Dinner and a show.

If Sunday is for sleeping in, then Monday is for using a jackhammer at 7 a.m. on the road outside our apartment, constructing an office block out the back window and testing the resonance of car horns off the surrounding buildings.  Luckily we’re no longer suffering from bus-lag.

Some of our “Oh, that’s how you do it here,” moments this week are…  We ordered a ham and pineapple pizza as we thought that would be a gentle way to ease the kids into eating different foods.  The ham and pineapple, Hawaiian or even Tropical pizza to those with a flair for language, is an Australian favourite.  Our pizza came out with eight olives sitting on the border and a criss-cross of some sort of sauce.  We asked the waitress what the sauce was and she said it was olive sauce.  Not only has Argentina slammed us with a reciprocity fee but they have also defaced the Tropical pizza with olive sauce.  This will take some time to adjust to.

Park drinking fountain

We stopped in at Wöllen Tag Swiss ice-creamery.  While not very Argentine, when one needs to bribe kids to keep them walking, one cannot be too picky.  When it came time to eating the cone, we were at a loss trying to define the flavour of this edible vessel.  Was it malt, or salt, or something reminiscent of fish and chips?  Whatever it was I think the owner was confused why there were four cones sitting on the table.  Perhaps he thought, “So that’s how Australians do it.”

Playground equipment does not meet the same standards that we’re used to in Australia.  We’ve told Depp that we need to have a quick look at the swings and slides before he hops on.  Some of the swing chains look like they’re almost worn through.  Most of the parks often have a few homeless people sleeping in the corners, which has lead to some eye opening conversations for our kids. 

See Saw 

Our noses were called over to the smoky aroma of chori completos being cooked over charcoal from a food van.  We don’t know exactly what sort of meat they are made from but we were impressed with the vendor’s approach to not wasting anything as he tossed a bag of charcoal into the fire without even opening the bag and then ripped up a cardboard box and threw that onto the fire – including the sticky tape that held the box shut.  The chori completo and chori lomo are a gourmet barbequed sandwich with your choice of over a dozen pickled vegetable mixes.  This has been the tastiest thing we’ve eaten this week. 

The park was our choice for eating dinner and we sat watching jugglers congregating, practicing, twirling, fumbling and above all else, defying gravity with their instruments of flight.  The skill needed to juggle is impressive and makes me think that juggling should be taught at school.  Many jugglers busk at the traffic lights while the lights are red. We teach calculus at school.  Could you imagine a maths teacher running out into the middle of an intersection under the glow of a red light with a whiteboard on wheels and running through a string of calculus problems in the hope that drivers would throw a few coins their way.  It just wouldn’t happen.  They’d be slain whiteboards at every intersection.  Power to the jugglers.