There is so much to see and do in Palermo, we spent another day exploring our neighborhood.  We started with breakfast at a cafe down the street.

We took a 30-minute walk north to the Japanese Garden. I’ll give the garden its own blog post since there was so much to see there.

On the way to the garden, we crossed Avenida del Libertador. Buenos Aires has several grand avenues, and this is one of them. It is 11 lanes wide, all going in the same direction. It was mind-boggling.  

Believe it or not, this is not the widest avenue in the city. That title goes to Avenida 9 de Julio which was modeled after the Champs-Elysees in Paris and, at 14 lanes wide, is the widest street in the world. That one takes a pedestrian two traffic cycles to cross the street, and that’s only if they don’t dilly-dally.

Walking around today, we also saw lots of dog-walkers. Portenos (people in Buenos Aires) love their dogs, and dog-walkers take the pooches out during the day when their owners are at work. This guy had 8 or 9 dogs. When he got to the crosswalk of Avenida de Libertador, he untangled all of the leashes and took pictures all around to prove that he took the dogs out, and then he crossed the street with both hands in the air so the cars knew to give him a wide berth with all of those dogs.

We stopped at a pharmacy to get some cold medicine for Chad. I only know very basic Spanish, so I used google translate on my phone and typed, “My husband has a cold. Do you have decongestant?” and showed it to the pharmacist. The pharmacist handed some medicine to me and used his own phone to translate and showed me, “Take this every 4 to 5 hours.” Thanks, Technology!

Afterwards, lunch was at a little bistro called Kajue. 

After lunch, we strolled around some more and found the hipster part of the neighborhood with lots of stylish shops. Chad pointed out that this area was for “hipsters with money.” Things seemed expensive in these shops.

At this point, we were hot, tired, and sweaty, so we got some gelato and then headed home to rest. We knew it would be summer here, but we didn’t really think about how exhausting the weather would be. When it’s 85 degrees and 85% humidity in Atlanta, it doesn’t seem bad, but we’re not usually walking around for hours in that weather. We’re at the point here where we want to take multiple showers a day.

So after resting, we thought, let’s go walk around in the heat some more. We explored another part of the neighborhood and stopped for a cocktail at Tres Monos. This place has been voted the best bar in Latin America and one of the 50 best bars in the world, and the cocktails were very interesting.

On the way back to our apartment, we popped into a little neighborhood shop to buy a bottle of wine. We left the shop with wine, a very interesting cheese, olives, salami, and a local beer. Chad is so good at asking for local recommendations and a taste of this and a taste of that, and then we have a full grocery bag of local treats. And then we stopped into a panaderia to get some bread, and this panaderia also had a lot of delicious pastries and cakes.

Dinner was a combination of restaurant leftovers and miscellaneous groceries as we watched the evening turn into night over the botanical gardens.