BEAUTIFUL city. We had so much fun here. We got hooked up with a great (free) place to stay, thanks to a friend of Kristin's. A cute old home that they decorated with all things vintage. Buenos Aires is a fantastic place for antiquing...tons of old antique shops with authentic, very old furniture, lamps, mirrors, etc. If only we lived closer! The city itself was beautiful; very European, with beautiful architecture and old baroque buildings. There is also graffiti EVERYWHERE, some of it artistic, some of it political. I actually really liked it; it was super colorful and in many cases, really beautiful. Another thing we loved was the subway. One of the lines still has the old subway cars and it was so fun to ride in them and imagine what it was like in Buenos Aires back in the 20s and 30s.
On our first day, we hung out in the Palermo area and explored the streets and markets. We stumbled across the cutest little restaurant for lunch called Helena. It had such cute decor and fabulous food. We ate eggplant pizza and had fresh squeezed lemonade with ginger and mint. We had a very long walk through the parks in Palermo and relaxed by the water. People were super active in the park; roller blading, running, playing street hockey, doing aerobics, there were also a lot of people making out. We ended up spending the evening in the city center and eating dinner there.
On day two, we visited the San Telmo area where they hold a HUGE antique fair. It was amazing and there were tons of antique shops littering the little cobblestone streets. It was very difficult not to want to buy up nearly everything we saw! We saw this great street band playing music outside one of that cathedrals with accordions and this great old piano. After our afternoon there, we headed over to the Recoleta area which was really cool. There were tons of sidewalk cafes, street performers and a huge street fair. Nathan and I headed to the Recoleta Cemetary which was truly amazing. It is a maze of beautiful little chapels and tombs; the statues and architecture there was really cool. You would see so many tombs from different eras -
Unfortunately, we only had two days in BA before we headed out to Iguazu, so we will definitely need to make it back there some day!
Puerto Iguazu
We arrived in Iguazu by plane and were greeted with amazing hot weather, tropical plants and animals, and rain forest. It felt like we had just arrived in Hawaii - green everywhere. We got to our hostel and got even more excited - it was amazing!! It was in a great setting in the middle of the rain forest with cute rooms with balconies overlooking the pool. It was like a little retreat. What made it even better was the people who owned the hostel - they were so incredibly hospitable and helpful. If you ever visit Iguazu Falls, you MUST stay here. We were given "welcome" caiprinhas (the best we had in all of South America), and relaxed as we settled in to our rooms. We went for a walk to the river where we saw all three countries (Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil) come together.
The next day we visited the falls...most amazing thing EVER! They say that the negative ions created by the spray of the waterfall make people happy, and I don't know if it was that or not, but we had so much fun and so much energy as we ran around and explored the falls. On the Argentinean side they have catwalks all over so you can walk under and look over the top of the falls; we spent hours running around and exploring and snapping photos. It really was beyond beautiful. The falls are so powerful...the water rushing over is so heavy and comes down with so much pressure that when it hits the bottom, the water sprays hundreds of feet back up into the air creating rainbows everywhere and a truly amazing show. We were awestruck. We took a boat ride that took us under two of the less powerful falls and got completely drenched. It was fun but we couldn't even open our eyes (or breathe, for that matter) so we couldn't enjoy it completely! We just laughed and covered our eyes. Later, we took a slow boat ride through the river and saw toucans and a caiman about five feet away from us. At lunch, we went to the kiosk to get some sandwiches and saw tons of coatis surrounding the tourists as they ate lunch. These animals were creepy and aggressive - they stole one girl's lunch right out of her hands and a hoard of them were crawling all over this one couple as they ate lunch...we chose to eat elsewhere.
The next day we relaxed at our hostel. They had a yummy breakfast for us with Kenny G playing in the background, and then we spent the morning and afternoon relaxing by the pool. And thanks to the hostel book exchange, I discovered the glory of Twilight, the vampire book series for high school girls...yeah, that's right. And I finished all 500 pages in 2 days. I'm hooked.
That evening, we left on our 15 hour overnight bus ride from Foz de Iguacu into Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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