March 18 – April 1 , 2019
We got back from Iguazu and had a few days by ourselves before McElwees came down from Seattle for a week-long visit to celebrate Maksim’s birthday with us. Danijela is Maksim’s Godmother and McElwees are family to us. I was gonna say how Maksim loves Zachy but then I would have to say how he loves Jared who is always ‘very nice, never mad’ (Maksim’s words), how he loves his Dadanela, how Petra loves Dadanela, how Nina talks about his Dada and baka Zora every single day, how I love my ‘sanity check’ friend, etc. Instead of listing all the love between us, the point is, we love McElwees and they love us too. They took a long and an expensive trip to celebrate their godson’s birthday with us and we are grateful for it and for all the fun memories we managed to make in those 7 days.
Our second 2 weeks in Buenos Aires included the following events:
1 – Adults only dinner out (thanks to our teenage daughter aka babysitter). We went out for dinner with Kt, her boyfriend Nick who is in Foreign Service working for the US embassy in BsAs, our new friend Carolina from Ireland that we met at the Iguazu falls, and Nick’s friend Dimitri who currently lives in Japan. During the night, we made more friends – a Serbian guy Djole from Montreal who works for the Canadian embassy and a few of his friends that came down to visit beautiful Buenos Aires. I don’t have to say much about this night out except that it started with a drink with Carolina, continued with an amazing steak dinner that KT and Nick arranged, and then we ended up in some hip bar past 2am. I felt way too old for overeating and drinking a bit too much into the wee hours of the night with these young ones. Quite memorable evening that spiced up our month in Buenos Aires.
2 – Petra played a ton of Ultimate (again, worth a post of its own, there is just so much to say about that amazing group of young women and men).
3 – Petra cooked for us a few fancy meals, had her regular Spanish lessons and spent some more time with Lu
4 – McElwees arrived and we did all sort of touristy things, including: visited many parks, ate the best ice cream, tried out good Argentinian steak and empanadas, walked around most of the tourist highlights around town, ate all sorts of sweet pastries every morning, visited the famous Recoleta cemetery and the kids’ science museum, attended children’s musical Beauty and the Beast (in Spanish), stumbled across the Serbian plaza in the middle of BsAs, went out without the kids to see a famous local show called La Bomba de Tiempo, celebrated Maki’s bday with a trip to a nearbytourist town of Tigre and did a fun obstacle course that left us all sore the next day. The best part about this obstacle course was that even Nina did a couple of levels and was so incredibly proud of himself. He still talks about it.
5 –Petra’s last practice with her Ultimate team (we were all really sad to say our goodbyes)
Kids also did impressive level of schoolwork, especially Petra. She is taking 2 high-school level classes – Algebra 1 (second semester) and Chemistry 1 (first semester) and doing great. Maksim did some math and writing with his favorite Dadanela and Zachy turned out to be the best math tutor. Zachy taught Maksim all sorts of tricks for remembering a multiplication table. Three weeks later and Maksim is getting quite proficient doing multiplication and is picking up division now. I also picked up a few tricks and pointers from Dadanela on how to work better with Maksim on his school work.
All the beauty of Buenos Aires is hard to represent in words. I know for sure that we love it more because of all the lovely people we met there. We are also grateful that Danijela, Jared and Zachy came all the way from Seattle to spend a week with us. We can’t wait to see them again somewhere else on this trip.
Buenos Aires is physically beautiful (although somewhat dirty and messy in places) – amazing architecture, parks everywhere, water, tons of events, people working out all over the place, it’s full of very good looking diverse folks from all over the world (not tourists but immigrants).
Also, the weather was so perfect in March.
We always felt safe in Buenos Aires. Petra and I walked from a park to our apartment at 11pm never feeling nervous about it. We were stopped a couple of times by random people asking us if we needed help with directions or warning us to not go to a certain part of the town after a certain hour.
All in all, there is so much to love about Buenos Aires and I could see us at some point in our lives coming back to Buenos Aires for a longer period of time (retirement or after winning lottery that we should start playing 😉).
Refresh Journey 