Goodbye, Buenos Aires!
Yesterday we tried to change the date of our post about Buenos Aires from the 13rd to the 14th to prevent bad luck, but then it sort of crashed. So now we are writing this for the second time…
Right now, we are in San Ignacio, a little town in the north of Argentina near the Parquayan border. It is getting very tropical here. That is a bit different from a few days ago, when we still were in Buenos Aires, where it´s autumn now. This means the weather was perfect! Nice and sunny, but not too hot.
For a change we stayed in Palermo, a trendy and posh neighbourhood on the other side of the city. Palermo is famous its beautiful green parks, nice fusion restaurants and its clubbing scene. You can also find the Evita musuem there, so of course we also had a look.
Especially Martine was very impressed by the fact that Evita comes across as a very strong women who achieved a lot in her short life (she died at 33 years), such as introducing women voting rights in this macho country. As Jannis said before, the weird thing about the Evita museum is that nothing mentioned at all about the fact that her husband Colonel Peron, was a dictator.
Next to Palermo is Recoletta, the wealthiest neigbourhood in the city. Recoletta is populated with a lot of big elegant buildings, embassies, impressive government buildings, massive statues and wide lanes with big trees. The wealth of this neighbourhood is best shown in its cemetery. The dead are not only just buried there, but each one has gotten his own little palace. No wonder a lot of famous people end up here. The latest addition is the ex-president Martine wrote about before. At the moment his grave is even beating Evita´s in popularity!
It was very nice to stay in trendy Palermo this time. But after we had seen the things we came for, we moved back to San Telmo, the nice and cosy neighbourhood where we had stayed before.
Back in San Telmo we visited the Sunday market again, and there we got free tickets for this Tango performance. This turned out to be really nice. It all started with an hour of Tango lessons, where, suprisingly enough, we didn´t do too bad. After this Tango class it got really busy with Argentinian people who all had come to dance on the Tango mucic. They all were really good, and since we only had started to learn, we quietly moved aside. An hour after that an orchestra of young musicians started playing fantastic modern Tango music, on which only the best were able to dance on. The live music gave us the goosebumps, but what even impressed us more was the final performance by a professional Tango couple. Since we had tried to dance the Tango ourselves, we realised the complexity of their dancing.
The day before we left Buenos Aires we had one last thing to do: visit the Boca neighbourhood. Boca is one of the main tourist attractions in the city, but as it is a rough harbour area, you can only visit it safely by going there by bus, even though it´s only an hour walk away from where we stayed.
Boca is expecially famous for its bright coloured houses, each part of which has been painted in a different colour, as their owners painted them with leftovers from the shipyards.
Boca is also well known for its soccer team which has a very special stadium. It is open in the front, so you can look into it from the outside. As the stadium is only a few streets away from the touristy area, we of course wanted to have a look at it. But having walked only a street or two towards the stadium, we already saw some strange acting boys watching us. So we decided to turn around. Not a bad decision, as we heard these boys yelling at us while we slowly walked away.
Boca was a very strange experience as it´s very nice and safe in the couple of touristy streets, but as soon as you start to wander around, you immediately enter a dangerous area.
After having been three times in Buenos Aires, it starts to feel like ´home away from home´. So leaving it behind at last, it feels like we are starting with a new holiday…
Martine & Jannis.
P.S.
Keep checking our Flickr-webpage as we are still publishing pictures on it frequently.
Tags: Travel, Tag Index
jannisenmartine
April 15th, 2009 at 12:04 am
where did you learn that peron was a dictator????? He is loved by a lot a people (I dont really care about him) and hate by others , he did a lot to improve the situation of the workers in the 50s. We, sadly, had many dictators, but i dont really consider him one of them. And if you thought that he was a dictator is really naive to think that they will remark that fact in museum made to show love for his wife , specially because here the word DICTATOR provoke hate.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Hi Lu,
First of all it`s nice we get a reaction from somebody from Argentina itself, so we know how you think about these things.
Now about what we have written. Outside of Argentina it`s is in the history books everywhere that Peron rose to power as part of the military, that he admired fascism, and that he implemented a big part of this ideology while he was in power, banning newspapers and things like that. So, except maybe for Argentinian people themselves, most people agree to the idea that Person was a dictator.
Jannis and Martine.
April 18th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
yes he had some kind of admiration for fascism which is disgusting. But he did good things too. He is loved, not by me, but yes by old people, workers and poor people who didnt or doesnt care about what he thought but for what he did for them.
April 18th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Also my mother told me that he was ELECTED three times, and then he was overthrown in a military coup in 1955. The thing with foreign people is that they dont understand how a militar con be voted to be president, honestly i think that in argentina its impossible to be repeated after 1976. For example Chavez, you can say what you want about him, but he was ELECTED by the PEOPLE several times, but everyone say that he is a dictator Why? i dont really know but its what cnn love top say. So before say things about him or anyone, its not because of your blog only, but a lot of foreign people write, read a book of argentinean history .
April 19th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Hi Lu,
We agree with you that Peron did good things too, but the only thing we say is that what we noticed is that a lot of Argentinian museums (not only the Evita museum, the Che musuem near Cordoba also shows no critism about Che whatsoever) only seem to adore certain people, without any critism, so a balanced view seems to lack. The fact that somebiody is loved by a lot of people, doesn´t mean that you can´t show any critisism about him/her.
By the way, we have read some history about Argentina while we´re here, and those books all say that Peron was not elected the first time he became president, so at that time (and that´s the time where we talked about in our blog, because Evita was his wife back then) he was a dictator. That´s all we wanted to point out.
Jannis & Martine.