South: Buenos Aires-- cars, Chinatown, cemetery, 2 theaters

Day 19:

Our stay in Buenos Aires began with a walk to the upscale Palermo District for some window shopping.  While one of us shopped, the other one took pictures of cars.  Can you guess who did what?

I had no idea what this was.

Apparently, it's a Chevy.  And it's right hand drive(!).

This old Honda Accord hatchback was in tip-top shape.

I saw this poor thing outside a couple of classic car repair shops that were next door to each other.

These two were in the two shops getting restored.

For lunch, we went to Chinatown.  It's not huge, but there appeared to be at least a few authentic restaurants.  We dined at Ciudad Exquisita, which may not have been the most authentic, but was definitely popular.

The first thing you notice is that every table has ordered a large fried rice and packaged bread sticks.  We ordered some boiled dumplings (same as potstickers, except they're not fried).  They were a bit too damp but still tasted very good.  I got a pork chop rice, a popular Taiwanese-style lunch dish.  There wasn't much meat but the steamed rice and tea egg that came with it were very tasty.  We also ordered an eggplant dish.  The eggplant tasted very meaty and we suspected that we liked it too much because it had MSG in it.  All in all, it was a great meal.  It's definitely better than the Chinese food I had in Chile and Peru.

Next stop was the cemetery.  Rows and rows of crypts made the place look like a small city.  It was very touristy and everyone had to take a picture of Eva Peron's resting site.

After the macabre tourist trap, we moved on to El Ateneo.  It used to be a grand theater and it has been converted into a book store.  The stage is a cafe and customers use the balconies to read the inventory.  It's a fantastic idea.

I'll take this opportunity to say that Latin Americans need to take a course from us North Americans on how to operate a retail store.  The book store was easily many times bigger than a Borders or Barnes & Noble, yet it only had two cash registers.  Each line of customers must have been 40 deep.  We were going to buy five books but gave up because of the lines.  How the heck do they expect to make a profit with these business practices?!

One last comment.  I went to a number of book stores and it seems like a large proportion of the inventory was devoted to intellectual or leftist topics-- the kind of books that were popular in Berkeley or Cambridge in the 60s and 70s.

We ended the day at a movie theater.  It was hot all day and we were looking forward to the air conditioning.  In fact, a lady came up to us in the lobby and asked us if we were in the theater because we were hot.  We replied yes.  She then asked if she could ask us more questions.  That's when I saw her microphone and her friend, the TV news cameraman.  We suddenly became embarrassed with our Spanish and declined.  That was funny.

The movie was an HD rebroadcast of a London ballet production.  Apparently, one of the dancers was Argentine.  The program is akin to the The Met's Live in HD series in the States.  It is my habit at these shows to sleep through 1 1/2 acts.  For this ballet, I slept through 1 1/2 acts.  I don't think I missed much because when I woke up, they were still dancing.