Jardins

On Monday, we decided to have a more low-key day.  We brought our books (Robert Heinlein's "Glory Road" for me, and The Autobiography of Mark Twain on the Kindle for Rose) and headed out around 11 am.  We walked to the Jardin Japones first and spent about 3 hours there.  It really is a nice garden, with a very large pond and huge koi.  It costs a few pesos, 8 I think it was, so it keeps the crowds down (at least on a weekday).  It has benches and provides relative peace and quiet in the busy city that is Buenos Aires.  It also has a Japonese restaurant/tea house and we had green tea, a salmon sushi roll, and a delicious noodle and vegetable dish as a small lunch.  (Note, if you ever make it here and get green tea, make sure you fish the tea leaves out of the teapot quickly or your last half cup will be all kinds of bitter!)  After taking up one of the benches at the garden for another hour or so, we moved on...walking back to the botanical garden.  I was rather impressed with the quality of the botanical gardens - it is well laid out and well kept....and free!  Other than right around the main building and greenhouse though, it is really more of an arboretum - having an impressive collection of trees and shrubs, but little in the way of small plants - perennials and such.  I don't consider this a problem though and it was great to see an arboretum/botanical garden that was somewhere other than in a temperate climate. 

We headed home after I took numerous pictures of the collection at the botanical gardens (how amazing is it that they have orchids growing from trees, out in the open BsAs air!).  We stopped at a tiny hole in the wall in our neighborhood that sells pizza and empanadas.  We got 4 empanadas; 2 carne, 1 spinach, and 1 humita (corn) and all for just $4!  We went home, ate our empanadas with an ice cold beer (Stella, as I'm not a big fan of the Argentine beers I've had so far) and I looked for a beginners tango class to go to.  We found one for 20 pesos each in Centro, from 8:30 to 10:30, perfectly timed to make it home on the last subway trip of the night.  I'll get to the details of that when I get back to writing, but for now, I'll just mention that trying to learn a new dance in a crowded room, in a foreign language, is not exactly an ideal learning environment.