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Published: June 25th 2009
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Okaaaay
He was a real live person (just looked like he had escaped from Madame Tussauds) BA was, as a friend had promised, a wonderful mix of some of Europe's most fun cities - like Paris, Rome and Barcelona wrapped into one. For the first few days we laid low as on arrival Zoe was pretty sick with some kind of virus (which of course had all the matching symptoms of Mexican flu - if we had a pound for every backpacker we have met who is convinced they have had swine flu then we would be very rich). Plus the weather was cold and wet and the heating didn't work in our hostel room. So we moved hostels to one with heating AND a bath tub - cue lots of lovely hot baths and on Zoe's recovery we made up for lost time.
We relaxed straight out of backpacker mode into good old, bad old holiday mode with lots of late nights and long lazy lunches. Zoe lost the plot in the shops and purchased a pair of peep toe heels which will come in very handy for trekking in Peru. But it was hard not to dress up - BA is a party city and so we felt obliged. We headed to Pasha to see
an awesome percussion band Bomba de Tiempo - who didn't
start playing until 3am, hung out in lots of cool folky or jazz music bars in Palermo. Eric befriended the owner's son at the relaxed San Telmo hangout Bar Seddon so we spent plenty of fun nights there. Sundays saw us wandering the San Telmo antiques fair, having a vino on Plaza Dorrego and the very touristy but fun 'safe' part of Boca. For the sake of our marriage we decided not to take any tango classes ("no I'm leading, dammit, get off my foot").
We headed to two footie games both times escorted by 'Maradona' a lookalike who did a great 'hand of god' move. At the Argentina vs Columbia world cup qualifier we saw the man himself and we also saw a Boca Juniors game. This was more to marvel at the insane fans the infamous La 12 - which are the very hardcore supporters. And we got a good language lesson - enthusiastically shouting hijo de puta along with the rest of the fans. It was the first game we've ever seen where the ref and the away team taking corners are protected by riot police holding
shields over them. We had to arrive early to avoid mixing with the really hard core hooligans - La 12s were on the other side of the stadium to us and although they sure looked like they were having a good time we all knew we probably wouldn't survive 5 minutes in there ( in fact we saw this article suggesting the barra brava are now getting in on the tourist act! http://fourfourtwo.com/blogs/argiebargy/archive/2009/05/09/boca-barra-brava-set-up-sightseeing-service.aspx) However the fans of the visiting side San Martin didn't take well to their 3-0 defeat and went on the rampage after the match. We were stuck in the stadium for a good two hours after the match while police helicopters whirled overhead. For that whole two hours the La 12s continued to sing, play drums and set off fireworks. On leaving the stadium we discovered that, not content with pissing over the balcony onto the fans below (we had been warned and stood in the shelter of the balcony), the San Martin fans had chosen to foul all the stairwells making getting out of the stadium a pretty smelly affair.
It seems that football and driving are two areas where the Argentinians go a bit loopy.
Traffic was as mad and bad as we'd seen before - the porteños couldn't beat the Romans for crazy driving but they came fairly close. We had planned to hire tourist bikes (painted bright orange ie TARGET!) but decided we'd prefer to keep all of our limbs intact and live to see another day. An example of a typical Argentinian driver was our cabbie one night. Chatting to him we pretty quickly established that no he didn't like football but loved motor racing, one of his favourite films was 'The fast and the furious' and that he loved 'velocidad 'which he then proceeded to demonstrate to our horror. We love the Argentinians - but when they get behind the wheel they turn into total maniacs.
We ended up spending about two weeks in this great city - staying in hostels in San Telmo, on busy Florida street (a bit like Oxford street - tacky and crazy busy) and finally Palermo. One thing we couldn't get used to was the amount of dog crap in that city - it's knee deep. And the botanical gardens are the hangout of about a million cats (seriously) so not much grows there 'cos that
is full of cat crap.
The smell of cat pee at Recoleta Cemetery (home to BA's famous dead and about 100 cats) was a somewhat disconcerting as already struggling with the strange tomb village and its coffin clad inhabitants. We'd already spent too much time thinking about corpses following our visit to the Evita Museum. This interesting but confusing monument to the lady had left us wondering how her corpse looked that good when they dug it out of a secret grave in Milan about 10 years after her demise. (She was embalmed -our grasp of Argentinian history is a lot better now but we do tend to get stuck on the small detail).
A couple of things we had planned to do but didn't get round to were to head up to Tigre (an out of city weekend spot) and catch the boat to Uruguay for the day. We later met some guys who had visited Uruguay and had a great time, so we kinda wished we had. However that's for next time. Oh and we also forgot to take any good photos...sorry.
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