Jeannie and John in Buenos Aires: Apartment Life in BA

When friends refer to our "vacation" in Buenos Aires, I have to respond that we are always on vacation - we're just living in Buenos Aires this month. And, that's the truth! We are not really behaving like tourists. Yes, we are visiting some of the tourist sites and eating out a lot but basically, we are living here. But it is very different from home.

Apartment living in this big city is just about opposite of our life in San Miguel where we have a relatively big house on nearly an acre of land surround by a wall. At home we have our two sweet doggies and I go to ride my horse every day. John works in his shop and in the garden. There is virtually no traffic noise and usually we hear nothing from the neighbors. We can walk out any of the doors of our house and we're outside. Here we mainly live in one room - combined living, dining and kitchen (if you can call it that). We walk out the one door and are in the hall on the 6th floor where we walk to the elevator and go down to the main lobby where we unlock the door and go onto the street with buses and cars zooming by. At least BA has trees on the streets - that is a huge plus for this big city. But from our apartment windows, you see other apartments - fortunately the window coverings are translucent - they let in the light but you don't have to see the ugly views. There is a balcony but we have not spent even one minute on it. No point in that.

Anyway, back to apartment living. Down a flight of stairs we have a master bedroom which is just big enough for the king size bed which is very comfortable, thankfully. There is also a second bedroom which is tiny because it has one twin size bed with another that is stored underneath it. But it does have nice closet space. This is my closet and dressing room and bath across the way. There is another small bed room and bath off the other side of the master bedroom and that is John's bathroom and dressing room - very nice to have.

There is a pool on the roof which is quite small, uncovered and therefore not too warm. So, we have not been using it. But today, since it has been warmer than when we first arrived, we checked it out again and maybe it is warmer and maybe I will swim for the last week here. But no promises.

We have a big supermarket, Cote, 3 1/2 blocks from the apartment - just a nice walk. We have been able to find whatever we need there for breakfast, light lunch and occasional dinner. This morning I walked over there to purchase food for dinner tonight. We have bought filet of beef (lomo) a couple of times - first time it was really good and the second time, not as good. So today I decided to try again. The meat display is really something - at least 2/3 of it is beef, followed by a short length of pork and a little bigger length of chicken. There are, of course, more people shopping on Saturday and I was amused to observe the concentrated efforts of people choosing their beef. One was a little old lady and she was still studying the packets of beef when I moved on. I found a nice package of lomo for tonight and another package of something that looked like porterhouse for another day (put it in the freezer) and moved on.

The produce section is fairly large but not particularly appealing. I bought a couple of bananas, some enormous carrots and I already had a potato from last time we shopped. I have to remember to not get carried away because we have to carry everything we buy back home the 3 1/2 blocks. I did not find any broccoli or zucchini. However, they had nice looking eggplants and lots of green and red peppers. The tomatoes looked anemic. You have to bag your produce and then take the bags to a counter with a lady who weights and labels them - they are extremely fast and efficient.

I then headed over to the bakery and prepared foods area where you can find all kinds of food ready to eat. The only thing I bought there was a piece of Tiramisu for our dessert tonight - I've eyeballed it the last few times we were there and today it grabbed me as I was walking by. I also bought a few other goodies to have around for breakfast.

Well, I decided that I pretty much now had all I wanted to carry (had some staples like milk that added some weight) and so I headed down to check out. Total weight was just about right for carrying home.

It would have been nice to have a charcoal grill for the steaks but the frying pan had to do. And, I forgot to mention earlier that I bought a package of chimichurri mix so I read the instructions and mixed that up first. (They love chimichurri sauce in Argentina - it is lots of garlic, parsley, oil and vineagar and it's very tasty.) Then I threw the potato in the microwave, peeled and sliced one enormous carrot, put it on to boil and got the lomo de chorizo (filets) out. It all came together pretty nicely and we had a tasty dinner without much effort on the cook's part. The tiramisu which we divided was delicious - almost like homemade. Here are pictures of our meal.

Tomorrow we are planning on heading over to the San Telmo neighborhood where they have a huge outdoor market every Sunday and maybe even some tango on the streets. That should be interesting! Stay tuned and here are pictures of our apartment.