Because it would be all but ridiculous to pass up an opportunity to climb a tower, especially one made of books, Elizabeth planned our day around a visit to the Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel) currently on display at Plaza San Martin.



The tower is a temporary installation built in a city park by a well known local artist Marta Minujín. Sadly it's not built primarily of books, because that would be too awesome, but rather a metal structure enveloped by 30,000 donated books.  The books are in various languages, half of which were donated by over 50 different embassies.  The literature they handed to us said the structure was 7 stories tall, not that we could confirm or dent that because the outside of the tower was as far as we got.  To limit the number of people on the structure at any given time, an appointment is required to climb the stairs (which could only be requested online beforehand).





After the tower we set off on a loop that would take us by a mini Big Ben clock tower donated by Britain (yes, we like our towers), two museums, two palaces and a theater. All of which turned out to be closed on Saturdays (or at least Saturday afternoon) expect for the clock tower.  Was today some unscheduled holiday in the land that loves it's holidays?


With our cultural agenda in shambles and our loop complete, our bellies were calling for a oldie but a goodie, Mexican food.  Mexican restaurants in Buenos Aires are about as common as a Mexican restaurant in Milwaukee.  It's not something you accidentally stumble across.  But our decision to skip lunch was starting to come back to haunt us, because it was 5:30 in the evening.  That statement on it's own doesn't make sense unless you know that showing up for dinner here at 5:30 is like showing up to a Mazzio's lunch buffet at 9am, you're going to be on the outside looking in.  Apparently crossing your fingers doesn't have much effect on the time paradigm by which restaurants here operate. We showed up to two different closed Mexican restaurants, with no posted schedule on the door.

With Mexican out and close to China Town our thoughts turned to fried rice and lo mien. But were we really up for some more walking?  "As long as it's less then 10 blocks away, let's go" was Elizabeth's response.  As we walked toward China Town we decided on trying the restaurant with a giant bowl of noodles above the door.  Maybe not so surprising by now, it was closed. But thing you can always count on in China Town is the ability to find an open restaurant with something appealing on the menu.

drum roll please.. closed

Our subway home was a little more eventful then usual.  The usual is hot, cramped, a journey of smells and the parade of street performers/beggars.  But today we got an extra show.  Two stops from our exit, a group of 4-5 guys jump on and post up next to the door (the one next to use looked like a gang banger with a Detroit Tigers tattoo on his neck and a oddly nice white sweater), then a commotion of some sort happens on the ground where a girl is bent down to pick up some papers, a few people bend over to "help" and as quick as they got on the train they all walked off without saying a word to each other.  All of this at the same subway stop in the 10 seconds it takes to open and doors close the doors. Elizabeth and I looked at each other and said "Someone just got pickpocketed".  We were right.  As we prepared to get of at our stop we spotted the pick pocket victim patting down his pockets.

Just to recount, we walked 7.5 miles to; visit two towers, two closed museums, two closed palaces, a closed theater, three closed restaurants, a trip to China Town and a crash course in how a team of pickpockets operate.  All in all an odd day out in the city.