Buenos Dias, Buenos Aires!

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So back on the trail after a few weeks break back in London and Scotland, great to see family and friends again, but glad to leave behind the foul spring weather. This part of the trip will only be 4 months long and is designed to be a bit different from our first sight-seeing-top-heavy 6 months. This time we’ve factored in a 4 week language school in Argentina, where we will be living in separate homestays (living with local people) and 4 weeks volunteering 10,000ft up in the Andes teaching English and again staying with local folks. Sightseeing won’t be forgotten as we’ve booked a tour into the Amazon rainforest and we’ll be travelling overland through the salt lakes of Bolivia and up to the Mayan ruins of Guatemala.

Now (23rd April) we’re in Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, the 8th largest country in the world. Our hotel is situated right in the heart of things on the Avenida de Mayo, 5 floors above the 24hr racket of a million buses, taxis and cars. I’d forgotten how dingy hotel rooms can be, can’t they just put up one nice picture on the wall or have a wee vase of flowers on the side? For £10 per night you expect a bit of class, know what I mean?

Denise has been excelling at her Spanish (which she did at school), although she has a tendency to break into fluent English when flustered. Communication has been difficult as this is the first country we’ve encountered where hardly anyone speaks English and even fewer want to speak English (and why should they when they have the 3rd most popular language in the world!).

Last night (22nd) we went to the Opera at one of the finest Opera Houses in the world, a huge edifice 6 floors high (guess where our seat was?). Everyone was dressed up in their fineries and I too matched them with my Vietnamese hand-woven silk shirt, only slightly letting myself down with my dirty trainers! Don’t know what the opera was but there was too much singing and not enough action. Lovely band but let down by a lack of guitar solos a la Jimi Hendrix, Alex Leifson, Ben MacDonald…. Anyway waves of yawns hit us, and concerned that we might topple over the edge of the balcony on to the unsuspecting over-appreciative and, I have to say, over-dressed audience thousands of feet below in the stalls, we made a hasty exit at the half-way mark.

Buenos Aires has loads of great cafes and eating out is incredibly cheap. We’ve had loads of toasties, not because they’re nice but because it’s the only thing we understand on the menu (‘tostados’)! People here are very political, there was a huge anti-government march down our street the day we arrived and there’s political graffiti everywhere (mainly communist) and Che Guevara’s image is omnipresent.




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