Happy Immaculate Conception Day!

It is now 7:11 in the evening and I am just waking up. The still heat is stifling and our fans are useless...if I could sleep more I would. But I suppose I have to be awake anyway because we're making a trip to La Cabrera tonight, our favorite spot for steak in town.

I slept all day because it is Virgin Mary day or Immaculate Conception day or something along those lines...basically it's an Argentines-don't-feel-like-working day, so I have the day off. Which in parallel meant that I had a day on at the bar - we stayed open all Sunday night as if it were a Friday or a Saturday. Now that summer vacations have started and study abroad students are returning home for the holidays, the clientele has switched from a good mix of expats and Argentines to almost strictly Argie, meaning less tips and later hours for us. David, a Brazilian kitchen guy, is leaving today and will be gone for a few months (as most of us will be), and as he's the first to go, a bunch of us thought we might as well go out after work. At 7 am. It's amazing that you can do that here, but I surely won't be making a habit of it. 7:11 is too late to wake up.

Kelly and I dined last night at Sarkis, a much talked about Armenian restaurant in Palermo. Kelly, having never had Armenian/Middle Eastern food, was a bit nervous I think, but since her foray into Indian cuisine last month went so well I wasn't concerned. We showed up at 9 (on the early side in this country) and despite a huge dining room were made to wait for a spot while space cleared. The dining room was so vast that our waiter resorted to air traffic controller-like hand motions to guide us to our table from across the room.

Dinner was delicious, we got a quartet of appetizers that the waiter recommended, and then we shared a lamb entree. Which first showed up without yogurt, which I was having none of, so he brought the plate back and doused it in yogurt and pita and onion, and presented it to us with a rather exaggerated but earnest 'ta-DA!' We ate til we physically could not continue, and walked to Sugar.

***Pictures added below, to Thanksgiving dinner post