday and thus it appears most of the city was closed up and not a lot going on. We did enjoy a new empaanda as well as a pizza place for lunch and it was good, but did not match up to the other place we tried.

After roaming around for some time throughout town and not really finding anything we called it quits and just enjoyed some time in our apartment

Today we will find a Sim for my phone, head to la Boca, get laundry done. I have been to La Boca before and I think traci is going to love it 🙂

Today, we went and checked out a Japanese garden in town. The are was beautiful but was quite small and simple. On the bright side it was also near some extremely beatiful green spaces in town as well, so we also went to experience those as well. There was a great town square which was filled with people teaching kids to play soccer and ironically baseball (which seemed wierd to me) then we followed down the road a bit further and there was hugs park that had a large lake pond in the middle of it

It was a beautiful walk and at a certain point we passed a place that you could also rent a paddle boat for a period of time to take out on the pond and paddle around. This is interesting to me as it seems like this is a thing in south america, I have seen this in Peru, Chile, Columbia and now Argentinia (im guessing i saw it in Ecuador as well, but cannot remember the place that had it.

As we passed around to the other side of the Pond, it turned into more of a general park with the normal things you see in parks in south america, work out groups, and just famies and friends just hanging out and conversing in parks.

We also did manage to conquer everything that we tried to do sunday but were not successful because everything was closed,

\We got out laundry dropped off, a sim card put in my phone, another neat thing that I learned about argentina, is the sim cards we typically get are pretty much what someone would use as a “Burner Phone” in this country every sim card has to be registered so that they are able to trace you if you are using the phone for illegal activity. This is something I have never seen in another country.

Tommorow I have el tigre planned which should be a pretty quick trip, but is another cool little tourist attractiion within Buenos Aires, We may also head back over to the park we visited on the first day of our trip as this one of my favorite parts of Buenos Aires

Today was a day with rain so we were limited on a lot we could do, but I did want to get out an explore the city one more time before we got to spend a fun and exciting day in the airport.

We decided to try and visit a neighborhood called San Telmos, which i had read online from multiple people that it was one of the best places in buenos aires. I can understand why, the place was a rustic old timey neighborhood had a super relaxed vibe and there was a large market nearby.

The market was probably one of the best I have been to anywhere. I finally got to try a local coffee shop coffee while here, which really wasn’t much different from what we have in chile but was enjoyable and we tried a good local restaurant in the town.

The knocked the food out of the park and it could be one of the best meals that I have in this city. After that we explored the area a bit more and then were going to head back to the park we had gone to the first day were were there but were having problems navigating there and we could tell the rain was on its way back. After some hiking we finally gave up and caught an Uber back to the apartment just intime for the rain to strike

After that it was again getting late so we found a grocery store and cooked some ravioli at the room for the night and just enjoyed ourselves for the remainder of the night.