A walkable city

Our travel guides have said that Buenos Aires is a very walkable city but they still would probably think that we were crazy. Traffic is totally nuts to the point where it´s actually amazing that more people (pedestrians, motocyclists, drivers) don´t die from accidents. Pedestrians cross the street whenever, drivers run red lights as a matter of course otherwise you´d probably never get anywhere. So Chris and I have only taken a taxi from the airport (which was scary enough. Tailgating is a sport here.) and have otherwise walked everywhere. We could take the bus but see above re: traffic and crazy drivers. We could take the subway but we´d rather walk (although you generally get a face full of cigarette smoke mixed with smog in many areas). So we thought we´d walk to the Palermo neighborhood even though we knew it was a bit far. But we figured we could always take alternate transportation if we got tired. It wasn´t too bad but it did take us 1.5 hours to walk up there.

We treated ourselves to a nice lunch though by having sushi at the Japanese Garden. It was actually very good sushi although heavy on the salmon. They LOVE salmon down here - I think I have been eating a year´s supply of it while here! But the fish was fresh, the rice was good and it was overall yummy. The gardens, although a bit bare since it´s winter, were quite pretty as well.

Then we wandered around different parts of Palermo, including the Botanical Garden which was a nice little green respite from the city and chock full of cats. Seriously, many many many cats. Then we stopped at a cafe for some hot chocolate and coffee. They call hot chocolate a ¨submarino¨ here and I think it´s basically a bar of chocolate dropped in some very hot milk that you stir up. Yummy!
We had dinner in the hipper Palermo Viejo district then debated heavily about walking home vs a taxi. It didn´t help that it rained again but less than the other day. So we just decided to start walking...and kept walking...and walking. Fortunately, the rain stopped during our walk home. Sometimes it honestly felt like we would never get back. As long as we were moving, I was ok but if we stopped, we´d both get kind of tired. And started to look forward to getting into bed and going to sleep! We estimate that we probably walked 10 miles or so during the day and didn´t get back to our room until 12:30 am. We figured no one else would be as crazy as us but it was kind of funny while we were walking.

We did return to sanity this morning and decided to treat ourselves to a very lazy day...taking our time getting up and getting ready to head out then just travelling locally. We saw the famous Cafe Tortoni which was very elegant on the inside and had a little line of tourists waiting to get in. And then wandered around the shopping area a little to get some souvenirs. Then came home. See? Very lazy. But I´m going to try and get Chris to go to a tango milonga with me in an hour so we can learn a little dancing.

Ok....I know pictures make the blog but I think I tried to upload too many...it´s been trying to upload pictures for almost half an hour. I´m gonna have to cut and run now and try to upload just a few pictures later....