Buenos Aires ain´t Bolivia

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Forget the tourist books:

The books are good to give you a phone number for a hotel to make a reservation, but once you are here for a day just get another hotel and dump the books.

For example all the books tell you to call a taxi by radio, and don't just grab one off the street. That is a crock. All you do is look for one of the taxis from the radio-taxi company on the street and flag him down.

I found that the books send you where all the tourists go. Now mind you I speak spanish fairly well, in fact none of the locals ever guess that I am american, but if you go where the books tell you to go you are going to meet tourists, and not locals, and you are going to pay big bucks to do it.


One of the best parts: Restaurants

I am starting to get a little spoiled. Don´t eat where the tour books tell you to go. Ask taxi drivers, ask waiters where you eat breakfast, ask strangers, just walk down any street and pick a place that looks interesting. If you see americans or europeans in there just keep going. The argentinians have an outrageous number of restaurants that are great. One thing that I noticed is that you have to get off the main street about a block or two to find the great ones. This is better than New Orleans. However there is one big difference New Orleans uses spices and flavours, and sauces. The Argentinians use basic ingredients, almost no spices except cream, cheese, pesto, and salt. However their wines make up for it. Every where you go they have great wines that make the food flavours come out.

Nice Group of restauants where locals eat: Calle Corrientes and Montevideo
Great little breakfast spot: Cafe de me Pais: Tucoman and 25 de Mayo(great coffe, service and fruit salad)


The Flight was the worst part

Well after one of the most uncomfortable airplaine rides of my life we arrived in Buenos Aires. The employees of American Airlines that we dealt with were all good people but I think one of their engineers was using the measurements from a deformed midget when he calculated how much room to give each passenger seat.


Hotels

We had reservations in the Retiro section for the ------ hotel for about $57/night. Their airconditioner shuts off automatically after 2 hours. After not sleeping on the flight, I woke up in a sweat at 2 in the afternoon when the AC cut off. As we were walking out of the lobby of that hotel to look for another hotel, in walked 4 english speaking people wanting to know whether this was a good hotel. They were paying $100 per night for a dumpy hotel

The point is I think the hotels here have issues, and they are outrageosly priced.

We found the Hotel Tucuman Palace, near the corner of Calle Tucuman and Calle Reconquista that was $60/night and at least the AC stayes on.

The location is super-convenient:

Down the street (i.e. Tucuman) there is a real pleasant place on the corner called ´Cafe de Mi Pais´, nice espresso, croissants, and the waiter, Santiago, was a pleasent helpfull gentleman.

Up the street is this ´Locutorio´or telephone/internet store where I am writing this from for $.30/hr to use the computer.

To be honest there are great breakfast places all over the place.

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Photos

San Thelmo Restaurant
Had a pleasent meal here. I need to add the address to this blog so others can check it out.

Hotel Tucuman
They let you lock up your luggage after you check out so you can still go out and do things after checkout without having to lug around all your stuff

Boca - Very Boring and touristy
This area is photogenic, but very boring because everyone there is a tourist.