Leaving wintery Toronto for summery Buenos Aires might have been the best decision I’ve ever made in my entire life. My fella and I took our kids – 3 and just about turning 1 – to Argentina for a full month and picnicked in the park and drank jarritos at the café on the corner every single morning and ate so much of the most delicious steak. It was a 32-day-long love letter.

BA is a truly wonderful city. There are incredible, extraordinary art galleries, palaces THAT YOU CAN SWIM IN, statues to letter carriers outside of old post offices that are now cultural centres, gold (!) street lamps and palm trees and patios and parks.

OH, the PARKS! They are the parks of Jane Jacobs‘ dreams – multi-use parks filled with every kind of person – elderly folks, babies, families, teenagers hanging and drinking maté, kids learning to ride their bikes, epic soccer games, all of it. Our flat was right near Plaza Vicente Lopez and we had lunch and happy hour at that park almost every day for the full month. One day, I even picnicked four times. It was positively glorious and I will dream about that park until my last breath.

I wrote love letters to rivers and the Atlantic Ocean in Carilo and wrote more than one love letter to The Recoleta Cultural Centre – it had the most incredible courtyards – one with a fountain the 3-year-old LOVED running in and out of, and another with chairs set under orange trees. They repainted the entire facade of the building with EVERY new show (!) and the first show we saw was aptly titled Amor de Verano – Summer of Love.

There were interactive galleries and spaces to read and work and places to sit under fruit trees, AND some of the most joy-filled art I’ve ever seen. I LOVED Sebastien Curi‘s huge colourful murals, every single one of them. They filled my whole heart.

I am back now, and desperate for warm air and parks and long summer days. But I found crocuses today, and biked with my kiddos in the late afternoon sun. And soon, there will be (warm!) picnics!