We changed money and on the way back to the hostel encountered an international food festival. Sourh America and Europe were well represented. The DR was present, selling something that looked nothing like Dominican food and more like fajitas (perhaps they were trying to compete with Mexico, among the most popular of all the booths). In case you're wondering, the U.S. Was not present with either hamburgers or french fries, although Burger King and McDonald's were only blocks away.
From there we made our first official visit of the evening - a stop at the home of the Padillas. We were there to deliver a letter from Post Office Bay in the Galapagos. It is here where sailors and pirates historically left notes for other boats to deliver to loved ones at home on those rare occasions when a passing boat may have been on its way to the homeland. Today, tourists (like us) leave notes for people to deliver to others from their homeland. We searched all the letters but found nothing destined for Washington. Instead we found a letter for Buenos Aires and decided to deliver it during our brief stay in Argentina. As it turned out, the recipient of the letter wasn't too far from our hostel, so on our way back to the hostel from the food fair, we stopped at the Padillas.
Stop one. The mother of the Padilla homestead and three of her four children were at home. Their home was impressive...in the middle of the city, large, and with its own outdoor courtyard. Apparently the mother and father, both doctors, had been at Post Office Bay only days before us. We talked about our different trips to the Galapagos, and then moved on to different topics, such as Argentinian and Cuban health care systems (one of the Padilla daughters who is a medical student had done a rotation in Cuba). They served us coffee and before we knew it more than an hour had passed. Only when the medical student daughter got up to go to mass did we remember that we too needed to get to Purim services. We ran to the supermarket, bought some things for dinner, cooked quickly and headed off to services.
Stop two. We arrived at services over an hour late, and missed the telling of the story of Esther, but made it in time for a Purim play. There were so many youth and so much life in the room. People had on all sorts of costumes, and Melissa didn't pass up the opportunity for a face painting. It was a wonderful scene, and quite the contrast from the calm Catholic Padilla home.
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| Melissa with face paint. |
Stop three. When the party wound down at about ten, we boarded the subway back to our hostel's neighborhood. We were just blocks from the hostel when we came upon Santo Domingo Restaurant. As we peared in the window, one of the customers came to the door and told us to come in. The owner was Dominican, as was the man who encouraged us to enter the restaurant. Before we knew it we were sitting at this man's table sharing beers. It felt strangely comfortable to be I the company of overly warm and welcoming Dominicans. Just like in the DR there was plenty of laughing and joking, and even a little bachata dancing. Amazingly it wasn't until more than hour into our time together that one of the Dominicans asked Melissa what was painted on her face - as we were momentarily transported to the DR, we forget that just slightly earlier we had been celebrating Purim. We finally pulled ourselves away from this small slice of the DR at about midnight and lumbered back to our hostel before our morning flight to Patagonia.
As we got ready for bed, we marveled at how we had stepped through three different Buenos Aires worlds in one night. Once again, this beautiful Souh American metropolis had shown us that its people, natives and immigrants alike, far outshined its beautiful buildings.
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