Travelers learn to be adaptive about diets. Here in Argentina, you can't get bacon and eggs. Not huevos rancheros either.

What Porteños eat for breakfast are mezzalunas and café. Maybe some orange juice, but that's extra.

It's fairly thin fare for people brought up on IHOP blueberry stacks with aerosol whipped cream. But in Argentina, you have to lighten up somewhere. Pizza for lunch and yet another rib-eye steak a punto for dinner leaves one overfed and logy. These days I'm just not hungry in the morning anymore.

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Only in the USA do you get that 48 oz soft drink in a plastic tub half full of ice. Nobody else in the world has the love affair with frozen water that Americans do. In Mexico, you normally have to ask for ice; it's usually cheerfully supplied. In France, waiters sneer when you ask, sigh in exasperation, and exchange knowing glances with the locals at the adjacent table.

In Buenos Aires, your diet coke is served in a wine glass. No ice. Takes some getting used to.

Seeing as I drink diet Coke or Pepsi to the exclusion of all other fluids except for coffee, this is a big deal for me. At first I asked for a larger glass and some ice. Waiters simply can't grasp the concept of someone wanting a larger glass, but they've heard about ice in Argentina; they even have a little. Comes from Antarctica I think.

When you ask for ice, the waiter brings you a crudely cast aluminum pot with three ice cubes in it. Jean takes two of them for her agua con gas, leaving me with one small one. I drink half of my glass of coke so there's room for my ice cube. I put it in the glass. It instantly melts.

I'm adapting. I don't bother with ice in my coke anymore. I'm actually getting to like tepid soft drinks. And mezzalunas for breakfast hit the spot after last night's pig out.