A Day Out to Celebrate Gillian’s Birthday |

Traditionally, a bunch of us go out to dinner to celebrate birthdays, but this year Gillian decided she wanted to do something different. So seven of us (Gillian, Venetia, Sally, Vivi, Cecilia Beth and Helen) went last Sunday for a day trip to San Antonio de Areco. We went in two cars, with Cecilia and Vivi driving.

San Antonio de Areco is a village about 90 minutes from Buenos Aires, and it is strongly associated with gaucho culture. You may know that the gaucho is the Argentine version of the American cowboy, associated with living on the pampas, raising cattle—and raising hell! Every year there is a gaucho festival at San Antonio, but that’s at a different time of year.

On Sunday we were still in the midst of a horrible heatwave that had us in its grip for a couple of weeks. Honestly, I’ve always loved summer heat, but daily temperatures in the high thirties with high levels of humidity is not fun. We all struggled to walk outside in the sun, but fortunately the restaurant and the gallery we visited were well air conditioned.

There is a famous Argentine artist called Florencio Molina Campos, who painted cartoon-like images of gaucho life, and there is a gallery of his paintings in San Antonio. Some of us arrived early for lunch and decided to pay it a visit. Besides the paintings, there was a special presentation that took some of the images and transformed them into life size scenes, narrated to give more of an idea of gaucho life on the pampas in the past. It was wonderful. Here are a few shots of both.

So then all seven of us met up at a lovely restaurant called Rossita. I have only good things to say about this restaurant. The food was excellent, the air conditioning was blissful and the service delightful. Here’s a shot of us outside the restaurant – missing Beth, who took the photo!

And here is a video of Gillian blowing out the birthday candle – not the exuberant Argentine candle this time, but enough to do the job! (As you can probably year, all the other people in the restaurant joined in the singing!)

Next stop after San Antonio de Areco was a surprise visit to an estancia owned by friends of Vivi’s. When we got there it was her turn to be surprised, as a whole bunch of her friends were there to greet us. You’ll see from the photos there were quite a lot of them — and we went around and kissed everybody once when we arrived and again when we left per Argentine tradition!

The tour of the estancia brought us to their big swimming pool, and although we didn’t dive in, it was absolute bliss just to dip our feet in the cool water.

The sun was setting just as we left, and we got a nice souvenir photo of the whole group together with the owner, Vivi’s friend Alberto.