High Tea

First of all, I have to say I'm having major e-mail issues. So, if you've written to me, please try again. I think I just lost all of my e-mails I've gotten since I've been here - spread the word. I won't go into it any more than that. I think I solved the problem and can now blog freely, so my computer is not going to go flying out the window like it seemed destined to about an hour ago.

I'm supposed to be napping. Larry and I are going to meet and have a light supper and a bottle of wine. I think we're going to his neighborhood empanada place. I want to try "locro" which everyone was eating last night. I hope it doesn't have tripe or brains or anything like that in it - it's some sort of stewy soup - looked like everyone was enjoying it.

Today I met Larry and we walked around Recoleta, which is really a high-fashion, upper-crust kind of place. Beautiful tree lined streets and known for older women in furs, called "conchetta" (I think the men are called "conchetto"). We started at the church we were at last night. An art festival/market was set up outside, apparently happens every weekend.

We walked through the stalls and looked at the wares - jewelry made from beads, traditional instruments like claves and maracas made from gourds, and came across one stall with some very elaborate jewelry made from very large gemstones. Larry picked up one necklace and said to me, "How could anyone wear this? It's so heavy!!" The woman who ran the stall suddenly appeared (or made her presence known to us), dressed in a fur coat and matching fur hat, wearing large designer sunglasses, and in classic Argentine Spanish explained to us that this jewelry was "couture" (I don't even know how to spell it), and she dropped names like Chanel, Louis Vitton and Karl Lagerfeld, at which point she pointed to a photo from a newspaper hanging in her stall showing her standing next to Lagerfeld himself. She told us this jewelry was not meant for wearing to the supermarket, but was for places like the Hotel Alvear, one of the most expensive hotels in Buenos Aires. She was a trip. She was the mother of all conchettas, she supplied them with their jewels. We walked away and I said to Larry, "they don't have people like that in markets in Mexico" - we cracked up. I wish I had a video of her, because she really was impossible to capture with words. She was over-the-top, gayer than the gayest gay man on earth, and totally serious.

We walked through the Recoleta Cemetary where Evita and every other famous Argentine is buried (we never found Evita's final resting place) and then went and had lunch at a very nice outdoor cafe (where a stream of children came to our table one by one and placed something like a pack of tissues on the table and then later came back to try to get some money out of us - we even had an accordian player who was probably around 7 years old). Lunch was followed by ice cream (dulce de leche) and then we went to Palermo Viejo, a trendy up and coming neighborhood where I bought two scarves (from India). Finally, we hopped in a cab and headed to the Hotel Palace Alvear (without our gemstone necklaces, both of us wearing jeans and sneakers, me with a scarf) for high tea.

For an incredibly low price (maybe 10 bucks each) we sat and had a classic high tea, complete with tea (of course) little cakes and scones, lemon curd and marmelade and a desert, plus a Kir Royale (champagne and cassis) that the manager threw in because Larry told him he had seen him rise up in rank over the years he'd been coming to Buenos Aires. First of all, in the states, I would not even feel comfortable entering a place like that, and I especially would not go in dressed the way I was, and our high tea would have been a huge extravagance that I could not afford on my teacher's salary.

As we were leaving, the manager told us the next time we came back, he'd be the owner.

So, now I'm supposed to be napping and Larry is going to call in about 30 minutes, but instead, I'm going to try to post the picture of me and Larry at the Alvear Palace with our high tea.

More to come.