Recoleta and Good o'l Mac

 I know it’s kind of counterintuitive, but the first place that I went out to eat at in Argentina was McDonalds. Yup, I know what you’re thinking…but I can explain (and what a culture shock it was)!

My first full day in Argentina, one of the guys that lives in the house with me, Blake, invited me to go to Recoleta with him and his Argentine friend, Ariel. Blake is leaving on Monday to go back to Seattle and since he’s pretty much out of money, he asked if we were cool with eating at McDonalds. But, this McDonald’s wasn’t like any McDonald’s…this was an Argentine McDonalds and EVERYTHING in Argentina is “muy linda” aka nice. In fact, most fast food restaurants are 2 stories. The first thing I noticed was that the dining hall was super fancy; it had cool lights, artistic statues, lots of bright colors and nice, comfortable chairs to sit on, (even the workers were dressed up nicely). The second thing I noticed was the small amount of options they had and NO DOLLAR MENU! The food was very expensive for fast food, averaging at about 40 pesos or $9 for a combo and they don’t serve complimentary water L. I had a Big Mac, since Blake told me that the Big Mac is the cheapest thing to get at 25 pesos ($5.5), but it wasn’t on the menu because they don’t want people buying it because it’s so “cheap”. Everything else was over $7. I’ve never gotten my food faster at a McDonalds before and there were so many people there that we could barely find a place to sit.

After eating, we went to the Recoleta Cemetery, a very well known, historic site where lots of famous predominately Argentineans are buried. It had some BEAUTIFUL statues and we spent hours walking around inside. We then did some shopping in the flea markets and roamed around the city. 

 

Things you should know when “roaming around” Buenos Aires…

1. Pedestrian is not in their vocabulary, so watch out for cars because they WON'T stop for you

2. You have to go INTO the busy street and wave your hand around to get the bus to stop for you, the bus might start driving away when you're not even fully in it and they also might not stop all the way to let you off.

3. There are no lanes when driving and if there are lanes, NO ONE obeys them.