Days 532-564: Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Finally, a nice break. We spent an entire month in Buenos Aires.
We plan to spend the better part of half a year in Spanish-speaking countries, so we decided to camp out in the first one we got to and learn a bit of the language. There is no better city than Buenos Aires (BsAs) to live for a month and learn Spanish. So we rented an apartment on “the widest street in the world” and signed up for Spanish classes.
The view from in front of our apartment includes the Obelisk on Ave. 19 de Julio. It’s been described as the Times Square of BsAs.
You just might mistake Buenos Aires for a big city in the states, except that more people are speaking Spanish (even more than LA!). It is a comfortable, cosmopolitan, safe, cheap, easy, tasty city. Folks are really quite friendly, polite, and even form stunningly orderly queues for buses.
It is interesting how Argentineans perceive foreigners to be incredibly wealthy. Things are not dirt cheap in Argentina and yet more than once it was said that something would be expensive to an Argentinean and yet “cheap for us”. We can only assume this comes from the horrendous inflation that has plagued Argentina the past few decades. The peso has been devalued by something unbelievable like 10,000,000,000 to 1 in the past thirty years. There was even a million peso note in the money museum.
We loved having access to real grocery stores. Not much in the way of ethnic food though – including Mexican food to our surprise. We had to make salsa from scratch and had to soak our own black beans. That’s all fine though because we had our own kitchen and took serious advantage of it. We managed to scrape out a few Chinese meals that turned out better than we had hoped. However, in one meal Kelly got a bit more than the broccoli she was expecting. Note the teeth marks on this bug. Kelly still hasn’t been able to look at this picture yet.
One of the other great things about the grocery stores is the huge selection of fantastic Argentinean wine. Marcus drank a lot of it, and one of the few he didn’t like had his namesake. Bummer. At least most of the wines cost about $3-4 per bottle.
Marcus drinking Marcus in our tiny kitchen.
We took four weeks of Spanish classes. It was only in the last week that we started dreaming in Spanish. Yikes. The classes were generally tiny and lasted 4 hours a day. But we still managed to learn a lot.
Our first group of classmates: Natalia (teacher), Andy, Flo, Alice, Kelly.
Besides doing our homework, we found that watching English movies with Spanish subtitles on TV helped us quite a bit (especially with the words they don’t teach you in class). ¡Mierda!
The class came with a free tango lesson. We went and there were six gals and Marc. They had to call in reinforcements and Marc still had to make the rounds. We managed to learn the basic steps, but we didn’t look anything like the blur of limbs of the real tango dancers.
You might think these are street tango performers, but their real deal is that they drag unsuspecting tourists out for a two buck photo.
Besides the Tango, Argentinians are famed for their consumption of “mate”. This is fairly bitter loose-leaf tea that is traditionally served in a hollowed-out gourd and sipped through a fancy straw. Drinking mate is usually a social affair. A group of folks sit around and chat while passing the mate gourd. We tried it a few times and decided to stick with café con leche and té negro.
There are really only three words in Spanish that you need to know when visiting Argentina: dulce de leche. A little bit of smooth, caramelly heaven (well, a lot of caramelly heaven if Marc is serving). Kelly liked it with Oreos, but the best way we had it was stuffed in the middle of a fried churro. ¡Qué rico!
Kelly eating ice cream at the incomparable Freddo’s. Our favorite flavor: dulce de leche con brownie. Heaven.
We had our weekends free and got out to see the sights of BsAs. The Teatro Colon was a block away from our apartment. This magnificent theater was finished in 1908 and is closing down for two years of renovation to reopen for its centenary. This place was stuffed with incredibly carved marble. The actual theater hall was U-shaped and we got to hang out in the President’s private box for our tour. There is a section around the chandelier on the ceiling where a choir can sing “the voice of heaven”. We got the Blue Light Special $2 standing-room tickets to see the opera Boris Godounov. Not only could we hardly see the stage from how high up we were, but there really were blue lights too.
A staircase inside the Teatro Colon.
There really aren’t many individual sights in BsAs but quite a few neighborhoods that have their own character. Recoleta is a pretty posh neighborhood with a huge cemetery. The individual family tombs are enormous and opulent. It is said that it is cheaper to live an extravagant life in Recoleta than to be buried in Recoleta’s cemetery.
View down the “streets” of Recoleta’s cemetery.
Recoleta has an enormous metal flower statue that moves and closes as the sun sets.
There are arts and crafts fairs everywhere in BsAs and usually a few street performers doing weird stuff.
Another interesting neighborhood is the old port area of La Boca. The area is famous for its colorfully painted buildings – a tradition supposedly from ship painters using extra paint on their houses. It’s a bit of a tourist trap nowadays but still neat.
La Boca’s main drag seems to show up on every postcard.
Is that lady giving us the bird? Speaking of birds, Marc got dumped on his face by a nasty little bird on the way back from La Boca. Good thing it missed his “boca”.
Guess these La Boca residents were trying to make a statement on drinking and smoking.
San Telmo is south of the city center and hosts a huge antique fair on the weekends. Not many bargains, but neat to browse. It also has a lot of colonial architecture and tango.
A church on the way to San Telmo.
The area of Puerto Madero was really posh but didn’t have much of interest except the Ecological Reserve. Really cool flowers and a few bright pink flamingos.
The city center (“microcentro”) has loads of offices as well as historical buildings.
The Casa Rosada in Plaza de Mayo was the presidential residence and has the balcony where Evita would speak.
The Congresso building is really quite impressive.
As with any city center, there is loads of graffiti. At least most of it in BsAs was graffiti art and usually quite entertaining.
No surprise that soccer is the major sport in Argentina. One guy told us that the local sports report is by default mostly soccer and a few extra sports thrown in. Two of the big teams in BsAs are Boca Juniors and River Plate and they have a serious rivalry. They played our first weekend in town and we thought we would get to watch it on our fancy cable TV. They were showing the pre-game on multiple channels. But the moment the ball was kicked off all of the channels went to scenes of the crowd for the entire game. One of the sports channels “magically” became scrambled for the duration of the game. What the hell? At least we found out afterwards that River won the game because there is a tradition of the winning team swarming around the base of the Obelisk outside our apartment.
Jubilant River fans having fun.
Tags: Argentina
Kelly & Marcus
November 13th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
That’s some mystery bug Kel – ICK!
FYI The SS classes are loving the Egypt pictures –
I’ve made 5x7s of a lot of them and they are all around
the class.Other teachers come into to check them out
too…
Stay safe and travel with care xoxo
November 14th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Déjeme ver si tengo este correcto: ¡Usted goza particularmente el comer del helado marrón del ojo en Theatro Colon…!
November 15th, 2006 at 9:36 am
¡Sí! Old Swell Dad. Nos gustan los helados marrón en el Teatro Colon. Pero no podemos comer dentro del teatro porque somos sucio.
Glad they are enjoying the Egypt pics Mom.
November 23rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Que pasa eses! Yo hablo espanol muy bien y puedo ensenarte si quieres lol! Las fotographias son bonitas. Gracias por este website. Me gusta leerlo. Buena suerte con todo! Buscas una novia caliente de Argentina para yo! Saludos!
November 27th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Hi guys,
I see from your maps that you’re in Uyuni – any plans to go to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile? I ask because I’ll be there in a couple week before going observing at CTIO and would love to hear any tips you might have.
Hope all continues to go well, and thanks for keeping up the blog 🙂
Cheers,
Sarah Hansen
November 28th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Dudes! We just found out that this fancy new weblog puts comments that aren’t spam into the spam bin. We’ll pay closer attention now that we know our friends are considered spammers. 🙂