Chic Palemero

Our last day in BA we started by going to the gardens in the Palermo district. We started with the botanical gardens. It's fall, so there were very few flowers, but some of the plants were really interesting. There were a number of trees with very spiky trunks and branches from further north. Maybe they don't want big animals like monkeys to climb up them and get the fruit? For the most part it was relaxing.

Images for BA are in the album.

Then, we stopped at a cafe for a quick coffee and snack before moving on to the Japanese garden. It's one of the bigger Japanese gardens I've seen, although I presume there are some much bigger in Japan. They also have a sushi restaurant there that a BA native said was very good, but it was expensive and there are better places in the world (like San Francisco) to get sushi, so we gave it a pass.

We then walked to the old part of Palermo. Palermo is the current chic district and it shows. There were a lot of small cafes, boutique fashion stores and so on. Plus, there were a lot of kids on the playgrounds and buildings were at most 3 stories high, so it had a very neighbourhoody feel. We stumbled upon a celiac bakery, so Catherine was able to stock up on goodies. It's amazing how cognizant of celiacs Argentina is. We expected that the gluten-free awareness revolution probably wouldn't have made it here yet, but we were wrong.

After the bakery, we still hadn't eaten lunch and it was well past 2pm. We came across a famous parilla, La Cabrera that Catherine had tried to get a reservation for the night before, but was booked up. However, on Monday at lunch, there was plenty of space and they had a prix fixe lunch special. 99 pesos (or about $20) for a three course meal where we swapped the options. We had a first course of chorizo and caesar salad. A second course of chicken and beef with condiments on the side of pickled vegetables and so on. Finally, desert was flan. It was superb and the waiters were professional waiters, which was fun. The decor was homey and eclectic. The walls were stone and dark wood, while there were a number of interesting accents like mobiles of airplane models twirling from the ceiling, or decorative plates on the wall.

After that, we wandered around the neighbourhood some more and stopped in the central square to relax and people watch. Finally, we walked back to the hostel to pick up our bags before taking a taxi to the bus station and boarding the overnight bus to Mendoza.