THE SUN!

Today was a beautiful day in Buenos Aires. The sun was finally out, so we walked around all day. First we walked down to the botanical gardens, where we saw this group of dogs all tied up outside. (Large groups of dogs are a very common sight here, and there are dog droppings all over the sidewalk and streets, with no apparent laws or social customs to pick up after your dog).

The botanical gardens were quite beautiful, despite being filled with feral cats!

Then we headed right across the street to the zoo. The zoo is interesting in that the exhibits are designed to include remakes of old temples and ruins and several small species of herbivores are allowed to roam all over the zoo. Children are sold little buckets of animal food, which they are allowed to feed to most of the animals throughout the zoo, including this bison:

Like Siegfried and Roy, I am a huge fan of white tigers. This zoo had one, which was awesome:

Jen said this goat looked like Ray Charles because its eyes were kind of off-center and it swayed back and forth at this opening in the fence looking for food (similar to Ray Charles playing piano):

There was also a maned wolf at the zoo, a long-legged carnivore of the South American plains, which my dad has never seen. In your face, Jim O'Brien!

Then we wandered over to the Japanese garden:

Then we meandered about the city and passed by the Starbucks outside the city's main mall (Alto Palermo), which had an unbelievable line of teenagers:

We stopped in at Bonjour Pizza on the way back to the hotel for a late lunch and tried out Argentinian pizza. We had mozzarella with "jamon y morrones," which I knew was "ham and something," but Jen insisted that we get it. "Morrones" is huge slices of red peppers, so we removed those. The pizza was awesome, of course accompanied with a couple of Quilmes.

On the way back to the hotel to rest up before dinner, we stopped in to get a bottle of wine at the grocery store and saw these two bottles of liquor:

Now we're resting up and heading out to dinner at a steakhouse later on...