Restaurant of the week

Summer vacation is here and we got off to somewhat of a rocky start. On Friday, the last day of school, Milan's finger connected with my eyeball in the morning frenzy to get up and dressed and out the door. The pain was so bad I eventually went to the eye doctor later that afternoon and finally got some relief for my scratched cornea. What a way to start the summer-Christmas vacation. Luckily it is healed already and I can get back to more interesting things like making Christmas cookies, opening both eyes at once, and trying out new restaurants.

We are in week one of our 6-week summer vacation. For the Argentine schools this is THE summer break and they will start the new school year when they go back in February. For us at an American school, this is mid-semester break, Christmas break, also happens to be summer. So we have this 6-week break for Southern Hemisphere summer and 6-weeks in June-July for Northern Hemisphere summer. Since we won't be traveling for this break, we have many activities planned to try to keep from going crazy.

One activity is to try a new restaurant every week for lunch!

First a word about dinner. Here in Argentina dinner starts at 8:00pm at the earliest - most restaurants don't even open the kitchen until 8 or 9pm. What a difference from China, where most families eat at 5pm and we would close a restaurant down at 8pm. We really are on the other side of the planet! We've found a couple places (a pub with sandwiches, a bowling alley with bowling alley-type food) that are open for what we consider dinner-time. But other than that we haven't been to any of the fabulous restaurants around here. You can't even order delivery until after 7pm. And since we have failed repeatedly to get a babysitter so Tim and I can go out for dinner, we decided to try a family lunch once a week.

Yesterday we went to this place just down the street.

 La Bataraza, La Lucila

My pumpkin ravioli with tomato cream sauce, Tim's beef with potatoes

 Oops - forgot to take a picture of dessert before we licked the plate clean. It was Postre Danés - Danish dessert. I guess they like lemony frozen cake-like pie covered in chocolate sauce in Denmark??

It was a nice lunch and Milan did well. Prices were good (Milan's fresh squeezed orange juice was more than our half carafe of wine!) and the park was on the way home.

 Argentina is the home of the wooden-slat slides. Sounds weird but they are all so old and smooth, no splinters yet...

Can't get better than that. Or maybe it can! We'll find out next week!