Brilliant Buenos Aires!

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Now, as you have probably gathered from our past blogs, neither Alice or I are big "city people", however, there is always an exception to the rule and Buenos Aires is it!!

We began in Bariloche, the south american chocolate town and spent a few more days by the lakes and mountains before heading north on our 25 hour bus journey! It was the longest we have done so far and wasn´t without a story, of course! About 7 hours into the journey we came to a blockaded road where protesters had completely shut it off and cutting the south from the north of the country completely! So, we sat on the roadside and watched the sunset over the hills for nearly three hours before the police finally came, put out the fires, moved the trucks, timber and tires blocking the road and we were on our way again!

We finally arrived and headed for the district of Buenos Aires which is most famous for its tango and antiques, where we ended up staying for over a week! We explored what seemed like the entire city over the week and managed to see some live tango, samba street bands, watched a football match (more on that in a bit!), visited the painted neighbourhood of La Boca, saw Eva Peron´s grave and somehow managed to get a free tour of the pink house (government building)...in Spanish...by toy soldiers, and obviously ate lots of steak!

We decided that while in Argentina it would practically be against the law not to watch a football match, and the only one on while we were there was the world cup qualifier between Argentina and Venezuela - also Maradonna´s first official match in charge of the national team! So, we got our tickets and on match day I decided to put aside my feelings about supporting Argentina (and the whole "hand of god" situation..) and give them a shout! It was only fair! The game was played at the 100,000 seater River Plate stadium which seemed full and had a great atmosphere, and we were lucky enough to see them....us......win 4:0! It was a great experience and we both loved it, singing along with the chants where we could understand and just making noise where we couldn´t!

On the other days we headed to La Boca, (the home of Boca Juniors for the football fans out there), to see the neighbourhood of painted houses and vibrant music and tango street shows, did some "antiqueing" in San Telmo, sat in the parks of Palermo, visited the cemetry of the Argentine rich and famous in Recoleta, and found our joint favourite place to eat in the world so far - Freddy´s! Freddy´s was a tiny shop on a cobbled street conveniently opposite our hostel where most of the space was filled with a huge indoor BBQ / Parilla serving the best meat we have ever eaten, the biggest, most juicy slabs of pork, beef or chorizo in bread....or just on a plate on its own! Mega!

Buenos Aires is a colourful, vibrant, friendly and beautiful city and we were sad to leave a week later! We headed to Rosario from there, the birth place of Che Guevara and the Argentina flag to relax for a few and have just arrived in Puerto Iguazu to see the amazing waterfalls that straddle the boarder of Argentina and Brazil, so you can guess what our next blog will include!

Anyway, hope all is well back home, that spring has sprung, and Easter is a chocolatey one!

We will be in touch again soon!

Ally and Alice xx

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