After resting and recovering from the hospital stay on Monday, Kiersten was ready to go by Tuesday. She had a ladies lunch at a new churrascaria (meat restaurant) and some aspects were better than our other place but the chicken was not as good. Nevertheless she will introduce it to Scott soon.
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| Fancy fancy. |
Wednesday we had a pretty low key Valentine’s Day. A yummy pesto and balsamic chicken dinner with cheesecake brownies for dessert. Our present is the trip to Buenos Aires thus the low key affair.
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| Tasty dinner. |
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| Enjoying Mommy's chocolate heart from Daddy. |
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| Some quick (and cheap) Valentine's decorations we threw up last minute. |
The rest of the week we got ready for our trip. Cleaned out the fridge, used up as much food as possible, gave some food away, cleaned the house and took out the trash, etc.
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| "Helping" Mommy pull weeds one morning. |
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| Sharing a meal with our friends the Wheelers on Friday night. |
We flew out of Asuncion at 8:30 on Saturday morning. While waiting for our plane we noticed a lot of young tennis players and one was wearing a shirt that said “Hungary”. Scott convinced Kiersten to go strike up a conversation with them and an embarrassing 1 minute later came back to confirm, yes they are Hungarian and they are here going to Brazil for a tennis tournament. Let’s just say Spanish is now taking up most of her foreign language space in her brain Hungarian previously occupied.
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| At the airport! |
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| On the plane! |
Mackenzie handled the flight terrifically and by 11:30am we had landed, got through customs, got our bags and were sitting in a taxi ready to go to our Airbnb. It’s small but has just about everything we need. M took a quick nap and Scott explored a bit of the neighborhood to get us groceries and lunch. Out we went to catch the tour bus by 3:30 and we rode it for about half the route and saw a lot of the town.
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| Taxi ride! |
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| Looking cool waiting for the metro. |
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| Listening to the tour tips on the bus. |
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| We moved up top because oddly it was cooler outside. |
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| The beautifully colored buildings of La Boca. |
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| This was a crazy statue of hundreds of bikes linked together. (Not real bikes.) |
We got off at Plaza de las Naciones Unidas and the giant metal flower. It follows the sun, opening when the sun rises and closing when the sun sets. Mackenzie was in awe. We walked around then found dinner at Almacen de Pizzas which is actually the first restaurant we ever ate at in Asuncion too. Must be a chain. Feeling much more refreshed and nourished, it was getting late so we caught the metro back to our Airbnb for bed. Traveling takes it out of you.
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| The Floralis Generica. |
Sunday morning we got ready for church and embarked down the street to find the chapel. Not knowing the exact location and not having data on our phones, we wandered for about 30 minutes before deciding we missed it and to come back and listen to a Conference talk. Come to find out we were one block shy of the building before turning back. C’est la vie. It actually turned out to be a good thing because Mackenzie went to bed late and woke up early so she took a very early nap.
We hit the streets again at 11:30 to finish as much of the tour bus route as we could before meeting some people in San Telmo at 1. The Féria de San Telmo (street market) is one of the largest and most famous in the city. It’s only open on Sundays and has about 200 vendors. They even have live tango happening in the open areas. We saw some tango and some Argentinian antiques before grabbing a taxi for lunch at El Fabric de Taco, an authentic Mexican restaurant. Very tasty.
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| Back on the bus. Hot hot hot. |
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| Colorful seltzer bottles are very common in the antique area of ferias (markets). |
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| She insisted on eating the limes! |
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| This is basically a burnt cheese roll. It tasted much better than it sounds! |
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| Very delicious and authentic tacos al pastor. |
We retired to our place around 6:30 full, happy and tired once again. We planned out the next day and hit the hay.
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| All the metro stations have really nice artwork on the walls. |
Monday morning (today) we woke to rain. Sunday had been very hot, in the upper 90’s so the rain cooled it off but left the air muggy. We caught the metro to Plaza Italia and walked a few blocks to go to the Japanese Gardens. It was so beautiful inside. After an hour or so we were getting hungry and walked down a random street towards the metro and stumbled upon the perfect little Italian pasta bar, Quotidiano. They had croissants, Argentinian pastries, pastas and more. If we had more time in Buenos Aires we’d definitely go back.
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| Our walk took us past the zoo and if you look really closely you can see 2 giraffes. |
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| They have monuments everywhere! |
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| Inside the beautiful Japanese Gardens. |
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| Inside the quaint pasta bar we ate lunch in. |
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| This Argentinean dessert had multiple flaky pastry crusts with dulce de leche in between with a meringue top. So rich! |
We are settled in at the apartment now so Mackenzie can nap. Tonight we are going to see a live Tango show which we’ve been told is very good.
This week we’ll have a guest segment. Instead of our usual “Quirks of Paraguay” here is “Eccentricities of Argentina”!
- Sun bathing. Maybe because it’s summer or a weekend or both but in almost any park or open patch of grass you’ll see people soaking up the sun.
- Parks and plazas. They had them in abundance here and it’s awesome!
This park is located 2 blocks from our Airbnb. It has this playground, a dog park,
an exercise park and a walking/running track! Plus lots of open space to sit and
take in the sun.
- Bikers. We’re talking bicyclists. There are designated bike lanes and lots of people using them. Fantastic.
- Exercise. Having the parks and bike lanes seem to encourage exercise and we have seen a ton more people running or exercising outside of the park than you’d ever see in Asuncion. It reminds us a little of home.
- Metro. Speaking of home, this city has a metro system and it is great!
Its a metro!!
That’s enough for now. We’ll save the rest for next week’s edition.
The Mackenzie Update:
- This week she surprised us by responding to an English question in Spanish. Scott asked her to say “ten”. And she said “diez” clear as day. We were both stunned and thrilled at our little bilingual baby. Sadly she only did it the one time.
- She really likes "helping" Mommy at the grocery store. She did do a good job so she got a treat: chocolate milk which she sucked dry then carried all the way home.
Helping to pull the cart.
So happy with her chocolate milk straw.
- She has been counting in Spanish. We can pretty clearly hear her say, “uno, dos, tres” at random times.
- She got a pretty bad scrape on her knee this week. We used the biggest bandaid we had.
Daniel Tiger is distracting her from the pain.
- She loves the metro! She likes watching the trains come into the station and holding onto the handles. It is pretty fun.
That’s all we have for this week. Next week we’ll fill you in on the rest of our BA adventure!
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