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Published: January 12th 2015
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At 10.30am I went on a free walking tour around Buenos Aires lasting 4 hours mainly looking at the buildings. My plan for today was to get a quick tour of the main sights and then decide which ones to visit in more depth when I return to BA in February. Today felt like a real victory because I’d managed to walk and find my way from my hostel to the city centre and arrive more or lesson on time in the humid heat. I did the tour in Spanish with a local and was pleasantly surprised to find I could understand just about every detail about the Argentinian history and the only major obvious difference between Argentinian Spanish and Spanish from Spain to me was the pronunciation of ll as j, so they would say ‘’Me jamo’ instead of ‘me llamo’ and ája’ or ácha’ instead of álla’. Being able to speak Spanish has left me feeling right at home in this city and I don’t feel so far from Europe at all. YET.
I was intrigued and inspired today and had a question for the tour guide after every sight we saw. We began at Plaza
Estado del Vaticano on the corner of Libertad and we ended at the cemetery in Recoleta at Eva Peron’s tomb. All of the architecture was influenced by either the Spanish, the Italians, the French, the English or the Jews during the years of immigration from Europe. In fact it felt like I had done a tour of Europe in four hours. Some of the architecture was Neoclassical, one was Victorian and several were old houses of the elite society or aristocracy of Argentina which once belonged to the richest families and were then sold off as public property in 1928 when the families could no longer pay the expensive bills due to the Wall street Crash. These houses were designed in a French style at a time when the Argentinians were no longer interested in Spain as it was considered a backward country and instead were interested in French style as France was seen as a progressive, chic and forward looking country. We saw many plazas servings as memorials to key points in history such as memorials to those who died in the Falklands war or in other wars with Europe, we saw the French embassy which today was full
of people paying tributes to the French citizens who died in the terrorist attacks and we saw sights related to key figures in history such as San Martin who liberated Argentina and Eva Peron. Most plazas, streets and buildings here are named after European cities.
In the afternoon I was so satisfied by my tour that I spent an hour or two having a siesta and dreaming of the history of Argentina. I am now ready to hunt down some food. I think in this heat I will be getting up very early, eating very lightly, drinking lots of water and having long siestas in the afternoon between seeing sights, eating dulce de leche on toast for breakfast and avoiding wine for a while.
In the evening I ate a delicious Napolitana Pizza from the Pizzeria. Here in Buenos Aires there are pizzerias on almost every corner of the streets due to the italian influence.
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