Monday, January 30, 2006
Buenos Aires
If you are going to spend 4 days in a city with 11 million people, then Buenos Aires is not a bad place to go!
We have been told that Argentinian women are the most beautiful in the world. It is true, that with their dark skin, dark eyes, long hair and vacuum-packed jeans that the young ones are very attractive and sexy, but young people are attractive everywhere, and we will stick by our view that Australian kids still rank Number One!
Buenos Aires is very much a city that come awake after dark, so we adjusted our time clocks from our 4am - 6 am wakeups of the last three weeks, to staying up till between 2 and 3 am to take advantage of the lights!
We managed to pack a lot in to our four days, including a classic tango show at Cafe Tortoni (one of the "original" tango cafes in town), a couple of amazing steak dinners, ice-creams at Freddos and shopping in Florida Street for leather.
We went on a bit of a pilgrimage of Eva Peron, including a visit to the famed Pink Palace where she spoke (sang!!!) to the people, a visit to her grave in Recoleta (the most amazing cemetery that is more like a city than a cemetery), and a visit to the Eva Peron museum, which tells the story of her life and fight to get the vote for women (in 1947!) to open schools and hospitals across the nation, and generally to get a better deal for the working people. It is amazing that she died at only 33 yers of age.
Buenos Aires is broken up into separate "barrios" or districts, each of which has a very distinctive personality. From the working class suburbs of San Telmo and La Boca, where it is common to see people dancing tango in the street (with the standard hat out for donations of course), to the upmarket Recoleta and Palermo where we saw the famous professional dog walkers walking up to 15 dogs all together!
The weather here is very hot and humid. Unless you are used to the humidity you will probably find that a better time to visit this city is in autumn or spring. As we spent hours and hours walking every day, and the temperature was in the mid to high thirties, and very humid, we found our energy was sapped by the end of the day. Still, I guess Barcelona and Rome will be the opposite!
The best night we had was at a restaurant called Cabrera. Our friends Tris and Jasna who we met on our Galapagos cruise organised it all for us. We first went to their apartment in Recoleta, and up to the roof of their 20 story apartment block for a view of the city. Then a short taxi ride to Cabrera. It is an amazingly popular restaurant, and when we arrived at bout 9:20pm , our 9pm booking had been given away. Fortunately less that 100 metres away is their satellite restaurant, Cabrera North, the same food and atmosphere, just a few yards down the street.
We shared three enormous steak meals (sharing steaks is not uncommon here), which came served with a large array of accompaniments or tapenadas, including roast garlic, eggplant, mashed pumpkin, roasted carrots, potatoes and so on. We shared a very nice bottle of Argentinian Malbec, had some dessert and coffee and the entire bill came to about $Aus 50 per couple! A fantastic memory of Argentina!
Today we leave again for Barcelona. The good news is that we have been upgraded to business class for the entire trip. The bad news is that we didn`t know that to claim our tax-free refunds we needed to go through Customs BEFORE Immigration, and missed that. Now we cannot get back out to Customs, so guess we will not be able to claim our $22 refund. Pat also lost his Goretex hat in BA yesterday - no idea how, and at least we wonçt be needing it for the remainder of our journey.
Next stop Europe!
