Edmonton is far away from Buenos Aires..

Hello from Argentina,

We finally made it after a very long travel day(s) we have successfully landed in BA, Argentina. The flight from YEG to Houston was fine, just really early in the morning we left the city at a temperature around -8 degrees Celsius and arrived to Houston with an airport temperature of about 17 degrees Celsius and had a long wait in the airport (about 8 hours or so). We managed to kill the time by walking the entire airport and taking the airport train for fun when we could no longer walk to the terminals. We played a game of Yahtzee where Marilyn won (she always makes it seem like the dice are not rolling in her favour.. but it seems to me (Sara) that she tends to win a lot ha-ha) not that I am competitive or anything. Tyson and I ended up making a new game with the dice as we were getting pretty bored. The flight from Houston to BA was about 10 hours long overnight (9:oopm to 9:00am BA time). We are only an hour ahead of time so time change hasn't been the issue. Just you never sleep well on an overnight flight so we were all pretty tired from the long travel days.

When we got into BA we got through customs fairly easily, no real problems. Besides remembering that your in a foreign country and getting use to being a tourist again we really just took in our surroundings the first day. We are staying at a nice little boutique hotel called the "Tango Lodge" it is clean, nice, and the shower pressure is great. Thanks to Marilyn for finding the place and booking it. I am not sure that Tyson and I would have found such a nice place with being so busy the last couple of months we may have been sleeping in a back alley somewhere. We walked around our neighborhood district, the district of "Polomero" you will have to excuse my Spanish spelling as I am too lazy to look at the guidebook and it is far closer for me to grab my glass of wine instead the book :). We found this botanical garden that I nicknamed "Cat Plaza" as the place was littered with cats.. they were everywhere. I found one that looks just like an Argentinian "Hershy" just for you Chandra.

Oh we also booked our bus tickets to Salta. We are leaving to go up north tomorrow night. The bus journey is 22 hours long. We are hoping we picked a good bus with some decent food and we asked for full recliner seats so I guess we will see. After the walking and getting the bus tickets we were pretty tired so we returned to "home" to have a siesta. Well Tyson and I ended up sleeping for 5 hours and woke up around 8:00pm (perfect time for dinner in Argentina) you see the Argentines eat very late. Lunch is late, and therefore so is dinner. We asked Peter and Marilyn to join us but Peter was sleeping and Marilyn was sort of sleeping but I guess decided to just stay and rest with Peter. So Tyson and I went on an adventure to find some dinner. We had to wait 45 minutes to get into the restaurant "La Cabera" which was a really popular place for tourists and locals. While we waited they gave us a free cocktail and came by with french fries to munch on. We finally got in, and we were hungry. We ordered a glass of vino (wine), some beef short ribs from the grill to share, and french fries. In Argentina, you really have to eat meat as one of your main dishes as beef is the big thing to eat around here. I am glad we shared because we had more than enough food. The ribs were good, not too fatty and grilled to perfection. It came with little side dishes of mashed potatoes, pumpkin puree with raisins, this hot dish of bacon with melted Parmesan, and some other sauces that i just dipped my ribs into. I basically ate meat and dipped it into everything haha. It was good, usually i am not a fan of eating meat while travelling but I think here you really have no options. We got home around midnight and the restaurant was still packed so you can see they really do eat LATE here.

The next morning we awoke and Peter had reserved breakfast for us downstairs at the cafe. It consisted of coffee (delicious!!!), sticky sweet croissants, and toast. It also came with jam, butter, and my favorite dulce de leche sauce! Which translates to "caramel". SO GOOD! After breakfast we took the Subway to meet Tysons second cousin who is originally from Holland, Siestka (again not good with the spelling). It was great to meet up with her as she gave us a tour of the city and she is pretty fluent in Spanish so that was really good. Our tour consisted of :

The Cathedral
Plaza de Mayo- Where the president building is, and were protest often happen (dont worry mom none today :) )
Porto Madero - a little board walk area that had shops, and just a nice place to take a stroll (saw a Starbucks)
Lunch at this place that Siestka recommended the menu was all in Spanish. But it was very good. We had steak sandwiches with cheese and tomato and Alfajore (spelling again) which is a delicious sweet made of two soft cookies with dulce de leche in the middle (SO GOOD) lets count how many times i have dulce de leche in the next 4 weeks.
Siestak's apartment in Moneserrat which was lovely. She has a nice courtyard to grow plants and we got to meet her boyfriend Leo who was very kind.

We then took the bus to "Cementerio La Recoleta" this cementary, which was really like a village with all these fancy archetecturial tombstones and where famous Argentinian's are buried. A great place to visit on Halloween ooooo (which SA does not celebrate). We say Eva Perron's grave, so now I can really sing "Dont cry for me Argentina.. " you can sing the rest to yourself.  From there we walked to another little square that lone behold had more ways to eat dulce de leche... we found an ICE CREAM SHOP.. a famous Argentinian place called "Freddos". It was delcious. I of course had the dulce de leche ice cream, and Tyson had the coconut dulce de lech ice cream, Marilyn the same as me, and Peter had raspberry. It was very good as today was a nice warm day about plus 20 degrees celcius.

After a great day thanks to Siestka, we took the subway back which was a more unpleasant ride as it was jam packed and hot, and sweaty and Tyson felt like he almost got pick pocketed .. but nothing was stolen.. and we now have agreed to not speak English in the subway and to blend like a Argentinian (which is not hard for Tyson as he has a beard and curly hair.. think Spanish people).

We are now just having a bottle of wine and relaxing before going to dinner. Not sure where, but I bet steak will be on the menu. Tomorrow we will stalk up on groceries for the bus ride as you never know what type of food you will get on those journeys. Probably will not write until we get to Salta as the next couple of days are pretty busy with travelling to Salta, El Cafayate, and Igazu Falls, before coming back to BA to meet Ian. I hope dulce de leche is in every corner of Argentina, even in Patagonia in the mountains.

Till next time,
Adios The van Leusdens.