Drunken Trees and Big Juicy Steaks....

There is a big old hospital (Hospital Rividavia) across the street from us that is scheduled to be torn down (previous posts showed aerial views of the workers protesting its demise....it's full of beautiful old buildings with lots of green areas and grand trees...the tree  in the center  with the bulbous trunk that hasn't got its leaves yet is called "Palo Borracho"....it's covered with huge thorns and, after flowering, forms pods full of a silky fluff that used to be used to stuff pillows....I hope this all doesn't become an asphalt parking lot...

 About a block and a half away from my place is the Museo de Decorative Artes....I go there mainly for the great restaurant in the courtyard outside, but revisited the inside this week....it was originally a private mansion and this portrait of the owner's young son is my favorite thing in the whole fancy place....

 Here is the dining room.....

 I also went to my first play in spanish (I understood some of the lines, but mainly enjoyed my fantasies of what was going on).   The woman at the far end dressed up like Cleopatra is the mother of my spanish teacher.....

 But the best find of this week was the restaurant Don Chicho (Jujuy 136, Once)....Now that so much of the cattle breeding stock have been slaughtered due to the long war between the government and the farmers over export tax increases, and now that much of the pasture land has been converted to soy bean production making feed lot beef be the norm, most of the steaks I find now have been expensive and flavorless (kinda like the steak in the USof A).   For 20 pesos at Don Chichos, I got a huge steak with that nice yellow fat and great flavor that cries "range fed!" covering one dinner plate, and a second dinner plate of fries with two fried eggs on top...(I know, I will have to eat salads for days to balance out this meal)!  And on top of the fantastic food, this place had the great old waiters, and pride of place that I remember as the best part of the traditional Argentina Parrilla.