Posts from — October 2008

The San Telmo Sunday market has been one of our favorite outings during our month-long stay in Buenos Aries. Take a look and you’ll see why.

And if you haven’t had a chance to see our earlier videos, be sure to check them out too.  It’s a great way to procrastinate.

A Day in Pictures
Tigre, Argentina

City dwellers the world over have places where they escape, destinations that provide relief from the hectic pace of urban life. For portenos, Tigre is that kind of place.

Located twenty kilometers north of Buenos Aires at the edge of the Parana Delta, Tigre was once the destination of choice for the city’s elite.

Today Tigre is a preferred day trip, easily accessible by train. People come to relax and enjoy the lush green islands and maze of waterways that define the delta region.

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The first clue that we would have to make some adjustments to our body clocks came in our landlord’s verbal checklist: Open the window like this, turn on the oven like that, and “Best to put out the trash in the afternoon,” he said, “between 6 and 8 p.m.”

Maybe it was just a shaky translation.  Could 8 p.m. be considered anything but the dead of night?

At home we are, like all industrious Americans, “early to bed, early to rise.” But here we have been slipping almost unaware into Buenos Aires time.

It is not an issue of jet lag.  The day here simply begins and ends later.

Flipping through my guidebook, I can find only one museum that opens before 2 p.m.  Restaurants open for dinner at 9 p.m. and diners begin to trickle in at 10 p.m. or so.

From our bedroom window, you can watch people – lots of them – leisurely walking their dogs between 3 and 4 in the morning.

The tango show we saw last week began at 11 p.m. Everyone around seemed to think this was completely normal.

It’s no wonder, I suppose, that we are still in pajamas at 10:30 in the morning and that we look at our watches during an outing to find that it’s not 2 p.m., but 5 p.m.

When October arrives, we expect our days to grow shorter, but here in South America, the tenth month brings the long, leafy days of spring.

Our signals have gone awry.

We are upside down, posing for a picture next to a blooming azalea bush – and sitting down for dinner at bedtime.

Caroline said what I had been thinking:  “I hope this isn’t one of those illegal zoos.”

We had traveled 40 miles outside of Buenos Aires to the Lujan Zoo on the promise that we would be able to interact closely with the animals.  That turned out to be an understatement.

According to Mariana, our guide for the day, the zoo had been operating for fifteen years, and was unique in South America.  I’d certainly never visited another zoo like it.

We were four of only seven visitors to the zoo on a cool and overcast Monday.  Minutes after we arrived we were escorted to the area where the elephants were kept – not a cage, mind you, more like a large pen.

Caroline and Conor were riding an elephant around a yard before I could say Dumbo.

As it turned out, riding an elephant was least of what we did that day.

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