Last weekend my sister came to visit me here in Buenos Aires. Other than my dad coming right at the very beginning of my time here, I have not had any visitors, so it was really nice to have a familiar face around for the weekend. My sister can be kind of hard though. She has a little bit of trouble showing emotion and expressing her true opinions. So planning what to do was really hard for me. I wanted to make sure that we were doing stuff she wanted, since this was a vacation for her, but at the same time, I wanted to make sure I was having fun too and not just seeing the same stuff I see every day. All my worrying ended up being for nothing because we had one heck of a good time!

I showed her around a bunch of the different neighborhoods, ranging from La Boca/Caminito to Puerto Madero to my hometown here of Recoleta.

I really like maps and direction so I wanted to walk everywhere no matter how far. I also was always telling my sister where we were relative to her hotel and some of the other towns we visited. I don’t think she cared much about any of that and I don’t think she cared for all of the walking either. But that was my fun 🙂 For her, she definitely cared more about the food. I knew that all along, so I put extra amount of effort into making sure we dined well. I also never experiment with food here, since I don’t care much about eating. But since I am leaving to go home to the US in a few weeks, this was also a good opportunity for me to explore some of the Buenos Aires food scene as well.

One thing is for sure, my family has a sweet tooth. My paternal grandma, who I call Aji, loves chocolate very much. My dad loves a good French pastry and my mom loves a good chocolate cake. My sister and I get our sweet teeth from all of them. But for me, I really have acquired the dessert easting skills from my late maternal grandpa, Harvey Light. My family has a saying that is eating dessert in the form of brickling. Basically this means not taking a whole cookie, scoop of ice cream, or a slice of cake, but rather just having a utensil and eating little bits of it right from the serving dish. For instance, instead of cutting a piece of cake, just grab a knife and cut a little sliver to eat in one bite. You can stay and eat for a little or just take that sliver and go. My whole family does this, but I would have to say I’m the brickle queen.

Argentina has some amazing desserts. During my whole time here I have barely had any, and well my sister was only here for three days. So we put our brickle skills to the test. Gelato here is, as the porteños would say, “muy rico.” Because of the huge Italian heritage here, gelato is the Buenos Aires version of ice cream. Argentina also has some incredible pastries, most of which are filled with Dulce de leche. And of course, Argentina is famous for its Alfajores, which I say is like a big French macron made with shortbread and Dulce de leche instead of merengue and icing. My sister and I took advantage of all of these sweets. We brickled on Alfajores, and chocolate en rama (sort of like British flakes), Dulce de leche stuffed waffles, and even a small Dulce de leche tort.

Tort that fell on the floor 🙂

Fun fact: the tort fell on the street after we bought it, but we picked it right up and split it anyway. I pretended to forget about the fact that I don’t believe in the 5 second rule just so I could still eat that 38-peso treat. And then we treated ourselves to big desserts at night with gelato most nights. Although, one night we did get an 8 cm round cake and split it between the two of us 🙂

I have to say, even my big sweet tooth is a bit sugared out from last weekend. But it was worth it. We had so much fun brickling away and bringing a piece of inspiration from many of our other family members into the weekend. I did a workout every morning and we both walked about 10 miles a day, so it probably all balanced out. Well maybe not, but it definitely offset some of the damage. Really it was just fun to be with my little sister and break free from my strict healthy self for a little and let my brickling sweet tooth run wild. Maybe I’ll treat myself one last time before I leave for the semester, but I definitely got my fill of Argentine sweets. We both did. And despite all of the events and site seeing we actually did, brickling throughout morning, afternoon, and night, all three days was definitely the best part for the both of us!