Stop me if you've heard this one... An Irishman walks PAST a bar...

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 (technically Wednesday, July 9, 2008 at 4:00am)

This really is a city that never sleeps. I thought that was New York City…but I was wrong. I live on a busy street in Buenos Aires. I am right near the Plaza de Mayo, a starting point for most demonstrations. Then the demonstrations usually go up Avenida de Mayo, my street, up to the Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest, busiest street in Buenos Aires. At all hours of the night I will hear cars and busses speeding past my hotel. I either wake up to zooming busses or most recently the sound of drums from the demonstrations. The demonstrations have been occurring nearly everyday, and mostly peaceful minus a car en fuego sometimes.

That’s a different topic entirely. I wanted to talk about how this is really a city that never sleeps. As you know, I’m here writing at 4 in the morning. I’ll start by giving the run-down of my night. At 6:30 tonight our teacher arranged a wine tasting at the restaurant associated with the Museum of Evita. I just took a course on winemaking, so this wine tasting was fun for me because I felt like I actually knew what our expert was saying. In general, since I’ve been in Buenos Aires, my friend John and I have been splitting bottles of wine when we get good dinners because we believe that it is part of the meal experience. Most bottles of wine in restaurants aren’t that expensive, so we’ve been taking advantage of that. We’ve tried two Torrontés, a Chardonnay, and a Malbec. The Malbec was the most expensive, and the least expensive at 19 pesos (about $6 US) was our first Torrontés. Both of these were fantastic wines. We’ve been trying to get wines we wouldn’t be able to get in the States. Torrontés and Malbec are grapes that are classically called Argentine grapes.

If Argentina does anything right, it’s wine and meat. My first experience with the wonderful beef here (other than the wonderful beef empanadas of course) was last night. A big group of us went to get sushi at a sushi bar. It turned out that it was more of a bar that also happened to serve sushi, which wasn’t going to work out so well because most people were hungrier than that. On the walk over from the Subte (the underground system here), I saw this place that looked like it might be somewhat decent. It had florescent red lights with the name of the joint and plastic coverings for an outdoor patio. The tip that this was going to be a good restaurant, which I didn’t even notice when I had walked by it the first time, was meat roasting in the window. The restaurant was called Emilo Criollo in Palermo Viejo, a neighborhood in BA. This meal was the best I’ve had so far in Buenos Aires. I’ve been to quite a few restaurants, but this one was the most expensive AND RIGHTFULLY SO! I decided that since they had meat cooking in the front window I might as well try some beef here. I had medallions of lomo (beef loin) in a creamy pepper sauce with potatoes au gratin, a shared bottle of Malbec, and, to top it off, chocolate mousse. I was pretty much in heaven. Now if you’re not jealous enough of what I got to eat, here’s the reason to be jealous. This meal only cost me 80 pesos. That’s just a little over $25 US!!

Have you planned your trip here yet?!

But, back to the wine tasting… Our class tried about 10 different bottles of wine. One of the bottles of Torrontés was the Crios label, which coincidentally my mom actually bought me for my 21st birthday a few weeks ago. Also, the table spread was pretty amazing. Not only was there lots of wine, but lots of bread and cheese and chicken bites wrapped in pancetta. Here in Argentina everything either has jamón in, on, or wrapped around another meat. Though, this ham tastes better than most other ham I’ve ever had.

We finished the tasting at about 9. We were going to go out to a bar for this guy’s birthday, but it was still early. Now here in Argentina most restaurants aren’t even ready for people to eat dinner until 9pm. In Davis people can start going to bars around 9 or 9:30, even 10. Here… no one goes out to bars or clubs until 2am. 2am!! Anyway, I was getting tired of waiting to go to a “popular” bar, so I suggested we wait until we could go to this other bar at the Irish pub right around the corner from our hotel. We hung out at this Irish pub rightfully named “The Clover” until about 1. A friend of someone else in the program knew someone who could get us into this other bar for free if we came a little early (ha! Early being 1am!). We went over to this other bar, which was okay, but I was tired and hungry. I hadn’t really eaten dinner after drinking all that wine and eating all that cheese and bread.

My friend Ryan and I decided to leave the other bar and walk home and find something small on the way home. We weren’t terribly hungry but just needed something. We stopped and got empanadas to go from a restaurant. We were crossing a street when we were stopped at the light. We both looked at each other and gave the other a weird look. We saw a woman with 3 policemen. She was wearing short shorts and high heels. We both assumed she was probably a prostitute or something. We were waiting at our light when I realized she was speaking in English. I then knew she was no prostitute. Apparently this light was taking a long time because it gave the woman enough time to realize that Ryan and I were speaking English to each other. We then went to help the woman because she asked us if we spoke English. I saw this woman looking through her Spanish-English dictionary with a hopeless look on her face. She was walking back to her hostel and then to a club with a local guy. The policemen were just worried for her because she’s a tourist and this guy had been driving with two of his friends and they stopped and dropped him off on the side of the road. This seems like suspicious activity to me, but the woman had met this guy in a club another night. We had to explain this all to the officers. I asked the woman if she had been drinking earlier in the night and she said yes. She had a Sprite bottle with her. The officer asked what was in the bottle. She said Sprite. When he tried to take it from her she then changed it to include vodka. Her excuse was “I’m Irish!” I guess even the real Irish use that excuse to be drunk. Happy Tuesday night!