We made it!

So much to tell, and I'm SO TIRED!  It's Friday night, about 10pm BsAs time, so (according to our guidebooks), most porteños are eating dinner right about now, getting ready to hit the clubs in 3 or four hours.  But it's cold out, and we're exhausted, so Dinah, Nell and I are watching the public access channel from our bed.  We watched a special called "Guerreros del arcoiris" about the indigenous Bolivian movement for land reform and the current political conflict, which is all over the news here--several dozen people have died in riots in eastern Bolivia, and the U.S. ambassador has been expelled from La Paz under accusations that Americans have been fomenting disorder and violence in order to encourage a separatist movement.

We ran into a Bolivian demonstration on our walk home this afternoon, which took the form of a parade of several hundred people marching down one of the main avenues in our neighborhood.  Nell got some photos and a video, which she'll post.  Their message was anti-american but non-threatening--they waved signs reading both "Yanquis fuera de Bolivia" and "Paz."  People were carrying very cute babies.  I felt secure that, were anyone to recognize us as Americans, they would recognize us to be the non-meddlesome kind who did not support U.S. intervention in Latin American politics.

Our apartment is fantastic--on the 10th floor of a building near the Recoleta cemetery, where Eva Perón is buried.  Yesterday was spent mostly sleeping and grocery shopping in Carrefour, the French mega-chain that makes you feel like you're shopping in a miniaturized Walmart.  I felt pretty geographically disoriented yesterday--nothing we saw struck me as particularly Argentine.  We could have been in any major cosmopolitan city in Europe, or in New York if New York were to have tiny, tiny grocery carts.

So today we got oriented.  We walked around the Centro a bit, nearly got run over crossing the widest street in the world (la Avenida 9 de julio), and pushed through the throng of tourists shopping on la Florida.  I was disappointed to learn that the Teatro Colón is still closed for renovations, and will not open until sometime in 2010.  We did make it over to El Ateneo, a bookstore on Avenida Santa Fe that used to be an opera house.  We also managed to find and purchase a converter so that we can charge all of our electrical appliances (our blogging will not be stopped!).

Dinah is proving to be a wonderful personal chef.  The kitchen looks like it used to be a closet--it measures about 4 square feet.  And we are the proud renters of a 12-inch-high trash can.