The Suitcases Go into Storage

Home Sweet Home

The news: we’ve moved into our new apartment. We have been “moving” since sometime in December when we began packing our stuff - sending boxes to Argentina, selling some items, giving away things, putting some essentials into storage – but, after living in five different places in the last 19 days, today we stop moving for the next eleven months (at least).



We looked at about a dozen apartments in our first week in Buenos Aires before settling on a brand-new, never-lived-in, modern loft in a somewhat obscure neighborhood about 5 blocks east of our temporary digs on Av. Coronel Diaz in Palermo Viejo. Our original plan was to find a place in Palermo – the oh-so- hip part of town renowned for the best cafes, restaurants, bars, and shops. After looking at a number of overpriced, cramped, semi-clean apartments in Palermo, we realized our budget would not allow us to combine primo apartment with groovy neighborhood, so we opted for a nice apartment in a “where’s that again?” kind of location.



View from the roof of our building





Actually, everyone knows where our building is located (give the cross streets and every Buenos Aires resident knows the ubicacion), but it’s hard to get people to agree on the neighborhood designation. Is it Palermo? Is it Recoleta? Is it Barrio Norte? We actually told everyone it was Barrio Norte until I researched our ‘hood on the internet and discovered it is officially one block inside the borders of Recoleta, but not the identifiably fancy “Parisian” part of Recoleta.

Our neighborhood is middle-class, leafy, mostly quiet – we like it. By pure accident, the bus that stops in front of our building goes directly to Jen’s future workplace downtown. At 30 cents a journey, it looks like a fabulous stroke of luck. We moved in just hours ago and our stuff is strewn everywhere. We'll post more pix of our apartment and neighborhood later.