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Published: August 4th 2013
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We arrived in Buenos Aires (BA) less than a week after local boy Jorge Bergoglio was appointed the 266th pope, becoming Francisco I. Posters around the city streets and magazines proclaimed "Dios Eligió a un Argentino!" ("God chose an Argentinean!") In the few days since he had been appointed already street vendors were selling posters with images of the new pope. The square outside the national cathedral was decked in banners with the Argentinean colours, billboards, posters, film crews and large screens. All of this was in preparation for the Pope's opening address scheduled for that evening.
With nearly 14 million people, BA is big - that's London and New Zealand's populations added together. It is set up in a huge grid pattern with various significant neighbourhoods (called "barrios") with different characters. By extreme good luck my boss in London is half-Argentinean and has a flat in the beating heart of the city in the barrio Microcentro. Every morning Maria Chiara would chat with the porters at the entrance to our apartment building before we found a place to have coffee and croissants amongst the office workers. We were struck by how European B.A. feels. This is the way the
locals like it, apparently. Parisian architecture and a Barcelona vibe with wide boulevards, gardens and galleries. We found small elegant cafés and larger ones in the middle of town with a fin de siecle faded grandeur.
Our favourite barrio had to be Palermo Soho. These areas were a paradise for BA's professionals and hipsters, filled with music and clothes store and remarkably slick bars. For anyone (like me) who needs to buy a pair of cuff-links the Spanish phrase for "Do you sell cuff-links?" is "Tiene gemelos?". My other piece of advice is don't bother as the cuff-links are ridiculously expensive in Palermo Soho.
Two more luxury items in BA are graveyards and buses. Recoleta Cemetary is famously the burial place of Evita, along with most other eminent locals. The graves were more like houses - each one containing tombs in the basement level with coffins stacked one over the other. The buses were incredible - they were like something out of 1950s USA: all chrome and racing stripes, tassles and stickers. I don't think anyone would call a bus here a "loser cruiser" - this was a stylish way to travel!
Perhaps BA's biggest claim to
fame is being the crucible of Tango. Invented in seedy haunts by immigrant Italian and Spanish workers, it spread outwards about a hundred years ago and became a worldwide sensation. In the boho barrio of St. Elmo we found a small square with market stalls, outdoor bars and busking tango dancers. We also made the difficult decision to do the ultimate touristy option of watching a tango show. A mini-bus picked us up from our flat and drove us across town to goodness knows where to an old, cavernous, purpose-built restaurant for a theatrical, touristic, tango extravaganza. After a classic Argentinean meal comprising steak and malbec had been served to us by a remarkably neat waiter, the show began. A band included drums, guitars and accordion, four tango-dancing couples and two very hammy singers, one of each gender. It was cheesy at times, oh yes, but the band was top-notch and the dancing was extremely impressive - so in the end we had no regrets. Considering Maria-Chiara's passion for Latin dance, I was just relieved she didn't force me to try to dance in a tango lesson!
The typical BA view that I had in my head before being
there was of houses and shanty towns painted in bright multi-colours. In fact it is one particular area where this has always been done, La Boca. Boat workers working at the nearby port would smuggle paint used for ships and use it to paint their own houses. Nowadays the boat workers have gone but the tradition lives on, though entirely for the benefit of tourists! After walking through some fairly seedy streets we reached an area with graffiti - wildy varied, mostly of very high quality and often on a gigantic scale, and beyond this point the tourist trap began. Life-sized effigies of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, so many restaurants and buskers playing live music that one tune would blend and clash into another, and inumerable shops selling postcards, key rings, hats and various other touristic tat. The restaurant we found for lunch involved some fascinating people-watching and the only bad wine we drank in the entire three week holiday!
Very luckily we managed to visit Uruguay on a day trip. I say "luck" because we very nearly missed out. We went to the ferry building at the port to buy our tickets for the next day, only
to find they were sold out, and the next day the same - because our trip coincided with Easter. Then I suggested: let's go now! The only flaw in this idea was that we didn't have our passports - we hadn't prepared for a spontaneous border-hop. What followed was a mad dash in inappropriate footwear back to our flat, fighting against the clock to pick up our documents and get back in time for a 1pm boat for Uruguay. Along with the heat, what made this particularly stressful (and strange) was that each way we had to cross a picket line where a large crowd of protesting middle-aged men were not only drumming and chanting but letting off incredibly loud explosions every minute or so. After that, we were pretty relieved to escape BA for the day. We got our boat, and after a 50km crossing over the Rio de la Plata we arrived in Colonia del Sacramento. It was so relaxed here that it was a struggle to stay awake. This suited us just fine!
The only major incident in our few hours in Uruguay was my first sighting in many years of possibly my favourite fruit: the
feijoa! For the benefit of those who are unaware of this fruit, let me tell you: you need to try these! They are the size of a hen's egg, green and hard on the outside. You cut them open and eat the soft tasty insides with a teaspoon. In NZ these grow on trees in abundance and large swaithes of the population gorge themselves silly from March to mid-May. Since I've lived in the U.K. I haven't seen or eaten a feijoa in six long years, and so when I saw these feijoas I went mental. Mental enough to choose to smuggle a significant number back over the border to Argentina. I have no regrets - I think most Kiwis would understand.
By the time we finally left BA, having travelled the country from Patagonia in the south to beyond the tropic of Capricorn in the North, three weeks had past. By this time, to accompany your Pope Francis poster you could also buy pope-themed T-shirts, mugs and fridge magnets. We weren't too bothered about these items and instead left the country with industrial quantities of dulce de leche (Argentinean caramel) which after a few short weeks in London
disappeared remarkably quickly. We are still suffering withdrawal symptoms!
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