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.

Buenos Aires Part 01

We arrived in Buenos Aires on the 26th of March. We made a reservation for an apartment but there was a misunderstanding with the agency about the date and it took a couple of hours to solve the issue. Those first 2 hours in BA we spent standing on the sidewalk, trying to remember Spanish we learned a while ago. Finally we were inside and happy. The apartment was very nice, too big for just the two of us but Sanja and Eda were arriving soon so it was going to be a full house.
On our very first night, we went outside looking for a place to eat and got a first glimpse of the neighborhood San Telmo - our home for the next month. We found a nice restaurant/bar only a block away Bar El Federal, all wood inside, nice atmosphere. We realized quickly that we needed Spanish classes. None of the waiters spoke English, and the menu was only in Spanish.





It was the first time we were going to stay in one place for so long and it was welcomed. We started getting tired of moving around all the time, especially Hana. It is a nice change of pace, but even more so, it is a new experience on this trip. Instead of being visitors, this time we are actually temporary residents. We were lucky to find this apartment in such a great neighborhood. Thank you Patricia for putting us in touch with Juan.

After visiting the city, San Telmo is definitely our favorite part. It is very touristy but still very authentic. It is full of old buildings, cafes, restaurants, boutiques, antique shops, and little supermarkets owned by Asian people. The whole mix is very charming. It has a strange feel to it, kind of melancholic, maybe because San Telmo is the center of tango.
Oh, tango. We have heard about it, everybody has heard about the Argentinian tango. But to see the couples dancing right in front of you is something else. It looks so difficult and complex. We love this dance, we love watching it, and would love to know it. Watching couples dance tango, it is like a lover's game, an indefinite tease. Hot, hot, hot! It looks so cool, sexy, and sophisticated. And the legs, oh those legs, they move like they are "croshaying".
Our apartment is very close to Plaza Dorrego. There you can see people dancing tango almost any time of day or night. Specially Sunday's night, after the antique market, locals come to this plaza to dance tango and it is always crowded. Sometimes there is a band playing and you get to see some really good dancers.





Two days after we arrived in Buenos Aires, our friend Sanja (that we stayed with in Vienna) joined us. A few days later, another friend from San Francisco arrived, Eda. From then on it was girls gone wild for shopping. We have spent the next 2 weeks visiting, shopping, eating meat & empanadas, shopping, drinking Quilmes, shopping, walking around and going to every possible market, and shopping, shopping, shopping....especially Sanja & Eda :)
What follows is a brief description of some places we visited.



Recoleta Cemetery

Reminded us of the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, just smaller. It is like a little "neighborhood" of mausoleums with streets and plazas. It is the place where only the rich and the ones with the right last name get buried. There is a saying here: "It is cheaper to live extravagantly all your life than to be buried in Recoleta". This is also were Eva Peron's remains are. A few days after we have arrived, on April 1st, Raul Alfonsin died. He was the first democratically elected president in Argentina in 1983 after the Dirty War. He was considered the father of Argentinian democracy. Miko actually ended up going to his funeral at the Recoleta Cemetery by accident. He was going to visit the Ciruelo exhibition at the Cultural Center next door but ended up staying with the huge crowd that was gathered to pay the respect to Alfonsin.















Tigre

We did two day trips outside of Buenos Aires. The first one was to Tigre, one hour away by train.
The town of Tigre is a pleasant riverside town, but it is the Delta that everyone is after, a popular weekend getaway for "portenos" (people from BA). The Delta was a complete opposite of what we expected. We thought the boat ride there would be about beautiful scenery and nature, but the main attraction here are the local houses along the shores and some of them are real mansions. It was still very nice to walk around, so quiet and peaceful. We had a nice, long lunch at the Alpenhouse (owned by a Viennese family) and ate a lot of sausages.
It turned out not to be so simple to buy 4 round trip tickets when you don't speak Spanish and don't consult your phrase book before. Imagine the 3 of us, talking at the same time, saying every relevant Spanish word we know, and the poor guy behind the counter, who does not speak a word of English, trying to make sense of our Spanish marmalade.
We needed Spanish classes really bad.

























Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay

After our trip to Tigre, we went to Colonia, Uruguay for one day. We took the ferry from Buenos Aires to cross the river. The water is mocca-brown and looks really nice against the blue sky (even if it is very polluted). Colonia itself is a really cute place to visit. Like Arrowtown in New Zealand, or Locronan in Bretagne, it is a pretty town with character and history, many restaurants and cafes, and also very touristy.














































La Boca

On Eda's first day in Buenos Aires, we visited around El Caminito, a very colorful area in La Boca but also very touristy. We walked there from San Telmo and on the way, two teenage girls stopped us and told us that it is not safe to walk around with our cameras out, even during the day. Oops. This place also has a nice artesan market and a great store that sells clothes of the independent, local, designers. That's where the shopping craze began. The store is called Alicia Maravilla.






















That night we went to Hostel Clan and partied with kids. Especially Sanja, she partied hard and you could not tell the age difference on her (by the way 10 years min).





Puerto Madero

The newest neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Sanja's favorite from the architectural point of view. The highlight here was the Puente de la Mujer (The bridge of a Woman), representing a tango dancer. The neighborhood reminded us of the Mission Bay in SF. Brand new and modern, it creates a contrast with other parts of Buenos Aires, old and crackled.






























Recoleta & Palermo

These two neighborhoods are the upscale parts of Buenos Aires. Recoleta, is more of a cultural center with many museums and galleries. While the gardens and parks are in Palermo. And great shopping as well in Palermo Soho ;)























Hana liked the Floralis Generica, a gigantic flower made out of airplane parts that opens up during the day and closes from dusk until dawn.
Miko liked the Botanic Garden (Cat's Heaven). It is small, green, very calm. It is full of cats and lovers.
We both liked the Malba, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. Great museum displaying modern Latin American art. It is not very big, so you don't get exhausted by the end of it.















Markets

There is always a market somewhere in Buenos Aires, specially on weekends. We regularly went to the market in San Telmo on Sundays. The entire street Defensa is closed for traffic and there are many artists selling their crafts. There are performances, bands playing, clowns, tango dancers. It is very popular with tourists and locals alike.














There are other markets in La Boca, and Plaza Francia in Recoleta, and in Puerto Madera, but our favorite one was the Feria de Mataderos, almost one hour bus ride from the center. It is comunal, more country side and we loved seeing the gaucho side of Argentina. Especially the folkloric dancing. There was a group of kids and they danced really well. We loved their postures, their chest forward, head up high. So much attitude and pride in it. My favorite was the drumming group "Sol Argentino", men dressed in black, and women in red with traditional blue ponchos. Their energy was great, it was breathtaking to watch them. The women were drumming and sometimes yelling some words, banging their heads in the rhythm, their black, long hair tossing. You would not want to mess with these ladies.
In between performances, many old couples dressed in the traditional outfits would dance in the middle. I like that about Argentina, that old people still go out and socialize and have fun.
There is also a funky Gaucho Museum. Beware of the two old ladies selling tickets there, the pink tickets are for women and white for men! Miko tried to get in on a pink ticket that Hana bought for him and almost created a riot.
There is also a great artesan market, stands with food and asado (Argentinian bbq), and more locals than tourists :) Loved it.