For our time in Buenos Aires – a little over a month – we rented a high rise apartment in the trendy Palermo Soho area, a stone’s throw from the Plaza Italia. The city charmed us. We are near a kind of confluence of avenues. Avenida Santa Fe is our main east-west walking connection between Palermo and Recoleta. It is a typically frenetic thoroughfare. More for getting somewhere than strolling. But for strolling, there are many large parks and gardens off of the broad Avenida Sarmiento and Avenida del Libertador. Here is the expansive Plaza Sicilia, a magnet for picnickers and professional dog walkers.Great traffic circles tie these avenues together, some of them 10 lanes across. Off of one of them is the Jardin Botanico, it’s tranquility inside precisely opposite of the chaos outside.Patagonian Mara run around the botanic garden, hopping around like some kind of miniature rodent rabbit deer.Horned screamers inhabit the garden, too. They are supposedly unique to South America, but we have known and worked with a few. I guess they migrate.JardÍn Japonés, yet another garden park in Palermo. We took a picnic lunch.Here the photographer gets photographed on our picnic bench.A nearby triangle park bordered by three busy avenues, including Santa Fe. Picturesque and surprisingly peaceful, it’s another of our picnic spots. Why eat in restaurants?We grew very attached to the park benches in Buenos Aires. Yet another green jewel in the matrix of interconnected parks and gardens, the rose garden was still blooming in the early southern fall.Nearby is a shallow paddle-boat lake replete with swans and geese. We watched a big gander chase a couple of young girls away from their picnic blanket. Don’t feed the gansos.We couldn’t resist this shot. Texting while puttering around in his pond-cleaner.In our avenue wandering, we visited the El Atenio Grand Splendid. A remarkable book store giving new life, and new purpose, to an ornate 1920s theater. We enjoyed a caffeinated snack, center stage. The Recoleta Cemetery, a forest of mausoleums — over 6,500 of them (below) — dating back some 200 years.We paid our respects at the Duarte family mausoleum, where Eva Peron rests. We went looking for the ocean one day and ended up on the promenade between “downtown” and the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur wetland preserve.How many Central Business Districts border 1,000 acres of wetlands?And there is no ocean, only the Rio de la Plata, the widest estuary in the world and the outlet of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers. It is a 120 mile wide body of silt-brown water. Buenos Aires is not a beach town.The reserve itself is miles of raised trails that encircle and traverse the lowlands. They are biked, run, and walked. We walked. The city is not all avenues, gardens, and cemeteries, though. It contains a vast network of treed and crowded streets, lined with apartment buildings of various vintage.Blocks are short, with shops and restaurants at street level, making virtually every corner a center for commerce. And almost every corner has a fruit stand. This was ours, snd we were daily regulars. Everything is ripe and ready to eat today. If they don’t have it, it’s not in season.We like to enjoy dinner around sunset. The trouble is, no one in Argentina eats dinner before 10:00 pm. Even still, we usually eat out, having our dinner while everyone around us has their merienda, a snack of (usually) croissants, orange juice, and coffee. But sometimes we self-catered and ate in, as you see here.
