My last weekend in Argentina!

I went to La Boca with my new friend from Mexico, Eric. He has a real camera and he took a ton of pictures and shared them with me. La Boca is the stadium for Boca Juniors, one of the two main soccer teams in Buenos Aires. Barrio Boca is around the stadium and is really touristy but great for seeing people dancing Tango and gauchos doing their thing, etc. The best part was spending the day practicing Spanish with Eric. He also was very handy when I didn't understand what was going on. Touring around the city is SO much easier with a native Spanish speaker.

Me!

Daryl likes to ask me who is my Argentine boyfriend. Do I have to have just one? Here they are:

And last, but not least: Here is Eric showing what we had for lunch: CHORIPAN! Que rico!

I had a lot of pictures to post from my visit to El Tigre yesterday. El Tigre is a town just outside of Buenos Aires. It is built on a delta, I guess. The houses are mostly summer and weekend residencies. I took a bunch of cool pictures, but I seem to have deleted them in the process of trying to upload them onto my computer. Bummer! Oh, well. I got some pictures from Google images, so you can at least get the idea.

The houses at el Tigre are all built raised up on stilts or blocks of some type to allow for high water. It looked like a very nice way to spend a vacation. The people who live there have everything from canoes and other types of row boats to speed boats. I took a picture of a guy in a boat that was very similar to the boat my dad used for fishing. (I wanted to post it here for you dad.) There are public boat buses, also.

Here is a picture of a bus boat:

I went by bus to El Tigre along the way we stopped and visited a cathedral, San Isidro, which I enjoyed. I took pictures of the paintings, sculptures and stained glass. It was beautiful.

At El Tigre we ate lunch at a great restaurant. The steaks were the cut they call bife chorizo, which is basically a thick, juicy steak. I met the rest of my group. There were two couples from Brazil and a family from Paraguay. I got to practice a lot of Spanish, but one of the guys from Brazil spoke English so he helped me out when I had trouble understanding.

After lunch we visited the outside of an art museum. The building was amazing and there were several cool sculptures. Then we hopped on a boat for a 3-hour tour. Just kidding. It was a 90-minute tour around the delta and out to Buenos Aires. So, we returned to BA by boat. It was great circling the city at sunset. It was a nice trip. I exchanged email addresses with Michele, one of the people from Brazil.

Unfortunately for me, I have got a bad cold and don't have any EmergenC. They don't seem to have anything like it here. I did get some Vitamin C powder but I don't think it has nearly enough vitamins in it to do the trick for me. By the end of the trip to El Tigre yesterday I was exhausted and my cold was coming on with a vengence.

I'm spending today in bed hoping that I'll feel better tomorrow.

This is the view of the river from my hotel room. It is right on the beach. The beach even has sand. It has been too cold to go out there for more than a few minutes, though. There was a bitter cold wind all day today.

The other picture is a building near by hotel. I think it is a residence. It is a cool looking old building but I had to take a picture when I saw the gryffon coat of arms for Harry Potter fans. I think it looks like the Griffindor wing of Hogwarts.

I came to Montevideo to go to the temple. The BA temple has been closed for more than a year for renovation and will begin the open house just a few days after I leave. Boo hoo! But I did enjoy a beautiful time in the temple today. I was in a session with the parents of two families who were being sealed today. As I left I saw the children all dressed in white and waiting in the children's area for their parents to be endowed. There were a lot of kids dressed in white in there. At least 10.

This weekend I took a boat across the river to Montevideo, Uruguay. Well, the boat went to Colonia and then a bus took me for about 90 minutes to Montevideo. If you look at a map of Buenos Aires and Montevideo you can see the that the shortest route across the river is up the coast a ways from Montevideo so it is A LOT cheaper to get a boat to Colonia and ride a bus the rest of the way. It was also a beautiful drive. Loved the countryside. I saw a lot of cows. The ranch houses are painted bright colors, often in cool combinations, but I couldn't get a clear picture because the bus was going speedily down the road and the pics came out blurry, or I got the countryside just after the house, rather than the house.

Anyway, here are pictures of the ferry and of Buenos Aires from the ferry. I got on the boat about 45 minutes before departure so I had time to enjoy the scenery. It was a very comfortable ride. The seats were big and soft and I got up and walked around the duty free shop and around the top deck. The air was nice, it wasn't too cold. Today was very cold, so I lucked out having a nice day for the boat ride.

Last weekend was 9 de Julio, the Argentine independance day so it was a four day weekend. There is a street named 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires. Some of the others from our group went on trips to Mendoza or Santiago, Chile but I didn't have any money until Thursday afternoon and there wasn't enough time to book anything for that weekend by then. I just hung around BA and got to know the city. I found a place to eat pizza for lunch, went to a dinner theatre and walked and walked. They usually put several whole olives on pizza here:

I saw a lot of leather boots and shoes:

I also found a shop that sells shoes like Toms. All it has is this kind of shoe, for women and men.

I walked past the German park, Plaza Alemania.

And another plaza, but I forgot the name already.

There was a group of high rise buildings I thought were interesting because they had so much space in between them, yet were really tall. Kind of contradictory, they needed space so they went up, but there is a ton of space inbetween. I tried to get pictures, but there wasn't a good angle.

And last was a cool looking corner building.

I almost forgot! I walked through a park and there were a group of friends there decorating a wall with graffiti. The one guy was the main artist and the others were mainly filling in stuff for him. It was great to watch. BA seems to encourage "street artists." I guess there is even a city tour that explains the messages from the graffiti.

Also, there is a botanical garden about 3 blocks from my apartment. Here are a couple of pictures from there. The first is a grove of trees that they dry the leaves to make mate.