Buenos Aires, part 3: The best meals I ever had

Liz: All of humankind has one thing in common: the sandwich. I believe that all anyone really wants in this life is to sit in peace and eat a sandwich. 
Jack: What a surprise, your worldview is food-based. 

- 30 Rock


Buenos Aires is really only a cool city if you like food, art, sports, history, architecture, nightlife, or culture. I'm going to focus for a second on the first of those things:

Buenos Aires, part 2: I'll sleep when I'm dead

They say that New York is the city that never sleeps, which may or may not be true. If that's the case though, Buenos Aires is the city that never blinks. While Montevideo was fun, and a lot faster pace than Chile, Buenos Aires blew it out of the water. Friday night we stopped into a sandwich place for a quick dinner at 9, and had to wait an hour for them to open. Saturday, we ate at a nice steakhouse at 10:45, finished dinner at 12:30, and had to kill an hour and a half before we went out. You also stay out 'til about 6 or so--not just college aged guys either; I saw some men and women in their sixties walking out of a tango club at 6:15 a.m. 

We were really lucky in finding a hostel so easily--we got into a cab by the ferry terminal and asked him to take us to a place in the Palermo SoHo neighborhood. Pretty easy, but our market research might have been lacking. In just two full days and nights we somehow managed to hit all of the highlights:

Buenos Aires, part 1: going with the flow

I left home Thursday at noon to head to the Santiago airport then to Montevideo. The plan was for one night in Montevideo, then catch a ferry across the bay from Montevideo to Buenos Aires. We got to Montevideo around 8 on Thursday night, which was good because it was the only part of the trip that we'd planned or the only reservation that we'd made.

An hour or so later, we met up with my friend Rob, an Ole Miss guy that is studying in Montevideo for the year. He took us around town to a really cool outdoor cafe/bar area in the old downtown part of Montevideo, and then afterwards to a club on the beach overlooking the Atlantic ocean with some of his Uruguayan friends. It was a lot of fun, plus he's the first friend from home that I've seen in several months. It was definitely good to catch up and hear what everyone is doing with themselves.

Step two of our odyssey was figuring out how to get from point A to point B. It went like this:

Still here, still alive.

Sorry about the lack of posting as of late, I know my reader has been complaining. My computer has been in the shop, and while the prognosis wasn't good for a while, it's more or less back to playing condition. So there's my excuse. Also, things have been boring lately plus I've actually realized that I am indeed taking classes that count towards real things, like class credit and possible employment (job market joke!).

Thursday I leave for Buenos Aires via Montevideo. We (me and two other guys) are pretty flexible in our itinerary, and by "flexible" I mean "have only the vaguest of plans." That being said, if you happen to know of anything awesome to see or do, please drop me a line.

Also, the odds of me making repeated and obnoxious references to either Evita Perón or Diego Maradona are now at 3:1. Place your bets accordingly, gentlemen.

Doing work, son.

First off: my computer keeps "blue screen of death-ing" me, so I'm going to apologize in advance for the lack of pictures in this and possible future posts. My laptop is limping along in safe mode, so I'm effectively bringing a knife to this technology gunfight. 

But I went on my first wine vineyard interview Friday. I left Viña at 6 am, took a bus to Santiago, and took the metro to the nice part of downtown Santiago. All by myself. Las Condes, the aforementioned nice part of Santiago, is really impressive. I felt like I could easily be in downtown Chicago or Dallas or somewhere like that. Of course, there's both good and bad to this--it's a little boring, but also good for the overall perception of a city and all that. Downside of modernization, I guess. 

I met the PR director for Almavia at a Starbucks in Las Condes, and she gave me a ride to the vineyard, about 45 minutes south of Santiago. Almaviva is a partnership between Chilean Concha y Toro and Rothschild from France, and it is their attempt to make the finest wine in Chile. I was lucky enough to get a private tour of the vineyards and a tasting. Got to say, drinking a glass of $150 wine on a balcony overlooking vineyards and the Andes at 11 in the morning is a pretty easy way to live. My interview, with the head of US sales and the overall sales manager, went really well. They had great answers to all of my questions, and for some inexplicable reason my Spanish was on fire (or enfuego, as we like to say down here.) 

Also, friends and family, I went to the vineyards with full intention of buying bottles and shipping them back to some people. I couldn't afford to do it, and I felt like my family's excitement at getting gifts wouldn't be enough to outweigh their anger at their son spending a thousand dollars to send a case of alcohol to another continent. I'll just add it to my post lottery win to-do list. 

A story and a thought

"There are no foreign lands. It is only the traveler who is foreign." - Robert Louis Stevenson

I've been listening to a lot of music down here. I usually listen to music a lot, but I often find myself walking alone to get places, and it's kind of a nice time to just put in headphones and be oblivious. That being said, everyone who reads this needs to listen to the new Avett Brothers album, Live,  Volume 3. Here's a free stream. I'm going to be an obscure music snob here and call it my generation's Waiting for Columbus. At the very least, go to iTunes and buy "Head Full of Doubt/Heart Full of Promise" right now. It's weird how little things like music and food can connect people from different cultures or remind you of your own--one of the more surreal moments I've had down here involved me and an American friend of mine singing Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" with three thirty year old Spanish bankers in a bus in the Atacama desert. It's weird how things happen sometimes.

A Day in the Life

From reading my blog posts I realized that it seems that the only things I do down here are travel and go to parties. This is less true than I would like, and I want to take this moment to explain to both of my readers about what I actually do on a day-to-day basis--classes, thesis, things like that. 

Classes first: I'm taking 16 credits down here, which translates to like 14 hours in a US academic sense. Hopefully though, when I get back all I'll need to graduate with a double major will be three hours of Spanish and to finish my thesis. And in four years, too. Hate on, haters. I have nine Spanish credits down here, three of which are grammar, and six of which are culture and communication, and are taught by a charming and friendly communist woman. It honestly doesn't bother me at all, but I did find the song we listened to about Ho Chi Minh to be a little out of place. Five history credits--Formation of the State and Nation in Latin America (basically history up to 1900) and Twentieth Century Latin American History, which is exactly what it sounds like. Neither of these are very entertaining. Finally, I have a class on the internationalization of Chile's economy which is interesting and fits in perfectly with my wine thesis. And is also a great segue. 

My thesis, for those of you who don't know, examines the causes of the export growth in the Chilean wine industry over the past twenty years--basically researching how Chile became the 5th largest wine exporter in the world in a relatively short period of time. So far has been going well. Most of my research has been recreational in nature, but I think I'm interviewing the sales and export manager at my first vineyard on Friday and I've made contacts with several people in wine-related industries that I can interview. 

Finally, I told both my grandfathers that I'd periodically send out wine recommendations. Here's the first: Oveja Negra (Black Sheep) does really good blends of reds from their vineyards scattered throughout the country. The Cabernet Franc/Carmenere is my favorite--and is apparently an under $20 best buy, if you're in to that sort of "spending money well" thing. Here's a list of the awards it's won, if you don't believe me. I'm not sure how much it costs in the US, except for under $20, but it's about a $5 bottle down here. Pretty awesome. 

And an update: next week I have two tests, a paper, and a presentation. In two weeks I'm going to Buenos Aires by way of Montevideo. Wish me luck, y'all.