A story of manscarves

- O, how pretty you are!
- :)
- Do you have a permit ?
- :(
- Pretty without a permit, you shall have to pay fine!
- Hello sir what is fine ?
- Fine for not having permit!
- But I mean what is fine amount!
- Fine is not a mount, fine is a number of mountings.

Soⁱ myⁱⁱ girlⁱⁱⁱ's been^iv busy combing the expat community with a fine comb, resulting in various hits of interest such as a real estate agent with a decade's worth of history in the country, who we've subsequently met at the delightful bar of a local hotel^v.

This was the MDMA serving tray (pot cream cookies to the right). The whole rest is perfectly matched, gold leaf everywhere, nice furniture and an espresso machine the size of a Massive Ordnance Penetrator shell. I'd gladly recommend it if I could remember what it was called - alas the only part I recall is that on the way over I got into a heated football conversation with the cab driver and so we missed the street. So you know, maybe try doing the same ?

Anyway, the expat's partner is one Pericles J Economides, a guy with a golden baritone that even participated in some sort of casting thing, and so we spent a pleasant half hour or thereabouts. After which we went for a walk in the neighbourhood, me an' the girl. It's a very nice neighbourhood.

For those of you into birdwatching, who's this little guy ?

Anyway, after a short walk we came upon

which yielded a curt "o, we're checking this out" from me and well... there went the afternoon : as it turns out the thing is immense, we walked ourselves hungry, I took hundreds of pictures (which will however result in a separate article - or perhaps two, a dedicated one for the adjoined cemetery).

So here we are, reasonably lost and definitely hungry. The day happens to be a holiday (a safe bet by now for most Argentinian days) and so many places are closed, but not exactly all. We go into a better looking open one, which purports to be a barbecue place and is doing the whole spiel, with people outside inviting the passerby inside and so on.

I order two sides of their big deal steak and insalata Caprese (people here have a serious problem eating veggies) and I get... two slabs of meat, plus six tomato slices with some meh mozzarella roughly cut on top. That's that.

I had ordered medium (demi-anglais, if you must), but irrespective of that one of the slabs was well done (definitely bien cuit), the other rare. Saignant rare. Fortunately the girl actually likes it like that and I can tolerate it, but God help the steakhouse that can't even get the general neighbourghood. It doesn't help that they obviously cooked different thickness meatbricks on the same fire, and to add to the amusement the waitress preventively offered to have the meat further cooked should we desire as she brought it in. I should have had her do the parkerised chunk for another fifteen minutes, see what happens.

Leaving aside the cooking, that veal was the worst piece of veal I ever had in Argentina, and by a large margin. In fact, it was just about Romanian level beef, and so if you're ever curious what's it like to be [trying to] eat Romanian beef, by all means, drop by Montana and order their steak. (Do not fret the cooking, as it doesn't matter how you say you want it cooked, you'll just get whatever the roulette comes out with anyway.)

That'd be all, for now.

1. I tell you I am positively loving this arrangement where first I live and then I get to relive in detail as part of writing it into an article for Trilema. [↩]
2. This note part of an experiment into footnoting every word ; disregard. [↩]
3. You've probably figured out on your own by now we're not talking about the same person have you ? [↩]
4. Experiment ends here, this is fucking obnoxious. [↩]
5. I generally ask the other party to select the venue, because it's really the best way to find the good places in a new town. They're from there, after all, and so they should know at least a subset. In matching disjunct such subsets, one can and oft times does end up with a perfect selection in record time and for no expense. [↩]