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Published: July 30th 2006
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Buenos Aires
I thought it was about time that i finally updated the blog because it has been a while and if i leave it much longer i will have forgotten what we actually did while we were there. Also sorry about the title - i couldnt resist so please stifle those groans.
We arrived at Buenos Aires airport at around 10pm and were immediately informed that we would have to wait for an hour for our coach which would then take a further hour to reach the hostel. It was a little annoying not because we were tired, but because its not nice to have to arrive somewhere and then immediately have to go to sleep. We were very wrong with that particular assumption however. We arrived at the hostelonly to be told that our reservation had been messed up and that there was no record of us whatsoever. Which was a little annoying as we had a twin room booked and after being in dorms its nice to be able to spread your stuff out a little bit etc, anyway there were no twin rooms left, and so after swiftly rejecting a double (despite leons protestations) we
found ourselves in another dorm. As was mentioned before we were wrong about the having to go straight to bed as the bar was alive and kicking downstairs much to our delight, anyway one thing lead to another and we ended up rolling home from a bar round the corner at 6am. It pretty much set the tone for our time in Buenos aires.
Woke up late the next day and decided that we should take the standard mapless stroll around the city and hope that we would find something of interest and not get lost. It was a really pleasant change from being in rio, as in rio there is very little in the way of architecture of any interest. its also a very European city and I had to keep reminding themself that i was in South America. Not least because it was winter and quite cold. Anyway our little stroll bore little fruit so we returned to the hostel and booked ourself our tango show for the evening. The show cost 120 pesos (24 quid) which is obviously a lot on a travellers budget, but inlcuded drinks, a meal and the show so we thought that
we could afford to stretch our wallets a little. It almost all ended in disaster straight away when we thought that other people from the hostel were going to the same show, and so we blindly followed them only to discover that it was something completely different and in the wrong part of town. We did however eventually find our way to the correct place albeit a little late. The building was stunning and we were greeted with a champagne reception and canapes which made me immediately feel ridiculously under dressed. Next we were shown up to another room where we would have dinner and see the show. The meal was very well presented, and although (me being me) i didnt eat it, i was informed by the person i gave it to on the next table that it tasted very good. The show was enjoyeable although i must admit that i dont really have much of a point of reference to make that assertion. I do however suspect that it was very much packaged for the tourist so that it was easily enjoyeable rather than an amazing display of tango abiltity, but that was probably much better as a
first taste.
Just want to warn at this point that I am going to be employing a little bit of artistic license as to the exact timing of certain events, as i am writing most of this about 2 weeks after the things in question happened and so to say the least its a little bit hazy. Especially as in Buenos Aires it was a little difficult to tell whether it was day or night sometimes.
Anyway -- the next day (probably!) we decided to take on one of the city tours by bus. These arent usually my cup of tea because, you tend to spend the whole day stuck on the back of a cramped little bus, getting out for the odd 2 or 3 minutes here and there to take the odd photo. To be honest this was pretty much the case (except I didnt have my camera with me). It did however allow us to get our bearings, which was obviously going to prove quite useful given our previous little excursion around the city.
Ive just realised that this is actually getting pretty boring and if i continue listing every little thing that i
did while is was there it will only get much worse. so heres the abridged version:
As i mentioned before, tango is pretty central to whole Buenos Aires tourist experience, and as we had already been to a show the next stage was to attempt a lesson. Which having never attempted anything similar before was actually quite a big deal to me personally. The evening we booked featured a one hour lesson and then the rest of evening in a Tango club (gulp!). Luckily we seemed to spend most of the first part of the evening walking to the tango lesson, which although was good because it delayed having to face the reality of dancing was also rather annoying because it was about half an hours walk and would have cost pence each if we had got in a taxi. After an extensive tour of the palermo streets, which did rather interestingly include a wide variety of hotels that were bookable by the hour, we did eventually reach the place for the lesson. It was in a small scout hut type uilding in the centre of a courtyard, with a ludricously large amount of people of different abilities cramped into a tiny space. Luckily for me there were a significant enough amount of us novices so that we were decently represented. And probably even more importantly was that the girls that we would be dancing with were of the same ability as us (i.e. none). It was actually pretty good fun, although naturally i was pretty useless. The wierdest thing though is how unatural it is to be that close to a complete stranger, and as a result you become really chatty and start cracking jokes rather than taking it seriously. The upshot of this though was that all the british in the room made such a cacophany of noise that the music was barely audible, which I'm sure was not overly appreciated by the more advanced dancers in the class. Having finished the class, we had a quick bite to eat which provided me with another opportunity to embarass myself in front a different group of people about my rather limited diet, and then headed onto the club. As soon as i walked in realised how terrible it was going to be, as the dance floor itself was in the centre of the mass of tables was also rather on the small side. So not only were we going to be scrutinesed by everyone in there we were also going to have to spend all our energies making sure that we didnt bump into any people. I'll spare you the gory details, and just leave it that its safe to say that i was one of the greatest theyve ever seen.
We went on a tour of the Boca Juniors stadium, which is called the Bombonera which is the spanish for candy box as apparently it is shaped as such. No matter how hard i have tried to look at though i still havent managed to see the resemblence (theres a photo - for yourself). I actually enjoyed looking round here far more than i did the maracana, but maybe that was just down to expectation. Unfortunately we werent able to get to see Boca play (although the team was on our plane to Chile), but luckily we were able to see another Buenos Aires team called Velez play against the Mexican team Deportivo Guadalajara in the Copa de Liberatores, which was pretty special.
Anyway i'm gonna wrap this up now because its taken me absolutely ages to write this and its probably getting rather boring. Buenos Aires was a great city to visit, but it really was a place with dramatic contrasts although not in the same way as Rio. It was a definitely a very modern a progressive city, but on the other side you could see that the Economic problems shortly after the turn of the Millenium had really taken there toll. As you could walk around the streets and see children sleeping in the rubbish piles that seemed to be everywhere. It was however somewhere i would definitely like to visit again.
Tom 07/06
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