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Published: October 1st 2011
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So, football aside, we were staying in Palermo Viejo. One of the better parts of the city to stay in we were to discover. The flat was more than comfortable, with a nice balcony high above the leafy street. There was, however, only one washing machine for the entire building, so I was forced to do the washing in the bath, stomping an swooshing like peasants squishing grapes with their feet.
We spent a reasonable amount of time sort of wandering about. Someone had left a TimeOut guide to Buenos Aires in the flat, and it turned out to be quite a good little book. In it there was a tour of the shops. Most of them were too expensive for our tastes, but it did end up taking you on a good tour of the different parts of Palermo and surrounding areas.
This part of the city was simply lovely – tree lined boulevards, flash shops, quirky little boutiques, bars, cafes and restaurants aplenty. There also seemed to be an agreement that good street art will be left where it is, meaning there was tons of great stencils, and graffiti. Not to the standard of Valparaiso, but that
was a special case. It was certainly better than any other city of this size we'd ever seen. You did have to watch the dogs. They weren't stray like Chilean dogs, it was just that everyone seemed to own one, and there didn't seem to be any hard and fast rule about picking up dog poo from the footpath. Dogs need walking, too, but here you could pay someone to do this for you. The dog walkers have long since figured out that there is no way anyone is going to know if they actually walk the beasts, so they congregate at the local parks and just hang out. The dogs probably appreciate it, too – they socialise with their mates and lie in the shade. It makes the park a no go for pedestrians, or at least a no go for pedestrians that like their shoes.
If you've ever stayed in one of these holiday rentals you'll know that somewhere in the place there is generally a stack of random tourist brochures, and this one was no exception. Collected by previous guests, they're generally out of date and uninteresting. One stood out – it had the word 'free'
on it. The “BA Free Tour”. We checked out the details on the interwebs. It was an excellent idea – you do the tour and pay in tips when it's done. We wandered down to the centre of BA and found Teo wearing a green t-shirt and looking shattered – he had tied one on the night before, and was still feeling the effects. Also there were the usual crowd of freeloading backpackers – we recognised each other with friendly nods. But the crowd was more mixed than I expected. There were quite a few well dressed tourists along for the ride.
We spent the next hour or so walking around the centre of BA with Teo and a bunch of other tight arses. The centre was very European, we were told – the Paris of the South. Given neither of us had been to Europe we found the centre very Argentinian. Quite possibly Paris would be the Buenos Aires of the North when we got there.
Teo turned out to be a gold mine of information. From the congress building, the building across the road which is now shut, and populated by squatters, the obelisk, Cafe Torlini
(1858), Palacio Borolo (a building based on Dante's Divine Comedy), to the Plaza de Mayo where the madres de los Desaparecidos march. Then, past the Obelisk, past the pink house made famous by Eva Peron, and a look at Avenida 9 de Julio – popularly believed to be the widest street in the world (it used to be, then Brazil built one wider in Brasilia just because). It needs to be wide as on any given day at least half of it is shut – that day, it was ex-serviceman from the Falklands War period, or the Islas Malvinas, who wanted the same benefits as the combatants. Further along, another street was shut. It may have been a protest about the lack of camping grounds in the city as all I could see were a lot of tents set up in the street. Or perhaps you can camp on the street here.
Along the way, lots of talk about the best football players in the world, the best women, the best meat. Among the other tourists were a guy from Brazil who copped a constant ribbing about Messi being the best footballer in the world (as you might guess
there were hundreds of Messi posters up in BA), and a young doctor from Poland with some very strange ideas about asylum seekers in Australia – apparently the reason he was having difficulty getting a job in Perth was because asylum seekers were taking all the medical jobs in Perth. Couldn't possibly have been that he was a crap doctor, no, not at all....
He had friends in Australia that listen to too much Bolt and Jones. The rest of the tour were Americans who had absolutely no idea who Messi was and didn't get the joke. At the end we paid in tips – you gave whatever you thought the tour was worth, so Teo ended up with quite a bit of beer money.
In an attempt to get into the
porteño lifestyle we didn't drag ourselves out of bed before 11 the following day, then promptly went shopping. Here, in BA, the shopping district was huge – bigger than entire CBDs of most Australian cities. I tired to keep my excitement bottled up and managed, just barely. We had also been told to have a look at San Telmo. Just off the centre, it was rated the
highlight of the city – it's the old core of Buenos Aires, and retains most of the old buildings.
As much as we enjoyed Buenos Aires, we had to be honest about San Telmo. Sure, it was nice, but, really, no better, even not as good, as other old centres we had seen in Latin America. We may have been spoiled by other places, but what was good about BA was not the old stuff – it is the new, it is Plaza Serrano, it is La Bombonera.
We did, however, make the effort to have lunch at a nice restaurant and watch people doing the tango. The food was great, and so was the tango...I guess. I suspect tango is simply not our thing. Whereas the sweaty happy people dancing salsa in Cuba were engaging, maybe even mesmerising, the tango folk were simply formulaic; the music was pretty ordinary and the dancing to stylised and cliched.. Still, they were very good, so we tipped them, as did everyone else in the place except for a group of horrible English upper class tossers too cheap to tip.
Finally, back home, with a long stop at the supermarket
on the corner to buy 2 items. Seriously, the supermarket checkouts in this city were the slowest I had ever seen – at one point it took me an hour to walk the 50 metres up the street and buy some milk.
All in all, though, an excellent town. We commented more than once that this town felt like a place you could live, even if people spoke Spanish with Italian accents and shop assistants gave you death stares if you didn't have the right money.
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