Buenos Aires: Saturday

On Saturday, we decided to head out of the city to see a bit of the river delta. We first had to figure out how to get there; the concierge at the hotel told us just to head across the street and buy train tickets in the train station. But the ticket counters in the train station were all closed, and when we asked the ticket guys, they just sort of shrugged and pointed to the subway. We went down towards the subway station, where we discovered a little convenience stand that sold the automatic cards for all of the public transportation. So we bought two. We did not realize until later that the cards come un-loaded with value. Luckily, the Buenos Aires transportation system allows you to accrue a small amount of debt before rejecting your card. So we hopped on the train to Tigre.

After about 45 minutes on the train, we (and lots of other people escaping from the city) got off in the town of Tigre. We had planned to take a ferry to one of the delta islands. We went into the tourist office, and the lovely lady working there confirmed this was a good plan. She pointed us in the direction of the ferry ticket office and told us exactly what to ask for. Back in the ticket office, the lovely lady there refused to sell us tickets, and we couldn't figure out why. She was being very nice but very insistent. After about five minutes of not understanding each other, she said something that sounded very much like "vieni con me" (that's "come with me" in Italian... and apparently Spanish, too) and started walking back towards the tourist office. So we went with her. Back in the tourist office, she had an exchange with the tourist office workers, and then it was explained to us that there had been a flood and that the ferries weren't stopping at the island we wanted to go to. They expected the mayor of that island to allow them sometime within the next 30-60 minutes, but all of the walkways would be covered with mud. Perhaps we'd like to do something different? We did.

So instead, we walked along the delta just taking in the views. We found a very nice little waterfront restaurant where we had lunch (Tim was excited to get to try some river fish, which he thought was really great). After lunch, we wandered the other direction into the market that Tigre is famous for. We did a little shopping, then took the tourist office's recommendation of a little ferry that was able to navigate some of the smaller waterways, so we did get to see some of the delta from the water. After that, we caught the train back towards Buenos Aires. We got off before getting to the center of the city so that we could explore the neighborhood of Palermo a bit. We found a relatively random restaurant in Palermo (Las Pizarras), where we had a delicious dinner before taking the subway back to the hotel.