Fish, chocolate eggs, crazy traffic, christian guilt, family lunches & dinners, shops are closed…it’s the same story every year. It’s Easter week and all of the afore mentioned things happen here in Argentina as they do in Australia. Some people (Agus included) feel the need to eat fish on Good Friday, Alfie on the other hand is questioning why he isn’t going to kindergarten on (Holy) Thursday – it’s a holiday here, Easter Monday doesn’t exist. In my case I’ve personally added golf to the list of things that are happening on the Easter long weekend here as we are headed to the Hilton hotel in Pilar about 45mins (50km) north of where we are living in Florida 🇦🇷 for 3 nights.
We have organised the weekend away with our friends Magi & Herman and three of their 4 kids Franco, Juliana (Jules) and Martina (Martu). Sofi their eldest is on vacation with her cousin in NY. They are nice enough to loan us one of their cars so that I can take my golf clubs as it would have otherwise been impossible to cram all 8 of us into 1 car with luggage. Traffic is pretty crazy in Argentina at the best of times and we are trying to beat get ahead of the weekend holiday traffic. This probably warrants a whole blog post but just so you get an idea, driving in Argentina is a completely different experience – people like to overtake on either side of you, indicators are optional and I really don’t know how merging works here as everyone just weaves in and out wherever they want to. The Autopista (motorway) is basically a cross between a race track and a world cup rally course, I don’t understand how there are not more accidents as other than intersections that have traffic lights I can’t figure out how they know who has right of way (or if in fact they care). Oh and cars don’t stop (in general) for pedestrian at pedestrian crossings. Agus is driving (as I basically refuse to drive in Argentina) and I’ll admit I am a bit nervous as she hasn’t driven a) in Argentina for over 5 years and b) on the right hand side of the road for just as long. I can’t figure out the audio system in the car so give up on connecting my iPhone and listening to Spotify and resort to listening to FM radio (Aspen 102.3) as I am now slightly car sick – the constant lane changing, accelerating and braking will do that. Fast forward 10mins down the motorway and Alfie has passed out which is probably a good thing as he actually needs a midday nap these days even though he fights it. We arrive at the Hilton and leave him sleeping in his car seat whilst we check in & take our bags to our room – hold your parental judgement, the car windows were down, we could see him in the car from reception and Magi, Franco and Jules were outside keeping an eye on him for us.
We have a late lunch at the “Old English Pub” in the Pilar golf club house and Alfie gets to run around with the other kids. I checked my tee time for Friday morning and went back later to hit some balls at their driving range. Franco has a football and was being super patient playing with Alfie- we were hoping to see some improvement in Alfie’s footballing skills by the end of the weekend (spoiler, this didn’t happen). After letting the kids run around and use table covers as ghost outfits downstairs in the conference room / makeshift movie room we end the night at the buffet restaurant inside the hotel lobby and I’ll admit some scepticism about this style of dining, however the food was actually very good, they even had asado…of course Agus ate fish even though fish Friday was to officially begin in 4hrs. They did have an excellent desert bar & in between playing peekaboo with Martu, I may have made multiple visits.
Friday morning I am out for my first round of golf but not before having breakfast with Franco. Agus & Alfie escort me to the pro shop so that she can use her local credit card to pay – due to the unofficial exchange rate here our $USD go twice as far if we pay in $ARS pesos. I’m playing with 3 local Argios – I share a golf buggy with Mattiás who is an architect & he tells me that he can’t keep his younger staff as they all go to Australia and New Zealand for working vacations. The other two guys are father and son Miguel and Fernando – Miguel is retired and Fernando is a vet who looks after polo horses and is off to the UK in a week to work over there for the summer season. I play pretty well on the front 9 holes a few pars of and a couple of bridies (even chiped in one in) but the back 9 hurt especially when I sacrificed a 3 balls on the 13th hole into the lake…a steep R-L sloping fairway did the fist shot in, the next was a distance error when I hit it over the green and the final one I spun back off the green with a sand wedge from the drop zone and I watched it trickle down the bank into the water. Ouch – 11 (+6) score for the hole. I went to the range to hit some balls after the round as clearly I needed to work on my alignment and distance control.
Agus had a pretty full on morning with Alfie so after a bite of lunch I took him and Jules to the kids club and played with them until it was time to clean up for dinner. Or maybe it was the fact that I felt like I had just done a cross-fit style session chasing them all over the play equipment or maybe it was the dizziness inflicted from too many times spinning on the calesitas! The nap obviously did wonders for Alfie as his energy levels we running on high charge.
We had dinner in the hotel restaurant again and after desert I may had something to do with Martu and Alfie pretending to be ghosts with the serviettes from the table.
I was up early on Saturday morning as I had another round of golf booked. It was fresh with a fog and frost but I put my trust in the weatherman that it would warm up and be a sunny day. This time I ended up playing with a couple of guys my age, one of them had just flown in from Chile for the Easter holiday. I was told that there was nobody in the group using a cart so I chose to walk and carry my clubs. These guys turned up to the first tee with a cart…and we were a threesome so I played catchup all day. I had a pretty decent round and didn’t loose as many balls as yesterday. I had another couple of notable shots though during the round – I sunk my 4th for birdie on the 2nd from the green-side bunker, I chipped in twice from the fringe (once for par and the other for birdie) and I strung back to back birdies together on 16 and 17.
Agus, Magi and the kids were waiting as the golf club for me after my round and I was in time today for the Asado – perfect! Once we got the attention of the waiter and managed to steal some chairs from other tables to accommodate everyone we ordered chorizos and entraña. Both turned out to be a good choice but as ever it was tough to keep Alfie from running a muck. I finished my lunch and took him back to our room for a nap, leaving Agus to enjoy some peace and quite. Alfie fought napping with me (of course he did) until he actually fell asleep…the trick I’ve found now is just to agree that we are not having a nap.
Post nap time we went back to the kids club to find the others and this time I managed to get Alfie interested in kicking the football on the football pitch with Franco. Unfortunately this also meant that he tried to run off with it a number of times and then lost interest. That was until an actual game broke out with a bunch of kids but instead of joining in he found a blue football and proceeded to get in the way by placing it in front of the goal, kicking it in and yelling GOOOAAALLL! Awesome work Alfie!
Success, Alfie finally pooped and is back to eating mountains of food again…well mountains of desert. We’re back at the hotel restaurant for dinner with the gang and it’s a pretty chilled affair until tiredness hits the kids and they all start to fall apart so it’s back to our rooms and off to bed for all of us.
Sunday morning we have a lye in as I don’t have a round of golf booked today as we’re heading back to BA for easter lunch with all of the family. We head downstairs to join the rest of the guys for breakfast around 9am. It’s a pretty normal breakfast until Magi and Agus start making a stockpile of food from the buffet on our table and proceed to wrap it in serviettes. They even coerce Franco into getting plate loads of cookies for them. I’m told that this is a normal thing to do in Argentina (it’s not) and that it will be a full week of snacks for the kids school lunch boxes. I have flashbacks to the time that I first went travelling overseas with Agus to Thailand and she stole all the toiletries from the bathroom at the first hotel we stayed in. I had to call down to reception and complain that they didn’t put any soap, shampoo etc. in our room and that they needed to bring some up straight away so I could shower. After the restocked the room Agus came clean and told me that she had taken everything. Anyway after the successful food smuggling event, we pack our bags, load them into the car, check out and head back to Florida for Easter lunch.
Back home in Florida I start the fire for the asado – we are cooking pollo a la parrilla with a greek style marinade for the family. Agus is doing her world renowned greek style potatoes and some salads. I realise that we were running low on carbon so I dash out around the corner to get some from the local veggie store. I’m back before the guys show up with the food we need to prepare and I’ve got the fire going. Santi and Caro arrive and the next thing I know I’m being confronted my a mini Spiderman who is jumping around and shooting pretend spiderwebs at me! Turns out that Alfie saw a kid the other day in the park wearing a Spiderman
Now onto getting the chicken’s broken down and butterflied and into the marinade that Agus has mixed up. We let them marinate for about 20-30mins and then it’s onto the parrilla. Standing outside smelling the smoke reminds me of BBQ chicken shops back in Australia.
After lunch the Tios have planned an easter egg hunt for Alfie. This is the first one he has done (that he would remember) and he is super excited but doesn’t really know what the small bag we gave him is for and what he is doing until he finds the first one. The excitement level then just escalates with each egg. It was so much fun for him and for us also to watch this especially the interaction with his aunts and uncles. Now onto the eating and maybe more importantly for Alfie the smashing! Actually on second thought we had to start limiting the amount of chocolate he was eating or it would be impossible to get him to sleep. At one stage he had so many smarties in his mouth that he couldn’t chew them. But after all of that excitement he was out by 7:45pm! You can see the highlights below.
3 meses en Argentina 
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