Adventures in South America: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Today I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I flew in yesterday, from Arica via Santiago.  My girlfriend Melanie is here on a Province of Alberta trade mission she's working on, and she invited me to join her in Buenos Aires, so that is the whole reason I planned this trip to South America in the first place.

We are staying at the Hotel Melia close to the Puerto Madero neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

While Melanie has been working today, I have done a little exploring on my own.  I had to do some things like laundry and such (not to mention enjoy the Hotel Melia's wonderful breakfast buffet!), but eventually I headed out Buenos Aires's famous Av. 9 de Julio.

My destination was the Teatro Colon, to pick up tickets for tomorrow's concert.

From there I got the sube (subway) to a bookstore called El Ateneo, which I had seen featured in a short travel documentary on Buenos Aires Melanie and I had watched on YouTube before we came.  I had noticed already that Buenos Aires has an incredible number of bookstores, all of which seemed to me to be independent.  Already I have probably seen more bookstores than are in the entire city of Edmonton, and I have barely been here 24 hours!

In any case, El Ateneo is in a former theatre, and looks like this!

From El Ateneo I walked back to the hotel, and then headed out to an ecological reserve in Puerto Madero called Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur.

I ate a sausage sandwich for lunch just outside the park.

Then I ran a 5 km loop in the park itself.  Despite being so close (ten minute walk) from the downtown of the one the biggest cities in South America, the park felt amazingly secluded.  There were all kinds of butterflies, birds, and flowers, and not very many people.

The outer trail of the park runs along the River Plate (Rio de la Plata), which, if considered a river, is the widest in the world.  I could just see the Uruguayan coast across the water on the other side.