Day #2 In Buenos Aires

 

The municipality of Buenos Aires wishes everybody a Happy Jewish New Year!  This city definitely has more of a New York City feel than Santiago complete with the greeting and grit.

 

We started the morning off going to a book store that is in a converted theatre - El Ateneo Splendid Palace.   The stage was a cafe and the books were located on the main floor, basement and on the balconies.  It is located on one of the major commercial streets.  What a great example of adaptive re-use!  Jonathan noted that it was a lot more interesting than Barnes and Noble ;-)

We continued onto the first cafe of the day where Rob finally got his "cafe con leche con media lunas" a typical argentine cafe breakfast.  He was in heaven and Elisa couldn't get enough media lunas.

We decided to torture our children by bringing them on a tour of Teatro Colon.  We found out that they had tours in English a few times a day and headed for one of them on the subway or the Subte (subterraneo).  It is apparently the oldest subway system in Latin America and by the looks of things it hasn't changed that much since it was first built!  There is even one line that still has the old wooden (on the inside) cars.  It turned out that there was no room in the English tours so we further tortured them by taking a tour in Spanish.  Hopefully, one day they will think back on how neat it was to see the theatre.  Unfortunately, they did not allow us to take photos on most of the tour so here is a link.

Teatro Colon (where we could take photos)

We headed home and bought some empanadas to have with our apples and honey :-)  After Rob and I went out for a coffee together while the kids watched Nickelodean (all in the interest of Spanish acquisition) and a rest (or a read on the balcony) we headed out to a parillada (Argentine grill restaurant) and had some good beef and a salad.  Off to sleep..