Buenos Aires part 2

---

I´m glad I gave Buenos Aires a second chance. The first time I was there (in mid-January) it was so terribly hot and humid that it was hard to enjoy my time there. Plus, I think I was in major culture shock.

I spent 6 nights in B.A. this time, at the Terrazes Estoril hostel on Ave. de Mayo, a very nice hostel with a rooftop terrace. I was hoping that the higher price would attract more of an "older" crowd, but it didn´t really. However I met a few cool people there. The only problem is, once you meet a nice person there´s a pretty good chance they´re about to take off for another city! So you need to try not to get too attached and always expect the unexpected. One good aspect of having a terrace at a hostel is that you can usually do yoga in the morning on the terrace without being disturbed, which was great... I was badly in need of some stretching.

My week in B.A. had a few highlights. I went to La Boca for the second time and really enjoyed some of the more dramatic tango performances at the local cafes. I went into the famous bookstore, Atteneo Grand Splendid, which is located inside a huge old theatre, accompanied by a really nice girl from Waterloo Ontario (small world!)

On Sunday I went to a church service with a few other hostellers at one of the only Presbyterian churches in town (there are mostly Catholic churches here.) I understood about 50% of the service... the beginnings and endings of the sentences, mostly! It was a very laid-back affair, only about 25 people in the congregation although it was a huge, beautiful old church. The minister just wore a plain suit, and the caretaker who carried the offering to the front wore jeans. Funny!

Singing a few hymns at church really made me miss singing, so after the service I asked around to find out if they would allow me to practice in the church. I spoke to the caretaker, and he said that, as long as the church committee agreed, that it would be fine! So he told me to come back Tuesday at 3 pm.

Well, I didn´t really want to stay in B.A. that much longer, but the chance of being able to sing in that huge church was too hard to pass up! So my plans started shifting in order for me to stay until then.

Sunday afternoon I went to the famous outdoor market in San Telmo, when there are dozens of streets lined with artisan stalls and antiques for sale. There were plenty of excellent buskers playing live music, including a tango orchestra made up of a group of young, bohemian-looking musicians. There were three accordions, un upright bass, some violins, a singer and an upright piano - somehow they had wheeled an upright piano into the streets!

I also really enjoyed a one-man-show by a puppeteer. He had his marionette perform a cathartic dance to a very mournful song about life and loneliness. The marionette was holding a bottle of liquor and kept collapsing onto the "stage" in despair, and burying his head in his hands when the music became particularly poignant. At one point, the marionette was hanging off the end of the stage and was making a pathetic attempt to clamber back up... hilarious!

I discovered that one of the guys at my hostel had a little wee electric piano, and knew some Cole Porter tunes. So we went through a few tunes that night at the hostel. Too bad I can never remember all the lyrics!

On Monday I went to the Recoleta Cemetery to see Evita´s grave - pretty much dwarfed by the other huge graves, some of which are about half the size of a small home and are as ornate as a church.

Tuesday I discovered that there is a huge Ecological Reserve in downtown B.A., so I went for a very peaceful walk there - felt like I was nowhere near the city! Then, it was time for my rendez-vous with the church. It was quite funny: I rang the doorbell of the church office and a teenage boy answered and let me into the church - turns out he was the caretaker´s son. He showed me to the piano, and opened it up for me, but he seemed keen on conversing with me about every manner of topic: music, different composers, my travel plans. I kept thinking that I would start practicing, but then he would ask me another question. I didn´t want to be rude; after all, I was a guest in this church, and they were doing me a pretty big favour. Generally in Canada you need to pay to use a church´s facilities for a few hours. Finally, he said to me (in Spanish): "Are you self-conscious to start singing? Because you´re not singing, you´re only talking!" Funny. Sometimes you just have to chalk up these experiences to cultural differences. So I did sing, for a good 1.5 hours, and it felt really good after all this time. The caretaker very kindly told me that I could come again to practice anytime I want. Of course, I had already bought my bus ticket for Salta the next day, but it was nice to know that the invitation was there.

Tuesday night I met up with a really nice girl from England who had a pleasing accent - later I found out she had studied at Oxford! Fond memories of all the episodes of "Inspector Morse" I´ve watched, I guess. We were both interested in checking out a tango show. In the end we went to a venue in San Telmo which was wonderfully non-touristy, a hangout for locals called Torquata Tasso. We heard the tail end of an EXCELLENT tango orchestra, and in that moment I realized: Wow! I need to check out this tango music. There were some really crunchy chords, cool harmonies... I guess up until then I´d only been hearing the touristy, showy stuff. Tango music can be really intense, almost violent. After the orchestra there was a tango singer. She sang what seemed to be a lot of famous tango ballads, accompanied by a guitar player, and on 3 occasions, accompanied by a couple of tango dancers. It wasn´t until I saw these 2 dancers that I finally understood what tango was all about. Even just to see them take their starting pose - it was so intense! Smouldering! The intimacy, the passion, the connection, all happening within this very smooth, totally improvised, liquidy dance. I realized then that the tango I´d seen before was pretty "flashy," not the real thing.

So, the next day I took a tango class! I had half a day free before catching my bus, and I found a tango school that seemed to have a class open to all levels, so I thought: well, my level is level 0! It turned out that everyone there had previous experience besides me, but ah well, it was an experience. We had to keep switching partners and the men were all very polite and understanding even though I was like a wet noodle. For me, it was so strange, because although I´ve had 14 years of dance training, all of my previous dancing was very rhythmic: you count the beats, you learn what steps go on which beat, and voila! You´re dancing. But with tango, no such thing. It´s all about feeling the dance, and (as a woman) allowing the man to lead into whatever steps or directions or combinations he wishes. Well, I think it would take me many more lessons to get to that point, but I´m glad I went!

I ended up dancing a lot of the time with a very short Italian dentist who was from "outside Milan." I think he was relieved to dance with me because he was more of a beginner than the others. Afterwards, he invited me out for coffee at Cafe Tortoni - the oldest and most famous cafe in town - so how could I refuse! I drank the best hot chocolate I had ever tasted (it came with two metal pitchers: one with very sweet hot chocolate, and the other with hot milk) and you were supposed to mix the 2 at will. I also ate the African Cake, a homemade chocolatey cake filled with the famous Dulce de Leche that Argentina is famous for. The dentist and I agreed that I should brush my teeth afterwards 😊 My Italian friend was very hyper and was also a musician in his free time - a singer and guitar player - so he talked quite frantically about music and singing over the course of the afternoon. He is really into a method called "Speech-Level Singing" which he urged me to check out.

In the end, it was a very entertaining and quintessentially Buenos Aires-ish way to spend my last day there.

---

Photos

Inebriated puppet
It doesn´t get sadder than this.

A very fancy "tombstone"
There were hundreds more like this!