ajmatt blog

Matt here - I thought I’d get in on the fun and write a bit about our relaxing day yesterday here in Buenos Aires. After our monstrous dinner Friday night at Las Nazarenas, we ended up sleeping late on Saturday. We took our time getting going, and by the time we got outside, it was a beautiful, sunny and warm day. We decided to take a stroll up to Plaza San Martin, which is a park that contains and is surrounded by trees, monuments, former palacios, and other buildings.

A few of the highlights:
Circulo Militar - a large mansion previously owned by the rich Paz family that took 12 years to build - long enough that the man that commissioned it died before it was finished in 1914.


One of many monuments in the city to General San Martin.

The Islas Malvinas War Memorial - they are still quite upset here in Argentina about the Falkland Islands war with the United Kingdom in 1982. This is their equivalent to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. We read in many travel books to always refer to the Falkland Islands as the Islas Malvinas here in Argentina. Fortunately, we haven’t had the topic come up.

Torre Monumental - this monument, formerly known as the British Clock Tower, was a gift from the British in Buenos Aires after building the nearby enormous Retiro train station (right). After the war, the clock tower was damaged by riots. We found it closed for additional restoration in advance of the tourist season (it’s winter here now) and Argentina’s bicentennial in 2010.

We also ran into the “Movimiento Nacional Popular y Cristiano” (Matt translation: “Popular Christian National Movement”) - we seem to have a knack for finding these sorts of events on our travels (for example, see Budapest).

Afterward, we had a nice buffet lunch and decided to spend the rest of the day back in our hotel reading, relaxing, and resting up. It is vacation after all!!

We went to dinner around 9:30pm (early in BA) at Filo, an Italian pizzeria and restaurant. We drank a great bottle of wine, ate far too much food, and had dessert to boot. We got back to our hotel just before midnight.

If you’d like to see more, the full gallery of pictures is here. It was a great day, and we went to sleep in preparation for the next day’s adventure.