Dancing in the street

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After happily surviving Iguazu, my original plan was to head to on to the brasilian coast and spend a few days there before heading down to Uruguay again. But then, having stayed in Montevideo for an entire month and not having seen Buenos Aires - only a short 200km swim away across the Rio de la Plata - seemed just not acceptable. So instead of going to Brasil, I took a nightbus to Buenos Aires, city of Tango (and much much more), arriving just in time to enjoy a wonderfully sunny sunday on the streets of San Telmo.

It´s (sometimes hotly, sometimes amiably) disputed whether Tango has argentinian or uruguayan roots - Carlos Gardel seems a born Uruguayan but went to Argentina to invent Tango; I've also heard that he was actually born in France, so it´s all a bit hazy - but it´s a fact that Buenos Aires is the only place I know where they actually dance Tango on the streets. In fact, there is a lot of music in the streets in Buenos Aires, especially San Telmo (and apparently in La Boca, Palermo, Recoleta....but I only had one sunday and spent that happily in San Telmo). Between a million street vendors trying to sell anything from artsy Tango photos to handknitted woollen scarves to their great-grandmother's best tea set to a million Porteños (people from Buenos Aires) and approximately two million tourists, there are always a few people dancing Tango, picking their guitar or putting their piano on the street to do a little show with 22 of their closest bandoneon- and violin-playing friends. Fantastic. I could probably happily spend the rest of my sundays in Buenos Aires. See photos.

Monday was much less fun, mostly because it rained all day long and my shoes got wet first thing in the morning. Walking around a whole day in wet shoes is not fun, especially when you know that it is your only pair of shoes and they take three days to dry in a hostel without heating. So I actually had to take my tango class in the evening in socks - which was probably better than taking it in hiking boots anyway. It was great fun, and having the teacher lead me made dancing tango feel like one of the easiest things in the world. For a moment I felt like this was the start of my career as a famous tango dancer, but then I remembered that I would probably need more than one class for that, but that by the time the next class comes around, I would already be back in boring old Europe. Hmpf. There goes my Tango career.

I briefly considered staying in Buenos Aires for the rest of my life - maybe it is my fate to become a famous tango dancer, and you shouldn´t stand in the way fate - but actually, Buenos Aires is not a city to do nothing in. By tuesday, I was bored of running around as a tourist, and since exchanging a weekly tango lesson for a fantastic job with my favourite NGO in Brussels seemed more than just slightly demented, I decided to move on.

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