Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Colonia Del Sacramento (Uruguay)


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South America » Argentina » Buenos Aires » Buenos Aires
February 2nd 2016
Published: June 26th 2016
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Buenos Aries (Arg) -Colonia Del Sacramento (Uruguay) - La Plata (where we saw the Rolling Stones)


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Presidential palace
(Behind in my blog, so going to post 3 at a time!)

Buenos Aires was the starting point of our South America trip – and it was a great place to start – a very cool city with a European feel.

We started off in an area of the town called San Telmo – which is a bit of a run-down area that used to be lively back in the day. It is very nice though – just a little older and run-down.

The one thing that San Telmo is most famous for is it’s massive street market on Sundays. By massive I mean like 2km of market stalls! We went there to check it out more than once. It was pretty good. In fact I – who generally hate markets – bought more things than Emily, so it must have been good...

At the bottom of the market is an old square, where they have a free Tango show at the end of the Sunday market. We grabbed some food and drinks in a nearby bar and checked it out – a LOT of people doing Tango!

Tango is an old Argentinean dance solely practiced
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Kids playing football, street art outside La Boca stadium
in Buenos Aires. It is pretty much dead with the newer generation of Argentinians and kept alive just for the sake of tourists. Things kept alive just for the sake of tourists mainly are things that I tend to avoid like the plague...

We did a lot of walking in BA – aside from just exploring the city ourselves, we went on 4 different walking tours! BA is a great city for walking around – full of plenty of parks and cafes. You just have to be careful about where you’re walking – not because it’s dangerous (like any city it has its bad areas but we walked around so many areas and it’s as safe as any major city) but because of dog shit!

We initially thought that Argentinean dog walkers must not pick up after their pets but we later discovered that what people do is just let their dogs out in the morning when they go to work to run around by themselves all day... So there is a little more to avoid than most cities...

The first walking tour we did the host brought his guitar and sang a bunch of songs in
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BA from the boat to Colonia Del Sacramento
Spanish. Random. The second was much better, ran by a guy called Martine who was very passionate about the city, the history and the politics. I wasn’t really aware of the current economic issues in Argentina – where they are going through really bad inflation (and have been for a long time now) - north of 40% at present - making living there very hard for local people – you can find that the price of a loaf of bread doubles every month or so.

The history is that of a Government running for the wealthy in the country – with one exception: Peron and his wife Eva (Evita). So people did and still love them both (unless you’re rich).

Anyway, people find ways around it and try to get on with life but it must be tough when the money you are making is actually worth less... One thing they do is try to get U.S. dollars to 'hedge' against the falling Argentinian Peso. So you can often get a better exchange rate on the streets that you can in banks!

Another couple of walking tours we did were La Boca – another historic area of
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Colonia Del Sacramento, Uruguay
BA famous for the colourful buildings that immigrants living there created, as well as the football stadium – and a ‘Graffiti Tour’ looking at street art across the city.

I wanted to go to a Boca Juniors or River Plate football game but tickets are incredibly expensive because both teams have more season ticket holders than seats... Next time.

However, we did manage to see 70,000 Argentinians in a football stadium as Emily got tickets to the Rolling Stones – who were playing in BA – for her birthday!

What we did not realise was that they weren’t really playing BA but a place called ‘La Plata’ 100km from BA. So we almost missed the gig but got there in the end. Argentinean crowds are a lot of fun – a lot of singing and chanting – they create a great atmosphere. I can see why the football crowds are so famous...

Of course, we sampled the night-life in BA. The best night we had was when we – alongside our new friends Peter (Kiwi) and D’Arcy (Canadian) – ‘gate-crashed’ a pub crawl full of Argentinians and met a bunch of locals to have some drinks
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Just a small lunch...
with. We ended up at this ridiculous night-club which was jammed and must have been 4 floors each with 1000+ people. And, of course, people smoke inside the club – so I did not stay for very long at all – I wanted to get out almost immediately!

Peter, D’Arcy, Em and I also sampled a few different brew pubs – including one interesting one run by an American, called the Sexton Brew Pub, where we watched the Super Bowl...

Argentinean beer in Buenos Aires is pretty meh. They have 2 main brands – Quilmes and Isenbeck – both are terrible. Even Quilmes Dark – a stout (which means I should love it) is meh – far too sweet.

A few days in Em and I realised that we were drinking this crappy Argentinean beer – not enjoying it very much – in a country famous for it’s wine... Whoops! So we started sampling some of the delicious Argentinean wins more (Malbec is their most common red). You can get a bottle in a restaurant for a few bucks/quid - so you'd be silly not to!

One thing I took from this is that I LOVE
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Square where we sat with a beer and watched the sunset
chilled red wine. Yes, I know red wine is supposed to be served at room temperature but I don’t really care – chilled red wine is just so dam good!

In terms of food, Argentina (and Buenos Aires really) is most well known for good beef (steaks), pizza and empanadas. We sampled plenty of all 3: we went to a fancy(ish) steak restaurant called La Cabrera that many people recommended and had the largest steak you’ve ever seen for lunch one day, we went to another highly recommend pizza place called Guerin where we had massive deep-dish-style amazing pizzas. And we have had empanadas EVERYWHERE! One common theme is that the carne (beef - meat) empanada is always the best – every single place we’ve gone!

Oh and Argentinians seem to really hate vegetables! So many meals we were served had no vegetables. Sandwiches are served with no lettuce or tomato – usually just meat, cheese and bread or even just meat and bread in several places...

In addition to this, many Argentinians take the whole month of February off – similar to what Italy does in August (we also visited during this time) – to holiday
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Leaving BA on the boat to Antarctica!
for the end of the summer. So a lot of places were closed and things were a little quieter during our time there.

They also have a ‘mini-Carnival’ – I use the word mini, not them. We randomly discovered this when out one night and found one of the places they were doing this – basically 3-4 streets blocked off which different groups in similar costumes performing their routine. There were also lots of kids with LOTS of silly string – spraying everyone in sight!

Weirdly, it started at like midnight. This is actually common in BA – where people don’t eat until very late (10pm) and don’t go out for drinks until mid-night. I do find it strange that kids stay up late too – we saw so many kids running around in the early hours of the morning many times out in BA.

It was also stifling hot on many days, so we tried to have some ‘indoors’ days and visit some museums. Unfortunately, most only have exhibits in Spanish.

The one museum that stood out was actually the Evita museum – which had some really good exhibits and was the perfect story of
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Tango session in a San Telmo square in Argentina
her life. The same day we tried to watch the Evita movie and got about 10 minutes in – I had not seen it before and didn’t realise that it’s pretty much the worst move ever made...

Another day, we took a day trip across the river to Colonia Del Sacramento (Uruguay). This is a sleepy little seaside town with cobbled streets and old buildings. We met a Swiss girl called Alexandra there and hung around with her for day. The highlight of the day might actually have been the ferry ride leaving BA and also leaving Colonia (with the sun setting) – great views of both cities on a beautiful day.

It was a nice place – very quaint and a great change of pace from BA...

I did also try a Uruguayan beer which was just called Pilsen. It might be even worse than the Argentinian beers...

Back in Buenos Aires, one of the more interesting and fun nights we had was going to see a drum-percussion show called La Bombo De Tiempo (which I think means 'the time bomb'). These guys make some ridiculous noise using just drums, base, bongos, cow-bells (etc). After the show, they then take the party to the street – playing and dancing down the street – which was a lot of fun (they end at a club but we didn’t go in). The only downside was that it was raining, so we got pretty wet. I then slept under an air conditioner which cost me a bunch of days as I ended up catching a cough-cold-flu type thing.

We actually stayed in 3 different areas of BA – San Telmo (as I mentioned), Montserrat and Ricoleta. Of the 3, Ricoleta was probably the nicest – it is absolutely jam packed with cafes everywhere and lots of parks and green space too...

We also walked around Palermo which is a kind of pretentious, hipster area of BA – so Torontonians should fit in pretty well!

We randomly found a Beatles Bar and Beatles museum out walking one day – it seems that all over South America (I guess like anywhere in the world really...) they were and are still obsessed with the Beatles.

So really, nothing to say but good things about BA – I could definitely see myself living there (aside from the economic problems of course) and it’s a nicer city than say Shanghai.

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