BUENOS AIRES: T-BONE... VIVEUR!
I asked for a well-done t-bone. The last night in Buenos Aires has to be typically Argentinean and the restaurant Cabana las Lilas met all these requirements. We spread around a comfortable rotunda and while we were waiting for the moment of our fight with the steak, we decided not to talk with each other so as to listen to the gurgling conversations coming from the nearby tables. Nice people! The joyous temper of the portenos - as the city's inhabitants are known as - lies behind singsong Latin phonemes and encircles rounds of fatted calves.
A regular portion of a veal steak in Argentine is equivalent to at least 700 grams. Maybe this holds a little difficulty in believing as well as digesting it. But it's true.
Only when the steak came grilled in front of me did I realize that I shouldn't have eaten for at least one day if I wanted to eat it.
I cut a small slice and the first drops of blood started to flow in my dish. I had the first bite and I closed my eyes. I saw the bright green fields that were passing by us on our way from the airport to the hotel, the Avenida 9 de Julio, the biggest avenue - as the Argentineans quite frankly claim - in the world, Maradona dancing on the grass, the low two-storeyed houses in Palermo, the Galilei observatory over a water surface, the world lying in the parks sunning themselves, state documents torn in thousands of pieces falling like confetti from the windows of multi-storeyed buildings in the city center on New Year's Eve and the streets snow-white from papelitos, one in three Argentineans flaunting well-built muscles, big upright breasts and perfect jawbones, the dog-eared pages of The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges that make you remember at what point sleep was stronger that the fantastic stories, the exotic locations and the strange mystical codes of their national poet and writer, the consumer mania and the full shopping bags around Florida pedestrian zone, the avant-garde stencils that illegally paint the walls turning the city into an outdoor streets museum, the cheap drinks in lousy bars with plastic flowers, the embellished belle epoque in the Reloleta of the rich, the neighborly, posthumous marketing of Eva Peron with the humblest grave in a cemetery-gallery, the day trip to Mercado de Frutos in Tigre - the colonial style country house of the hot summers near the turbid waters of Rio Lujan -, the empty La Bambonera - the field of Boca Junior - and the graffiti in the back side, the colorful tourist Boca being empty and really charming in the rain, the endless walks in the regenerated Puerto Madero and the artistic approach that was attempted with the old cranes being the only reminiscent of its industrial past, the nearly 'racist' MALBA, the dozens of dog sitters, the modern entrances of the city houses with a Barcelona always there if someone wants to sit, the blocks of tenement houses with the satellite dishes in the balconies next to the clothes-horses, the public, Sunday nostalgic tangos of Carlos Gardel danced sacredly in San Telmo, the bazaars with the memories of an aristocracy that fell under the pressure of the revolution, the rich and the poor, the breakfast with frozen milk and alfajor (biscuits made of corn-flour), the sweet dizziness you start feeling after the second pisco in the - otherwise - overrated Gran Bar Danzon, the night's tribes in the popular and old-fashioned Pacha, a mousse de caf e cognac (helados artesanales) ice-cream from Bris, a hidden little diamond in Costa Rica 4592 in Palermo, that instead of it melting it melts you, the nights that were coming later than I was used to.