Buenos Aires - part II

After ten days of intense visiting (and shopping :) the girls have left. First Sanja on Saturday, then Eda on Sunday. It was weird to be alone in the apartment the first night. We felt that we did most of the visiting we wanted to do and now we could focus on taking Spanish classes and just live in Buenos Aires.
One of the first impressions when you get out of the apartment and start walking around in San Telmo are the exhaust fumes from the buses. The streets are very narrow and there are a lot of loud, stinky buses passing by. No one else seems to be bothered by this. I guess, people are used to it.
The second thing you notice are all the cafes and restaurants on every single corner and little boutiques, and bakeries (yum, yum). Everything around looks very familiar, very European. They call Buenos Aires the Paris of South America (hippie style). It does look very much like it, the dog poop on the sidewalks included. Except the customer service. Unlike in Paris, people here are very nice and friendly. Everybody, starting from waiters, cashiers in shops, bus drivers, post-office clerks, everywhere we went we had a good experience. Apart from the fact that when people bump into you on the street, they never apologise. Minor detail.


BA looks like a European city but poorer, rougher on the edges. The side walks are broken, the walls are covered with graffiti and street art. A lot of stencil and brush painted artwork. Some is very political like we have seen in Oaxaca (Mexico).














The city is huge, 12 million people. We have visited mainly the touristy neighborhoods, and some of them like Palermo and Recoleta are very rich. On a couple of occasions we walked to some poorer areas and the difference was shocking.
One evening as I was walking back to the apartment, I saw 2 kids sniffing glue out of a plastic bag. One looked a bit paranoid. The other one was staring at his reflexion in a window and then left hopping like a monkey.
On the same day, near the train station, I was shocked to see this homeless kid not more than 16 years old. He had no shoes and looked like he had not had a shower in days. His skin and clothes were of the same dark color.
And at night you can see people sometimes families rummaging through containers and collecting cardboard.

Then there are all the interesting cultural details we noticed during our stay:

~ People in Argentina drink mate (special kind of tea - yerba mate) ALL THE TIME. You can see them walking around caring a thermos bottle under the armpit and a mate (the cup) in the hand. Mate is shared among family, friends and coworkers, and in a way, sharing is the whole point. Our Spanish teacher Silvana drinks about 6 liters of mate per day!


~ After one month in Buenos Aires we still don't know who has the right of way at an intersection. They drive like crazy here, don't respect any rules, specially the taxis and the bus drivers.

~ I had to go see an eye doctor here. While waiting in the office, I saw other patients giving a kiss on the cheek to the doctor after exiting the office. I thought they knew each other. Then it was my turn. After the visit, the doctor opened the door for me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I was surprised. It happened again on my second visit to a different doctor.

~ People go out very late in Buenos Aires. Before 10pm nothing is going on. At 1am the city is alive with people of all ages, parents with their kids, young couples, groups of teenagers, old people. Everybody is out walking, eating, drinking, talking. Even some bookstores are open at 1am! At one concert we counted four pregnant women.

~ Just like in Paris, you can see young couples kissing and making out everywhere. But here they are so into it, they are almost eating each other in parks, cafes, metros, while waiting in a line....everywhere.

~ Passing by the magazine stands in the street, the first thing you notice is a gigantic pair of boobs on the covers of porn magazines, perfectly placed at the eye level, can't miss it :)

~ Getting change for the bus is a nightmare here! Nobody has change or wants to give you the one peso coin that you desperately need to take the bus. It is so difficult to find it that once you get some, you keep it like a treasure and always pretend not to have any.















During our last two weeks in Buenos Aires, we took intensive Spanish classes every day at the Hostel Clan in San Telmo. We got lucky to get a fun, energetic, and very patient teacher Silvana. She is from Buenos Aires and is about our age. She surprised us nicely when she invited us to her home one Sunday for lunch. Silvana is also a HUGE soccer fan of one of the local teams - River Plate. There was a big game between the city's two rivalry teams, River Plate and La Boca, while we were there but the tickets were too expensive. This reminded me of the rivalry between the two teams in Sarajevo, Zeljo and FKS, when I was younger. It divided the entire neighborhoods in two and people were very passionate about who they belonged to. Silvana is that way. So, on our last Sunday in Buenos Aires, she took us to a soccer game. Of course, we were on the River Plate side. They played against a small team from Jujuy. The game was pretty bad, but it was still interesting to see how passionate people are about soccer here. There was only a handful of Jujuy fans (since it is far away), but the River Plate side was more than full and people were singing and swearing madly the entire game.
















Anyway, Silvana has been our only contact with the local people here, and we are happy that at least we had that. It has been difficult to meet people here. The main reason would be the language barrier, but also we noticed that the more comfortable our traveling is the less people we meet. Hence us staying in an apartment instead of a hostel did not help.

Silvana also took us to a great place, La Catedral, where we took some tango lessons. It was so much fun, difficult but fun. La Catedral is like a big warehouse space with funky artwork on the walls. It has great vegetarian food and unlike a lot of other tango places, it is very low key and casual. It is acceptable to show up in jeans and sneakers and take a tango lesson. That's what we did, in our hiking shoes.

During the two last weeks in Buenos Aires, we did a few interesting visits. The first one was the visit to the Evita Museum. It was interesting to learn about her life, her carrier as an actress very young and later, after she married Juan Peron, her brief but very active political carrier. Her remains are at the Recoleta Cemetery but the high-ranking people were not happy about it because she was an illegitimate child (she forged her birth certificate after marring Peron) and because she was devoted to the poor. Some criticized her for being without scruples, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to be a woman in power at that time. In 1947 she was responsible for getting women the right to vote. She died very young of cancer. What a weird thing that her body was missing for 16 years...



Visiting Buenos Aires you constantly see images of Che Guevara, but even more of Carlos Gardel. He was a tango singer, a pioneer of the tango cancion (song). He was born in Toulouse but his mother brought him to Buenos Aires when he was two years old. His neighborhood Abasto is full of his images and even some of his songs written on the facades. There is even a Carols Gardel museum in a very colorful street. Some of the facades are painted in the Filateado style, a flowery, ornamental painting technique specific to Buenos Aires. We loved seeing it everyday, everywhere, on signage, buses, menus, ads, etc.

"For Love use condoms"















A little of Pepe's Ashes in BA

Conclusion:

We liked Buenos Aires, specially San Telmo, and already after two weeks we could see ourselves living there, even for just a year. We were sad to leave. More than the look of the city, it is its atmosphere, its texture, its melancholy that we loved.
By the end of our stay, we really felt like we lived there. Started little routines, going to the same coffee shop or restaurant. On our last day we went back to El Federal, our favorite restaurant in San Telmo, to have a last bite of their delicious Lomos al Champignon.
Miko lost a lot of weight in Asia, but he got it all back. Since we left Asia our trip has become more and more comfortable. Eating well, drinking well, sleeping in the same bed for a longer period of time. We very much needed the one month break in Buenos Aires. But in the beginning Miko felt like his brain and his body had a hard time adjusting to it. He was constantly thinking about what's next. After a month those feeling were gone... well kind off.
We are going to need some time to readjust to the travel mode and being on the road again.