Buenos Aires - The Beginning

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June 17th 2010

Published: November 24th 2010

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The view from our place

Hola peeps! Now I know this is unbelievably out of date, but after a bit of a drunken to-do involving Tom, a pint of beer and our laptop, we had to wait for some guy to remove all of our saved data from the drunken laptop and since then I had forgotten about this to be honest! But I thought it was about time to get back into our blog so here is the first 6 weeks, with a more recent round coming soon!

Buenos Aires, what can I say? We’ve been here about 6 weeks now and have mostly spent that time finding work and an apartment. Both are sorted now and we’re living in a neighbourhood called Abasto, really central and in the heart of tango land with tango clothes shops, shows and dance schools all in the honour of Carlos Gardel, the forefather of tango in Buenos Aires. Our cobbled street, Zelaya, is quite quaint yet full of theatres and cultural centres – pretty amazing considering it’s only 2 blocks long. Since we’ve been here there’s been a street party with a big burning fire, a band recording themselves playing at midnight, as well as kids playing

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The other view from our place

football and the local taxi mechanics cooking their lunch on a BBQ outside their workshop everyday. There’s a real community feel and although we were warned Abasto can be dangerous, we haven’t seen anything to back this up. The only slightly crazy thing is walking to work in the morning and the local transvestite bar still pumping out music at 8am. Bizarre! Oh, and Ian has witnessed a young kid pick pocketing someone and a car being stolen off the street...but that’s just normal city life, isn’t it! It really is nothing compared to Guayaquil. Here people walk on the streets, sit outside bars and cafes, go and sit in the many parks to enjoy the sunshine and go shopping outside of malls without fear of being robbed at gunpoint.

There are many more comparisons I can make with our life in Guayaquil. For starters, while this is a city of music and music lovers with heaps of great buskers on the streets and Subte (metro) and the chance to see live music anywhere, anytime, people here just don't dance. Guayaquil, and Ecuador as a whole, was a place full of people itching to get up on the dance

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Our street!

floor (or anywhere they had enough space to move in fact) and dance, with no shame or fear of embarrassment. You were the odd bod if you were sitting down while everyone else wiggled their hips. Here, however, people are ashamed of what others will think and so dancing is confined to tango classes and big electronic clubs. Shame. I also miss the music blaring from the buses in Guayaquil, albeit it musica romantica and reggaeton on constant repeat. But Portenos are good at street parties, as well as putting on massive artistic displays in the plazas during holiday times and protesting of course. Some old war boys even have a permanent camp set up in Plaza de Mayo in remembrance of all those who have fought and lost their lives in wars and the Madres de la Plaza, who have gathered every week fot eh last 30 years in tribute to the deseparecidos, their adult kids who disappeared during the military reign, most likely kidnapped and murdered at the hands of the armed forces.

Nightlife here is also pretty different to what we knew and loved in Guayaquil. There are places to drink everywhere but no one really

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The colourful streets of Abasto

goes out until after midnight so by the time we’ve done our typical pre-bar drinking as Brits do, we’re hammered and I never manages to get past 2am! But the booze is cheap – one litre for 66pence and wine is maximum £3. Dangerous! As for eating, we think the food is pretty good, nothing amazing but good. The thing here is meat. Meat, meat and more meat. They do fantastic parillas and asados, which is basically a BBQ. Although our friend Tom has actually done the best BBQs so far (foolishly set himself up for a whole year of hosting BBQs now!) There are also Tenedor Libres which are all you can eat places and the one we went to (Siga La Vaca, literally translated “Follow the Cow”) was A-MA-zing – £12 for meat (of all kinds, from steak to intestines) and a buffet packed full of salads, pastas, potatoes, cold meats, cheese, bread and vegetables, with a free bottle of wine thrown in for each person as well as dessert. It really is good. But it helps if you’re a boy with a massive appetite. All the girls did pretty poorly when we went while the boys had

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Our cobbled street!

about 4 helpings each. Good work chicos! Portenos are also huge coffee drinkers so there’s no shortage of cafes with good coffee (Ecuador, take note! No jars of Nescafe plonked on the table!) and they’re also big sweet lovers with the best thing being alfajores, a biscuit type chocolaty baked snack that comes in all flavours - dulce de leche, nut, dark, milk or white chocolate – and you can buy both the traditional type or ones with a modern twist courtesy of Milka and Cadbury. Mmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmm! One downside though is the lack of tasty, exotic fruit like you can get in Ecuador. Here you’re pretty much limited to bog standard apples, pears and bananas, and then for an extortionate price things like strawberries and kiwis. No chirimoya (custard apple), pitahaya (dragon fruit), tuna (prickly pear), maracuya or oritos (sweet baby bananas). I miss batitdos (fruit milkshakes) and fresh jugos! And you can’t get a cheap almuerzo (lunch) for love nor money. That’s one thing we definitely miss for sure, a tasty 2-course almuerzo for the bargain price of $1.50.

But Buenos Aires does do culture well. Portenos are a well read bunch and there are book shops

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everywhere. There’s also an abundance of theatres, although I have been told that something called “Magazine Theatre” is the most popular, which is apparently a rather base form of comedy where most of the woman are near naked...might give that one a miss. But there are the more serious lovey-dovey plays to watch if we desire. They also love shopping, as most South Americans seem to, although it doesn’t only revolve around massive shopping centres with huge food courts. There are areas for everything you need – the electrical area, the cheap clothes zone, the ski/snowboard shop street, even the mannequin crossroads I found the other day. Never really thought about where shop owners buy their mannequins but now I know. Our closest shopping centre is Abasto, set in an amazing building which was originally an old market hall. The food court inside is amazing also with a full size big wheel, mini roller coaster and huge play zone for the kids and is always packed out. And in Palermo, the posher part of town, there are lots of funky boutiques and arty markets selling some very cool stuff. Having not been paid yet though, we haven’t been able to

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Carlos Gardel, the god father of tango

experience the shopping experience. Roll on pay day!

Not everything is sweetness and light here though and some of the negatives include streets absolutely covered in dog crap. People here are dog lovers but apparently haven’t realised how gross and frustrating it is to have to keep your head down constantly to dodge their doggie do-do. This might also have something to do with the fact that most Portenos don’t actually walk their own dogs during the week – a well-paid and popular profession here is dog walking. You’ll see guys walking down the streets with up to 10 dogs on the lead, usually dressed up in some ridiculous clothing (the dogs, not the walker!). These guys aren’t just bums with nothing better to do – they’re often vets or other such professional people who are also expected to look after the dogs health. And they get paid more for doing this than if they worked in a veterinarian. Another problem on the streets are the numerous loose paving stones you tread on that then throw up a load of trapped water and gunk, wetting your feet for the rest of the day. Most irritating first thing in the

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Avenida de Mayo, over 20 lanes wide in parts!

morning on the way to work.

A hard fact to deal with is the number of homeless people you see on the streets. Since we’ve been here there’s been a real cold snap so most of these people sleep during the day, often near hot air vents from business and restaurants, while trying to keep warm, and alive, at night when the temperature plummets. There are also lots of kids who work the Subte, trailing up and down the carriages, giving the passengers hi-5’s while trying to get some money to feed their families. The problem here is that following the economic downturn in 2001 many people lost their jobs and were forced into moving to areas now known as Villas, where the standard of living is low and it’s not the kind of place you want to go wandering around.

We both pass the Villas on the way to one of the company’s we work at, which we have to get to by bus. Which in itself is ok, a one way trip is less than 20p and there are over 200 bus routes in the city, making it a well-serviced place to travel around. However, the

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Beautiful BA architecture

bus drivers are nuts, driving like they rule the road, extremely close to pedestrians on the narrow street pavements and there are often reports in the news of people having been mowed down. The buses in Guayaquil were pretty crazy but I don’t think I remember hearing about people getting killed by buses that are rushing to keep to a schedule. The mental travel issues aren’t restricted to the overground transport either, as the rush hour on the Subte is just unbelievable. You get completely squished, pushed about and trampled on if you happen to be unlucky enough to be travelling during the “Hora de Pique”. One good thing at least is that there isn’t a BO issue here, or at least not in winter anyway!

The whole travelling around the city for work is quite different for us as we’re not based in just one school, seeing the same people every day and forming bonds like we did in Ecuador. Here, the only option is to work for an institute that sends you to different companies around the city so it is a much more independent style of working. I do miss the camaraderie of working in team

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Meeting up with the old Guayaquil crew, Del Mar and Nick

and feel that opportunities to make real friends here will not be as easy as in Guayaquil. Not only on a gringo front, but also with Argentineans themselves. In Guayaquil, we saw most of our students every day for classes and so a rapport and relationship built up much more quickly there. Here, you often only see your students once, maybe twice a week, and so the whole getting to know you process is going to take much longer. I also feel that what with Buenos Aires being such a huge city, there isn’t quite the same ease of forming friendships like there was in Guayaquil, which, while a big city, had a much smaller town vibe.

But we’ll see. By the time I write again we will have been living here a while longer and feeling more settled.

Time to see what Buenos Aires has to offer...

Hasta luego chicos! x

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