Best Misadventure Ever

We spent yesterday traipsing around downtown Buenos Aires, having the best misadventure of our trip.

Plan A: Martin takes Ian and some of the older cousins to an art museum downtown, while I stay home with the girls. Except it was a beautiful day, and the kids were going stir crazy. So…

Plan B: We all take the train downtown together, and I take the girls to tour The Pink House while Martin and the boys see a Picasso exhibit at the art museum a few blocks away.

Reality: The Pink House museum and tours are only open on weekends. Which you may have noticed yesterday was not. This makes a perfect trifecta of failed attempts to visit Argentine musuems on this trip. I have no idea what it inside any of the museum-shaped buildings we’ve attempted to enter. Good thing there are guidebooks to fill me on what I’m missing.

So we loitered around for awhile eating dulce-de-leche sandwiches and wearing these appallingly cute hats. Hats so cute a bunch of Peruvian tourists came up and asked to have their picture taken with the kids. I agreed. And no, they did not steal our hats, or wallets, or anything else. They just really thought the kids were that cute. They were right.

Eventually it became clear a demonstration was brewing. Here we were, on Plaza de Mayo, the square where thousands of Argentines have come for generations to protest their government and hear the president speak. And there were protesters!

It was a pro-gay-marriage, demonstration, it turned out. So they weren’t exactly protesting. They were celebrating. Very politely. They were kind of boring to watch, as were the TV camera crews and riot cops who showed up to keep them company and then just noodled around with nothing to do.

But it was still AWESOME, because, you know, history in the making. Even a boring celebration of the first Latin country to legalize gay marriage is, well, the first Latin country to legalize gay marriage doing it while we’re here to bear witness. And as a resident of Massachusetts, the first state to legalize it way back in 2004, I can tell you that legal gay marriage is really boring. At least no more or less boring than straight marriage. A collective public yawn is about the right response, once the jubilation wears off.

The girls befriended a young woman who’d stopped in the square with her djembe. The sun set, the demonstrators went inside to hear the president speak and the flags were lowered while bugles played taps in the distance.

We rejoined Martin and the others, who had enjoyed their art museum in spite of the fact that they’d missed the Picasso exhibit by two months. We wandered into a cafe for tea and discovered that it just happened to be a famous literary cafe, one that had been perched on this streetcorner in Buenos Aires for a hundred or so years. Awesome.

After tea, we walked down Florida, which turns out to be this amazing pedestrian mall filled with street performers, sidewalk sales and many, many window shoppers. We made our way to an amazing restaurant where we had great Argentine food and some of the best wine I’ve ever drunk. Then we carried our sleepy babies (who behaved beautifully all night) back to the train, and made our way home.

The day went not at all how we’d planned, but so so so much better.

Best. Misadventure. Ever.

Related posts:

1. 50 Happy Years!
2. Why compromise?
3. Then Everything Changed, and Nothing Seemed Different
4. Pop goes the Art!
5. A Possibly Perfect Saturday

Tagged as: family, food, travel, vacation