Travel Diary – Argentina December 17th 2011
I slept until late morning and woke with a tinge of hangover from the previous night’s wine. There wasn’t much to be had in the way of breakfast and no one was awake or around in the house but Lorna and I. We ate our sandwiches that we’d taken on the plane and various other snacks.
Later in the day, Eva and Juanci woke up and talked with us a bit. Eva did some translating for us and Juanci spoke Spanish until he decided music would be better. Though the both of them were talented musicians, I didn’t really understand what was going on. We got directions to the nearest ATM and to the nearby market from them. Sarah had left with her youngest daughter Juana for a school play and taken the keys to the house. The only way to leave the house was to open the garage door and leave it unlocked for our return. We didn’t want to be responsible for the house getting robbed, so we opted to wait for her return.
We sat and read. We ate lunch. We read more. Sarah finally returned around 4:30pm and told us of how the school event had featured over 100 kids and took 5 hours to complete. We took the keys and hit the ATM and grocery store before returning home with our supplies.
We decided not to try to force anything else major into the day and focus on errands needed to settle ourselves. Later in the evening we went shopping again at another grocery store and to search for a power converter.
The grocery store was fairly normal. It resembled an Argentinian Target featuring wilted vegetables and overpriced wines. We gathered up meat for Milanesas and a few other supplies and headed for checkout. The lines were … well, I sat here for 3 minutes trying to think of an adjective.. They were long. Very long. We got in line and didn’t move. I went to get a bath mat and came back, then thought better of it and returned it to the shelf. Lorna and the cart hadn’t moved a step. I checked out the ice cream section and we had moved up one person. The other lines weren’t moving either.
After about 30 minutes we were no longer standing among the shopping aisles and had only 5 or 6 people waiting ahead of us. I could see that the cashiers were chatting with customers and each other, looking over the items being purchased and lazily scanning them or looking up prices. I started timing the total time per customer. The range was between 4 and 12 minutes and had no direct relationship to the number of items purchased. Just before 10pm, we were finally free of Carrefour market and on our way back home.
Milanesas are a simple Argentinian dish of thin tenderized beef soaked in egg and garlic and then breaded and fried in oil. They are quite delicious and something I definitely plan to make for us when we return home. We’d bought some wine and beer at the store and opened a bottle of wine with dinner. We wanted to try the second wine and so that was opened as well. This drinking then lead to the first bottle of beer being opened. I had planned to save the beer for a hot day by the pool, but somehow the second bottle was opened as well. Then, amidst protests, the third bottle was opened as well and it was all gone. Drunkenly, we headed to bed in the wee hours of the morning.
