Annabel and Rebecca started school at Las Candelas the last week of February. After Rebecca’s rather traumatic first day, we’ve decided to keep her home and continue to home-school her. Annabel is doing well given her scant understanding of Spanish. In the morning, she has language arts and math. The morning teachers and administrative staff don’t speak any English, so Annabel is having a truly immersive experience. The afternoon (which begins after siesta, from 2:00 – 5:00pm) is devoted to English. About half the students stay for the English portion of the day; the rest go home at 1:15 pm. After a few days of staying for English, which consisted of her writing stories involving cats and hats, we decided to have her come home instead. There seemed to be more productive things to do with her time like after-school activities or home-schooling. With English in the afternoon, the school day is long, and Annabel is happy to be with us in the afternoon.
After checking back with the authorities to see if our passports were recovered (what a shocker – they weren’t!), we decided to make the trip to Buenos Aires to ‘visit’ the US Embassy and tour the City. We took the overnight bus, much to Mark’s delight, which was actually quite comfortable (although I don’t know if we’d like to repeat it again anytime soon). We splurged and went 1st class for the 14 hour trip which meant we had fully reclining seats. We had heard from friends that we should bring eye-covers for the girls as they play videos all night (our friends Becky and Jeff were delighted that they and their kids were entertained with ‘Saw 2’ which they got to watch not once but 3 times in immediate succession. Needless to say, their 9 and 7 year olds had nightmares for a few nights following). We, luckily, had reserved our trip with ‘the best’ bus company so we got an Emily Watson movie - again, much to Mark’s delight- which was relatively tame and only shown once.
We arrived in Buenos Aires on Thursday morning and were picked up by Hernan, the man who manages our finca and who lives in Buenos Aires. He had arranged for an apartment for us for the 5 days we would be in the city. We discovered that many Argentines and ‘in-the-know’ foreigners rent vacation apartments instead of going to hotels. For us it was perfect as we have a pretty severe cereal addiction, and hotels are hard places to keep milk fresh. We were staying in the theatre district which closely resembled 42nd Street in New York pre-Rudolph Giuliani and his ‘let’s pull in Disney and clean up this dump’ campaign. Becca asked whether there were other kids living in our apartment building at about the same time I was wondering how many of the apartments were subleased by the hour, to which, of course, we responded “no, I don’t think so, honey.” The good thing about our apartment was that we had access to a few key subway routes which took us to many wonderful places in the City.
The day of our arrival, we immediately went to the US Embassy to take care of our passports. The people in the embassy were remarkably compassionate and efficient. We went for lunch in a lovely area called Palermo Viejo which has beautiful tree –lined streets, and reminds me of certain parts of London. In the afternoon we went to Plaza de Mayo to see the Casa Rosada, the ‘Pink House’ and the office of ‘La Presidenta’, and the city’s main cathedral, the Catedral Metropolitana. Over the next few days we visited most of the city’s neighborhoods. We came back to Palermo to go to the botanical gardens which is famous not only for its beautiful gardens, but its feral cats (now you know the real motivation). The kids were introduced to Eva Peron – we went to the Eva Peron museum and the Cementerio de Ricoleta where she and other famous Argentines are buried. One evening, Mark went to see an Argentine musical on the life of Evita entitled Eva: El Gran Musical Argentino. The museum and musical were decidedly one-sided, but very interesting. Probably our favorite part of the city was San Telmo, one of the oldest barrios with cobblestone streets and charming, old low-story colonial buildings. The barrio is like the Village and is now famous for its antiques market, galleries and beautiful little shops. On our last day, we went to the waterfront area and walked over the Puerto Madero bridge. The biggest disappointment of the trip? La Boca, a supposed working-class section of the city whose main street might as well have been called Tourist Trap Way. We sat down to an expensive, and mediocre, meal, and fended off hawkers who wanted to know where we were from.
Overall, the trip was a great success. We, however, missed the cat, dogs and birds, as well as the relative quiet, and were happy to return to the finca and Mendoza.
We were invited to a polo match by our friend Susana who works at Familia Zuccardi. Zuccardi was one of the sponsors and their newly-formed team was playing in the tournament. Polo is a popular sport in Argentina but is played more frequently in Buenos Aires than in Mendoza (in fact, this was Susana's --- a native Argentine's--- first polo match). Of course, when our American friends heard about it, they all also wanted to go. So on Sunday, a big group of Americans and Argentines descended on the polo fields to watch the tournament. 
