We slept almost eleven hours. We had a late breakfast and Oscar finally arrived.
After Oscar got a chance to shower we walked to the area of the famous Recoleta cemetery. There is an enormous Gomero (gum) tree there that was planted about two hundred years ago.
There were a lot of craft booths set up for the weekend, many with nice looking items. One booth had some really nice mate (mah-tay) mugs that we would later wish we had purchased, but it’s hard to know what souvenirs to buy on your first outing. We saw the Basilica Nuestra Señora del Pilar which adjoins the cemetery.
We walked a couple blocks to Volta, a gelato shop, and we all tried different varieties of dulce de leche gelatos. They were some of the richest-tasting gelatos I’ve ever tasted.
Oscar began feeling the long journey catch up with him so we returned to the hotel. Sandy and Julie and I freshened up a bit, then headed back out to the other side of the large cemetary where we tried to locate a geocache. We saw some fun stuff on the way there.
Unfortunately we couldn’t find the geocache where it was supposed to be hidden in the roots of this large gnarly tree. We found bits of trash, some that looked suspiciously like toilet paper, got our shoes all muddy, and probably roused the suspicion of a couple of nearby muggles, but never found it.
We walked through the large adjoining park where there are a couple large monuments.
Then we returned to the hotel where we met up with Oscar again to enjoy some beer, wine, and bread on the rooftop patio. We met our tour guide Barbara, AKA Barby, and had our orientation meeting which was followed by a tango lesson. An elegant lady tango instructor was accompanied by her father and a man who played the Bandoneon, the traditional musical instrument of the tango. It looks like an accordion, but it works in different and more complicated seeming ways.
After freshening up again we took a cab out to the Barriochine (China Town) neighborhood where we met my friend Hernán and his lovely wife Gabriela for dinner at Parilla Pobre Luis. The restaurant did not open until eight, so we got the earliest reservations we could. We had a huge dinner with really interesting appetizers followed by plate after plate of grilled meat. We were really enjoying it, but by ten-thirty we had to cut things a bit short - we were supposed to be downstairs for the hotel breakfast before seven-thirty.
