Buenos Aires – v2.0

Uncharacteristically, today we’re heading out right after work and school instead of in the evening. My colleague Frank drove us to the airport on a nice spring day.

No meal service on our flight to Denver so Ellie had airport sushi (cucumber rolls) and boba. She approved.

It was nice to see that Aspire and WestJet have partnered to expand the Transborder lounge with a “garden” area. It’s usually really busy in here so the additional space will be welcome.

After a 30 minute delay to have a technical issue resolved, we took off just after sunset.

Ellie was tired after a busy week.

When the pilots filled out her flight logbook, they included a few trading cards featuring a few members of United’s Boeing fleet. Nice! Didn’t know United had these!

The flight was uneventful. Another uncharacteristic thing on this trip – we’re renting a car.

It’s been a few years since I rented a car anywhere (last time was in Cape Town – June 2022) and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the pickup process was. I did everything through the Hertz app at the airport while we were waiting for our baggage and only had to interact with a person at the exit to verify our ID. Super easy and painless!

The car had a bit of damage on it though and I couldn’t figure out how to report it through the app, so I took a photo and just showed it to them at drop off time, which was no problem.

Our flight the following day wasn’t until 2:30 PM so that’s why we rented a car, to avoid just bumming around the hotel all morning. Instead, we’re going to head to Golden on the other side of Denver.

We’re here in Golden to meet up with one of Blanka’s old friends, Sylwia, with whom she spent a lot of time in the mountains when she lived in Colorado in the early 2000’s. I’d met her and her husband Jay in 2009 when they came to Calgary, and Sylwia was really excited to meet Ellie.

We had brunch at a local cafe – very tasty – almost got my name right.

After a quick stop at the Colorado Railroad Museum to see the tourist train going around the yard, we returned the car and checked in for our bigger journey in a leisurely manner.

We spent a bit of time in the new AA Admirals Club which was a pretty small and packed space but it was still a nice place for a break and some complimentary refreshments.

We’re now onboard our flight down to Dallas-Fort Worth.

It’s amazing how similar Denver looks to Calgary, especially from the air. Suburbia, skyscrapers, and snowcapped mountains in the back beyond the brown hills.

Why are we doing this extra stop in Denver when we could have flown right to DFW from Calgary? Well, the core of this trip is a special “sale fare” from AA that was booked almost 9 months ago. Very good deal – worth the detour!

Anyway, we arrive in sunny and warm DFW before too long.

One of the great things about DFW is that it’s got great restaurants at the airport. So we’re going to take the SkyLink automated people mover train around to one of the other terminals to get a delicious meal.

I got the salmon platter with scallops and shrimp.

It was delicious.

We then moved on to terminal D, our departure terminal, for our next stop – Ellie supper.

After both of our tummies were satisfied, we still had an hour to kill in the lounge before our flight so I had a few glasses of the nice champagne that they offer in the AA Flagship Lounge.

At the entrance to Flagship Lounges, there’s a stand with an attendant pouring the glasses of champagne as a nice welcoming gesture. Better still is that the self service area has the same champagne, so you can refill as many times as you want 😉 I made sure to get my money’s worth during that hour in the lounge.

This lounge has one of the best apron views period, especially on a clear evening like this.

Probably better that we didn’t have more time in there as the bubbles were going down a little too smoothly. We board our flight to Buenos Aires Ezeiza International Airport.

The flight attendant saw Ellie’s flight logbook as she was delivering pre-departure beverages and asked us if we wanted to come up now and get it filled in and take some pictures. The flight crew were super enthusiastic to see Ellie!

The relief pilot was also into photography and gave us a bunch of photos of AA 777s in his hometown, Las Vegas.

Although we’d already eaten dinner, that was almost 4 hours ago so I ordered another meal.

Ellie, still stuffed from Chick-Fil-A, made room for the AA ice cream – one of the best onboard desserts!

Me too!

Looks like AA didn’t get the memo about updating their IFE moving map.

After a few hours of sleep, we cross over the Andes and into Argentina from Chile as the sun comes up and breakfast is served.

Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside of Asia, is visible south of us (it’s the snowcapped peak below the wing).

After traversing the dry areas at the foot of the Andes, we’re into the lusher agricultural land outside Buenos Aires.

The passport control line was long as there are plenty of widebody longhaul flights that arrive in the morning in EZE. It took us about half an hour to get through.

We caught an Uber which is now legal in Buenos Aires – there was even a tiny designated pickup area outside the arrivals area, and headed down the highway to El Palomar where we are going to meet a former colleague of mine, Alex. Alex was born in Argentina but they moved to Canada when he was a kid. Him and his wife just moved to El Palomar where some of his family still lives, in October.

Alex had picked up a variety of baked goods for us to snack on when we arrived. Yum!

His house is under big renovations, but his cousin who has an apartment nearby offered us to stay the night at his place. Very generous of him!

After taking a little breather and a shower, we headed over to his Mom’s place to meet Pipa – a huge capybara. Pipa was super chill!

And then walked through the neighborhood over to Alex’s place. It was really nice to see a typical suburban neighborhood, away from the more usual parts of the city.

One of these junk collecting guys drove by announcing pickup services on a loud and squawking megaphone.

Here’s Alex’s place.

Next, over to a commuter rail station to head downtown. First walking past some unused tracks that were intended to be reactivated for commuter use but the victim of project suspension in recent years. There was even a new platform… but no train to serve it.

Another junk collector guy passed us, rolling slowly through a red light. It seemed like this guy had a successful day. He probably didn’t want to stop lest the truck not get going again with all this stuff.

The train station was right next to a very busy sports field. It didn’t take long for the train to arrive.

This was my first time on one of these trains. It was a bit slow and the carriages were old, but it was very cheap, and just as quick to get downtown as driving. There were people walking up and down the cars selling various things like snacks and trinkets.

We arrived in Palermo in about half an hour and sought out some fast food for a late lunch. Went to Argentinian equivalent of Burger King – Mostaza.

The burgers were great, but I was really surprised at how dramatically prices for food and drink had increased since I was here last January – closer in price to the US than South America. More expensive than Canada, for sure.

Then we hopped on the subway (Subte) down to Plaza de Mayo.

As I showed Alex and Ellie one of the hotels that I’d stayed in during Christmas 2023, we also walked down the street a bit to check out this unassuming, beautiful church.

Further down, we stopped at Mafalda’s bench which was still busy. Mafalda is a famous Argentine comic book character. I hadn’t heard of this and probably walked right past it before, but I was alerted to this special place by my worldly friend Rubama. Thanks Roo!

After visiting Mafalda, we hopped in an Uber down to La Boca, a very colorful area, always filled with soccer fans as it’s the home of Boca Juniors, one of the most popular football teams anywhere!

Messi had a few visitors on his celebratory balcony.

Things were closing up for the evening, but we managed to get in to one of the souvenir shops where Alex and Ellie picked up a special memento from our visit to La Boca.

We walked down Caminito, totally deserted compared to how it is during the day which made it even better.

After all that, we headed back to El Palomar in an Uber. And stopped at one of Alex’s favorite local ice cream shops.

There was a big park across the street that had some cool features – like this old military plane. There’s an active air base in this district so it has a rich military history.

There was another plane further down the road…

After a busy day we went to sleep pretty quickly once arriving back at the apartment. We awoke the next morning to heavy rainshowers that were left over from a big thunderstorm overnight. We hoped this would clear up before long as we were going to be spending most of the day outside again today.

We bid farewell to El Palomar and caught an Uber downtown where we’re going to stay tonight, and headed out to Palermo.

There were definitely more signs of homelessness than my previous visit just over a year ago. Palermo is a very good area and I was surprised to see his scorch mark on a wall under a shop awning.

We were here to take part in a walking food tour of the area, beginning at this restaurant.

Empanadas were the food at 1810 Cocina Regional. They were of course, delicious.

Next stop was Naranjo & Flor – a bakery – where some treats were picked up to go that we’ll eat after our next course.

La Escondida is where we’ll stop for the main course. Awesome Argentinian steak. Wow!

The steak was so good. All it needed was salt and pepper. Even Ellie loved it (!!) and wanted more!

Some rain showers moved in as we were leaving La Escondida, but it was time for our dessert which we ate in a park across the street.

Next stop was a refreshment at Mercado Soho, a market hall with different food and drink vendors. We were there to try a special cider.

It started pouring as we left. I’m sure this place had good coffee but maybe not a great day to sit on the patio and enjoy it.

Here we are at Chori – a special chorizo sausage joint, where we had chorizo sandwiches and a beer. Ellie didn’t care for her sandwich so I got 2… getting really fully by this point.

As we walked over to our final stop on the food tour, I spotted this rooftop vent fashioned as a Lego head. Cool!

Here we are at Rustico, where we’ll enjoy delicious handmade chocolate and mate.

We said goodbye to the group and walked back to the Subte, thankfully the rain had let up a bit. The tree lined streets in this area are so beautiful.

Not KFC, it’s across the street.

A short ride back to the hotel where we were able to check in to the room by now and have a shower and rest before heading out for a late night.

The hotel was just a block away from the Obelisco.

Alright, concert time! Ellie’s been looking forward to this night for months!

We’re going to Lollapalooza which is being held at a horse racetrack way out in the northern suburbs. We had to take this massive highway to get there. I didn’t know there were roads like this in South America, close to 20 lanes wide with express and collector just like the 401 in Toronto.

We’ve arrived! Thankfully the rain has stopped.

As it was an all day, multi day festival, we only arrived closer to the end. Benson Boone came on stage shortly after we settled in.

After a cool drone show above the crowd, the headliner came on and Ellie was sooooo excited! She just loves Olivia Rodrigo!

Olivia’s performance was paused for about 20 minutes as a heavy rainshower rolled through. It did get a bit cold during this time. Glad it didn’t last too long.

There were still some late night bands performing as we left with the bulk of the crowd. It was after midnight already and it was going to take us a while to get out of here and home to the hotel. Probably not a great idea to try an Uber in this mess.

So we walked over with the hordes to the commuter rail station about 10 minutes away which had extra late night service for the music lovers.

After about half an hour we arrived back downtown at Retiro station.

I’d read before that this was a rough area but it didn’t seem bad at all, so we took the bus back to our hotel at 01:30. It felt just fine and was easy and cheap.

Back at the Obelisco, Ellie is craving McDonald’s. And admittedly, so am I.

I couldn’t quite handle any of the triples. A Double Bacon Cheddar McMelt combo really hit the spot and after that we were quickly to bed. Buenas noches, Buenos Aires!