Huevos de Codorniz

We got to bed last night after taking a bus and a cab to get to our couchsurfing hosts home around midnight after 24 hours of airplanes. We are staying for a few days in a well kept efficiency downtown Palermo and sleeping on a full size futon.

I felt very tired but my mind was still going from the day (I had gotten two long naps on the plane) and I found going to sleep difficult.

Early to rise, we got out on Saturday January 2 to find out nothing was going on until later, so we went to an organic vegetarian restaurant, Esquina de las Flores. The things we wanted to order were not prepared yet, so we got a chance to fumble through the Pimsleur Spanish we’ve been practicing for the last two months to figure out what was available. The high ceiling/balcony facade ambiance was nice, including the Austrians lifting their legs for the water bug and the cat walking around. The food was not bad.

After learning in NYC, Zoe is a whiz with transportation and figured out the subte subway and bus system fairly quickly with Google maps and the city’s app. We walked many miles, only it seemed longer because it is kilometers 😉

We walked through a botanical garden with mostly plants seen in California and a few I hadn’t encountered before. The sections were by continent but when it said America we weren’t sure if that meant north and south. There were two greenhouses that had pretty much house plants like what you see at home depot.

The matte or mate garden was my favorite. I enjoy matte and look forward to having the gourd experience here.  The matte variety in this garden was some of the first to be cultivated.

We saw the Evita museum, the Cinderella woman whom the all powerful dictator found and married to sway the people to his side.  They transformed Argentina into a modern country acting on the world stage. She died at 33 from cervical cancer just like the dictator’s first wife (most likely caused by his giving them HPV).

We walked and saw some more parks, each with a statue of a man on a horse, and the Gallileo planetarium, closed for annual maintenance.

The museum of world religions was also closed, so we went across the street, where hundreds of people were fishing off the cement sidewalk/pier, to the memorial of lost citizens, a waterfront exhibit spanning many acres with several sculptures. In the 1970s the government had killed off upwards of 30,000 people to keep them quiet.

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I thought if you’ve seen one Chinatown you’ve seen them all, but this pedestrian mall of Chinese stores seemed a bit different. Lots of usual schwag and that fish/rice starch smell, but also a refreshingly health focused, organicy store with some pricey quality items. It was bustling.

For dinner went to the grocery store nearer where we are staying and got some veggies and a dozen quail eggs for 20,90 pesos ($1.60, Zoe says they’re  $35 at whole foods).

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We had to look up how to open them because the shell is thinner so it kept breaking into the cup I was cracking them into, and because the membrane is thick so it took some pressure to open but would often squirt out instead of pour. Scissors did the trick, tap near the pointy end and clip it off like a cap.  Quail eggs have twice the nutrition per egg compared to a single chicken egg. With onion, heirloom tomato, and a side of oiled and salted green beans, delicious.

Rolling our sore feet on lacrosse balls to massage them and showering off the suncream, it’s time to see some tango.