Early morning. Avenida de Mayo, the central avenue of Byres. A series of colonial buildings in the shadow of huge plane trees, stretching several kilometers from the Pink House (Casa Rosada, i.e. the presidential palace) to the monumental building of the Congress, for a moment making you really believe that you are somewhere in Europe.
On one of the houses there is a yellow sign about which I read so much. Havanna. No, no, we are in Argentina. I don’t know what you thought, but this is the most famous chain of coffee houses here. Starting today, I will look for her everywhere - and in the bustling Byres, and in the provincial Mendoza. That's how we live.
Breakfast is not held in high esteem, by the way. And I still have to look for my favorite poached eggs (I found;). And so the standard Argentinean morning menu is cafe con leche y medialunas, i.e. Coffee with milk and croissants. Croissants can be replaced with alfahor, where would you go without it.
There is another novelty in my vocabulary from the coffee menu - the submarine, which I loved so much for these first couple of days. A glass of hot milk, a bar of chocolate that you slowly and meditatively melt in milk.
Now this is my favorite pastime in all coffee houses.
We open the door and fall into the kingdom of Alfahors (nat sweet of Argentina). They live here everywhere - on shelves in large gift boxes and on the counter near the cash register, where you can grab a little thing with you, cone-shaped and round, in white chocolate and black. We arrived at two in the morning, so the body does not understand what time it is and what is happening, but it is certain that a cup of coffee will not hurt.
We open the menu and .... We don’t recognize a single word, huevos-babidasy are adjacent to the medialunos. And even the native Latte and espresso are completely absent from the list. But I prepared for such a turn of events, so I blur out to the waiter the phrase I had learned at home:
"Submarino con medialunas, por favor."
From the feeling of a perfectly completed task and my impeccable Spanish, I begin to simply melt with pleasure. The waiter smiles, waves his head, and then suddenly a stream of incomprehensible speech raises down on me with questioning intonation. We have to move on to plan number two — smile broadly, cordially clap our eyes, and pronounce the second memorized phrase:
"No hablo espanol" (which means I do not speak Spanish, that is, in other words, complete surrender).
Plan number two goes into business every day, I must say. Although it only helps for a couple of seconds. After a puzzled pause, digesting the information, the interlocutor usually continues to babble in an inspirational way, and you continue to smile.