good bye BA, part 4: Voltaire

One of the things that I like best when I'm traveling is when I've stayed long enough to have a favorite place for coffee at walking distance. And at the moment it's Voltaire, around the corner from where we live, at Carranza y Voltaire. The two friendly owners make the perfect coffee, have the best little chocolate cakes and don't mind if our lively twin girls open all the bags of sugar. That's what I call home!

bikes with passion

I love people that work with passion, I love elegant, sexy, clean designs, and I especially love it when they are environmentally friendly.

And, being Dutch, the easiest form of transportation is going by bike. Even in Buenos Aires, where buses and cars rule the world. And that’s where those four things come together.

Because industrial designers Nata Burta and Alejandro Sanguinetti from Monochorome recycle bikes that result coolest ones that I have ever seen, produced in the most ecofriendly way and using the best materials, which is also ecofriendly because they last longer. The beautiful leather saddles are handmade, so regional craftmanship is also sustained. They encourage, even invite, people from all over the world to copy their way of producing, so eventually those bikes don’t have to be flown all over the world. Until that moment, you can have it shipped to where ever you want.

I whish I could take one home! I guess I will have to wait untill someone opens a shop in the Netherlands.

sweet Colonia

Now that we’re almost leaving Argentina, we are very busy finishing our to-do-list. One of the items on it was visiting Colonia del Sacramento, in Uruguay. It is across the river from Buenos Aires, it only takes about an hour by boat, so an easy journey to a lovely, old, romantic little town. Like our first experience with Uruguay, we were enchanted by the sweetness of the people, the respect for nature and culture and the easy pace. And the view on the river, from both sides of the old town, is stunning, especially at sunset.

We had a lucky shot with our hotel, Colonia Suite, which we picked from TripAdvisor, and it was the perfect choice. Colonia Suite is a bed-and-breakfast with three rooms in a lovely house, where we had the big garden room, with our own balcony with stairs to the beautiful garden. The owner, Fred, was the sweetest man, who made us feel really welcome, and prepared a big breakfast for us every morning. He also arranged a wonderful dinner in Energais, a private restaurant in town, where we had drinks before dinner in the garden under the stars, between giant cactuses (which we incidentally had been admiring during the day) and a view on the river and Buenos Aires.

good bye BA, part 3: El Arevalito

When I was planning my trip to Buenos Aires, a lot of people warned me that you really have to be a passionate meat lover because everybody was supposed to be eating meat night and day. Not true! Maybe as a reaction to all the meat, there are a lot of restaurants that excel in vegetarian and/or organic food. So you can choose wether you want to eat meat or be a vegetarian, even for a day.

One of my favourites is El Arevalito. The owner of the restaurant used to live in Amsterdam in the early seventies, where she ran a restaurant in a squat, called Kosmos. She’s a respectable lady now, but she has a free spirit, and her little restaurant breathes her energy and colorfulness. Plus, she and her team of cooks make the loveliest dishes. The menu changes twice a day, for lunch and dinner, so you can be absolutely certain that everything is fresh. A pick: stir fried organic rice with vegetables, toast with caramelized sweet onion with a fried egg and cheese on top, fresh salad with wafer thin sliced radishes, avocado and cucumber, spinach pie. And that was only for lunch.