This post is a continuation from the one before. For more pictures of my trip check out my Flickr Set.

Day 2

11AM: Cooking Empanadas

Being highly recommended on tripadvisor, we decided to give this a go and were very pleasantly surprised. Teresita’s empandas class is a great escape from the city’s hustle bustle and a unique opportunity to spend an afternoon at a local’s house learning how to make great empanadas. Be sure to make reservations in advance for this class as they tend to sell out quickly. Teresita, an extremely friendly, warm and hospitable woman, lives about an hour out of the city in greater Buenos Aires. You can take a train or bus to get to her house in Androgue (just outside the city). There you’ll find a quaint little cottage in a sleepy suburban town with a large shady backyard filled with beautiful orchids, massive trees with low hanging branches and humming birds hovering around bird feeders for a quick refreshment. The class begins almost immediately when you enter. Teresita introduces herself and ushers you into her kitchen and gives a warm introduction of herself and before you know it you have your hands wrist deep in a large bowl of flour (after they’ve been cleaned of course). This hands-on class is a fantastic way to learn how make Argentine empanadas of various kinds. The best part is you get to eat your spoils while sipping on local wines all in the comfort of her backyard as you exchange stories about life, family and travels with her and other travelers and forget for a second that she is not your grandmother. An absolutely delightful and unique experience.

4PM: Plaza de Mayo & Casa Rosada

Taking the bus back into Buenos Aires provides a great way to get a siesta in after filling up on empanadas and wine. The bus will drop you off near El Centro, the center of the city. Here you can walk around and see Plaza de Mayo – a historic plaza with the Casa Rosada (or Government House – the seat of the executive branch) at the center of it. You can take a guided tour of Casa Rosada if you so choose and learn a lot of Argentinian history.

730PM: Complejo Tango – Tango Lessons, Show and Dinner

After you have recovered and rested from the empanadas and wine, get ready for some more wine. After all this is Argentina. Make reservations for this tourist attraction in advance as well as it can sell out quickly. This is a great opportunity to not only take in a tango show while enjoying a hearty dinner but also learn some basic tango moves – valuable for the time-constrained tourist. While the class can get crowded making it rather difficult to dance in the cramped studio, the show is fantastic providing an initimate viewing of various tango styles from classical to modern. The dinner is also a pre fixed fare with all you can drink malbec that does not disappoint.

Also recommended: Shopping in Palermo Soho, Running tour of Buenos Aires – unique offering for tourists that combines a guided tour of parts of the city with a decent workout (something you crave after the massive amounts of food and wine you consume).

Having spent a week in beautiful Buenos Aires, I thought I would try to provide some recommendations on things that I enjoyed and heard about (condensed into a small 48 hour itinerary for the sake of creating a theme). The best advice I can give anyone visiting Buenos Aires is to go on an empty stomach and be prepared to wine & dine like royalty. Food and wine are cheap, plentiful and absolutely fantastic. Argetinians are also extremely warm, friendly and expressive people – not dissimilar to their Italian counterparts. In fact there is a saying that an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish.

It is also advisable to visit the city around October-November as it’s spring in the southern hemisphere and temperatures in Bs.As usually hover around 75 degrees F. Also, the city’s countless jacaranda trees are in full bloom during this time highlighting the streets with a shade of purple thats very photogenic.

Day 1

10AM: San Telmo Street Fair

On Saturdays, San Telmo is bustling with local artisans, bands and tourists. All along Defensa street, you will find tons of arts and crafts stalls selling everything from paintings, to flip flops to leather jackets to souvenirs. On practically every street corner you will also find bands playing live music from all over the continent. This is a great place to spend your saturday afternoon taking in the local culture. A much recommended stop for coffee and a quick bite is El Balcon which is a dingy cafe that sits above San Telmo plaza and provides a nice view overlooking the fair as well as free tango shows (very touristy and nothing fantastic about the food but its a nice experience).

3PM: Cemetery and Recoleta

The rich and famous rest in peace in this beautiful and immense cemetery located in Recoleta; the “Beverly Hills of Buenos Aires” as described by one affable cab driver. One can get lost walking the streets and alleys of this cemetery that are lined with large intricate forts containing coffins of past presidents, icons, blue blooded families and other movers and shakers of this country. This is also where Eva Peron‘s body has been buried along with Sarmiento.

After getting your morbid fill of coffins, walk outside the cemetery down Avenide Alveara and walk past the hotel. Keep walking down this road (very reminiscent of the Upper East Side in NYC) and you will see some beautiful apartment buildings and architecture as well as some high end clothing stores. If you see an ice cream parlor or heladeria, stop by and grab one, they are all over the city and excellent – similar to the gelatos in Italy.

9PM: Dinner at La Cabrera

What good is a trip to Bs.As without tasting some of the local beef. Venture into Palermo Viejo (the trendy part of town reminscient of SoHo) and stop by La Cabrera. This is one of the most popular steak houses in the city – so much so that they had to open up a sister restaurant right down the street from the original one. Walk in to the restaurant and it is like a carnivores heaven – pictures of cows on the wall detailing every cut of beef, with cow skins as carpets. I recommend ordering the bife de lomo (tenderloin) cooked a punto (medium rare). It is large enough to be shared by two and worthy of being a meat-eaters last meal. But you also can’t go wrong with anything else on their menu. Be sure to ask the knowledgable wait staff for a good a malbec recommendation. A dinner like this will put you back a mere $30!

Also recommended: the street fair in recoleta & the metal tulip sculpture Floralis Genierica (the petals of which open and close with sunrise and sunset)

See Day 2.

Day 2:

11:00 AM – The next morning, we walked over to the Mile-End neighborhood to see how it earned its reputation of being the hipsters hangout. A local attraction there is the Fairmount Bagel Bakery. In the words of a local shop-keeper in the area, a true Montreal moment is biting into a sesame bagel, served hot right from a brick oven at the Fairmount Bagel Bakery on a beautiful morning along with a good cup of coffee. Enticed by his description, ML and I decided to hunt down this place and see for ourselves how a Montreal bagel compared to its New York brethren. Upon getting there, I took the shopkeeper’s advice and ordered hot sesame bagel while ML ordered a cinnamon raisin. The bagels were noticeably skinnier and less doughy than your bagels at H&H. While I did enjoy the sesame bagel (though not as satisfying), ML’s cinnamon raisin bagel was hard as a rock and watching her face as she tried to bite it was priceless. She had half an intention of beating some sense into the shop-keeper’s head with her bagel.

12:00 PM – After the bagel debacle, we walked down Boulevard St. Laurent to St. Catherine Street. This is another great stretch of the city to walk through. You find shop after shop of local designer boutiques (much to ML’s delight its mostly women’s clothing) as well as, interestingly enough, a lot of Portugese restaurants and shops. Veer of St. Laurent a little and you’ll find a row of restaurants on Rue. Prince Arthur with sidewalk seating. Still hungry from the from the unsatisfying breakfast, we stopped into a Greek restaurant for a quick bite. While these restaurants are more for their location and scenery than the food, its worth grabbing a cup of coffee or a small bite and people watching.

2:00 PM – Montreal is a very bike friendly city and walking around you will find many bicyclists on the streets. The city even has a bicycle rental service much like the zip-car concept where you can pick up a bike from anywhere and drop it off anywhere else you’d like. This is geared more towards locals than tourists as renting these bikes on an hourly basis can quickly get expensive. Since the weather was holding up well, we walked back down to Old Montreal (following Blvd St. Laurent all the way) and rented bikes at a small bike shop on St. Laurent and Rue De La Commune. Being recommended a 20-mile bike trail along the St. Laurent River, we picked up our bikes and head down the trail which turned out to be a very pleasant bike ride through the old industrial parts of town, into Ile Saint Helene where you can catch a glimpse of the massive Biosphere and then into Ile Notre Dame. Once you cross the river back into the city, you can head over a very European style farmers market by the Lechine Canal and treat yourself to a cone of ice-cold gelato.

8:00 PM – Head back into Old Montreal for dinner at an excellent French restaurant within an auberge called Bonaparte. If you’re lucky, you can get a table by the window overlooking the cobblestone streets of this part of town and people-watch as the street lamps light up. I recommend trying the fois-gras and the tuna as they were excellent.

If you have time the next morning before your flight, checking out the underground city on St. Catherine street is worth a visit. Its block after block of inter-connected multi-level malls usually packed with locals and tourists that makes you forget for a second that we are in a global recession. A word of caution though, it’s very easy to lose your sense of direction and wallet in this labyrinth of retail stores.

I recently got back from a weekend vacation to Montreal. Having been there a few years ago and loving it, I thought it would be a good mini-vacation for ML and I as we were well overdue for one. It’s like Paris without the snobby holier than thou attitude Parisians are infamous for. So not only do you get to experience a different culture/language, there’s also an added benefit of going there during the summer time – you get to see why its called the city of festivals. We intentionally coincided the trip with the Just for Laughs festivals – a huge comedy festival that happens right after the Jazz Fest.

Having done a bit of looking up on what to see and do in the weekend we were there I thought I could share our experience breaking out the trip by day.

Day 1.

12:00 PM – The best way to get yourself intimately acquainted with a new city is to walk (assuming of course its a pedestrian friendly city). So once we checked in to our hotel, ML and I walked over from the Financial Area (by Rue Peel and Maisonneuve) to Old Montreal. The walk is pretty encompassing as you walk through the financial district of the city, past the hundreds of stores and malls on St. Catherine, through Chinatown and into Old Montreal.

1:00 PM – Once in Old Montreal you can choose to walk through the more tourist-friendly parts of the area packed with mimes, caricature artists and busy sidewalk cafes or walk through the quieter, more charming parts of this area strolling down the cobblestone paths lined with old gas-light lamp posts, hearing the occasional click-clock of horse-drawn carriages and encountering the ever-so friendly locals. The architecture, and quaintness makes you forget for a second that you are still in the 21st century and feel like you have been transported momentarily though time to the 18th century.

There are also a ton of boutiques and art galleries that populate this area that are worth looking at to get a feel for the local art. After soaking in the architecture and sights, we stopped by to sample some of the local micro-brews and grab a quick bite at a restaurant called Santos. ML tried their unique and rather potent sangria which was actually pretty good. After coercing the bartender for the recipe, I thought I’d share it here as well as I think it makes a great summer cocktail:

Rosé Sangria:

1 shot of Bacardi
1 shot of Peach Schnapps
1/2 cup Rosé wine
2 fresh strawberries, halved
A handful of blueberries
2 peeled and fresh lychees
1 wedge of lime
Splash of lychee juice
Club soda
Ice

In a large wine glass, add ice with one shot of Bacardi Rum (white), 1/2 cup of rose wine, a shot of Peach Schnapps. Add in a couple of halved strawberries, a handful of blueberries and a couple of lychees (skinned, of course) with a few drops of lychee juice and a wedge of lime. Top with club soda and enjoy.

On the way to check out the centerpiece of tourist attention in this area, La Basilique Notre Dame, stop by at a small bakery called Les Glaceurs for out-of-this world cupcakes that put the ones you wait in line at Magnolia for to shame.

7:00 PM – Given that we were in the midst of the Just For Laughs Festival, we had to get tickets to a comedy show. So we were lucky enough to catch a Videotron Gala series show (which are the premier shows of the festival) hosted by Lewis Black.

10:00 PM – After the show, we walked through the Just For Laughs street fair – its a block after block of food vendors, games, live music, clowns,  mimes, and Cirque du Soleil-esque processions. Right in the midst of the fair, we stopped by for dinner at a tapas restaurant called Confusion on St. Denis. You can sit outside at this restaurant and get a front row seat to the masked performers walking on stilts through the street fair, as well as a good dose of live jazz music from local musicians playing right next door on the pavements. It’s a perfect way to end your first day in Montreal.

Go to Day 2.