Museums, Manifestations, Malbec...and Meat!

The title pretty much sums up our last three days in Buenos Aires. The weather has continued to be beautiful, so we've made the most of it by walking everywhere, taking in lots of museums located all over the city. On many of these walks, we've encountered public manifestations of one sort or another, which has added an element of excitement to our days. And throughout, we've taken time to indulge in every sort of culinary delight in our sights (mostly ice cream, pizza, steak, and wine). I'm starting to see why Argentines love to tango...it helps to burn off the calories from all the delicious food!

Here's my recap of Buenos Aires, part 2.

Museums

BA has a wide range of museums, and we managed to hit quite a few of them. Although we are not numismatics, we greatly enjoyed our foray into Argentina's tumultuous monetary history at the Central Bank's Museo Numismatico. Here's an interesting fact: since the 1970s until today, the Argentine currency has lost 13 zeros (i.e. 1 Argentine Peso today would be equivalent to 10,000,000,000,000 Argentine pesos back then)!

The Argentine Central Bank

We also visited the Museu de Armas, where we saw lots of guns, swords, and dioramas of various wars in Argentine history...


Museo de Armas

A gas mask...for a horse! (Also at the Museo de Armas)

...And the Fragata Sarmiento, a naval training ship that made 37 (long!) voyages all over the world.

Jake at the helm (carrying my purse)

The Fragata herself.

Art-wise, we really enjoyed the contemporary Argentine artists featured at the new Museo Fortabat in Puerto Madero and the world-famous MALBA in Palermo.

Malbec / Meat

Speaking of MALBA...we have made a concerted effort to get our fill of Argentina's delectable and affordable wines, particularly Malbec. To ensure maximum enjoyment of the wine, we have also injested large quantities of Argentine beef at an assortment of the city's parrillas (which can loosely be translated into "steakhouses", or maybe "grills"). I didn't believe it until I tasted it myself, but I can now say with absolute certainty that Argentine beef is the best in the world. It was so tender that you could almost cut it with a fork, and it was more flavorful than any steak I've ever tasted. YUM!

Our dinner at La Brigada, in San Telmo

Manifestations

Not much to say here, except that the Argentines seem to rival the French in sheer number of strikes/protests/general disruptions to daily life. During our short stay in the city, we saw major strike action by the hotel and restaurant workers' union and the bank workers' union, and several other gatherings by anarchists, anti-communists, and veterans. And I think this is just par for the course...

Bank workers' strike