Where are we again?

We've been to Mendoza, Belen is taking me to Patagonia and Rosario, and you better believe plans to go to Chile are now in the works. But we hadn't done any of the areas immediately surrounding Buenos Aires, so last week we jumped on the train and went to Tigre. After a long journey all the way down the green line on the Subte, switching to the blue line, and then finally getting on the train (and realising that the second stop on the train was the one right behind our apartment and so we hadn't needed to take the subway at all), we finally arrived in the little town - tired and extremely hungry (of course). Tres Bocas is a residential neighbourhood about half an hour away and we followed our stomachs there to a restaurant we'd heard about - and found ourselves in another world. See, the thing about Tigre is that it's on the delta of the Rio Plate. Water, water everywhere. No roads, but the river. Streets were of water. The quiet little suburbs were tree-lined rivers, not tree-lined roads. People didn't have cars, they had boats. There is no bus system, there's a commuter launch system. That would've been intense enough, but on top of that Tres Bocas was so eerie.Twilight zone. I don't know where everyone was, we guessed at work, but everything was dead quiet save for the drip drip of water and the squish of muddy grass beneath our feet. It was a grey, dismal day anyway, but everything was soaking wet. Mud was everywhere. Houses were silent and raised up on stilts to protect against flooding, every one had a little dock out on the water and no one was around. The place seemed deserted. The water was the colour of milky coffee and the grass was´practically neon green because there was so much moisture. It is Argentina, so of course while no houses seemed to hold people, every one had a dog. And even the dogs, all collared and well fed, were covered in mud - there just seemed to be no way to keep them clean. The few people we saw wore galoshes as shoes. At one point, sloshing down the path, we came across an enormous black dog - the size of a small horse. Thick black fur, muddy, paws the size of dinner plates, he looked like something out of one of those old Scholastic books we used to order in Port Royal, there was one about an island with the ghost of a dog and a man on it. He was super spooky. And of course he, like the creepy dog in Mendoza that Island Girl mentioned, decided to adopt us. To de-spookify him we named him Patches, and almost immediately I actually felt better about having him there. Patches so needed a walk, so he tagged along happily on ours. His big scary presence was a relief when a scary man wielding a saw came crowding down the narrow lane. Patches to the rescue. It was said to say goodbye - he left us waiting for the launch. The whole place was totally surreal. It was a relief to get back to our nice little corner of Belgrano, and our apartment with its high ceilings and bright orange walls. That being said, now I kinda want to go back - it was such a crazy place!