Advertisement
Published: July 27th 2016
Edit Blog Post
Groundhog day Buenos Aires style
Buenos Aires :Tango, Parrilas, Empanadas, a city that easily levels with Madrid and Paris.
It reminded me of México city in it's golden years, elegant and proud with a beautiful mix of colonial and cosmopolitan.
Time has passed in both cities, but there's something that Buenos Aires kept, "sus Aires" , it's flair of grandeur.
Latin American's perceive Argentineans as arrogant and "presumidos" ( feel free to ask any Latin American friend about it) they think too much of themselves. They, at the same time, feel the same about the " Porteños" , the people of Buenos Aires.
We now understand the pride they feel ( or felt ) about their city ( and country). Buenos Aires stole our heart and let us after Rio, amazed of its mix.
The Spanish, Italian and French influences are very much present throughout the city.
We stayed at a place between Recoleta and Palermo neighborhoods. A lively area just around the huge Libertadores avenue and close to the famous cemetery on one side and the trendy Palermo soho on the other. The place we stayed at was hosted by a lovely lady who made us feel at
home, and trust us, a home we needed. Remember the famous Iguazú cold? Well, we still had it and the " aires" here were not only Buenos but Frios too! It was european style wet cold! We had electric heaters all over the house, wet-cold weather and it was not helping our cold, on the contrary.
Desperate times desperate measures. We went out to buy winter clothes and medicine, after having a bite ( it took us a while to find a restaurant that was serving food at 6 pm, we forgot the eating habits are like in Spain or Italy). Here they have "merienda" at that time, dinner's after 8-9 pm.
Merienda consists of having a coffee or a tea with a " medialuna" ( a croissant-like pastry) toasted white bread with cream cheese or jam or a cake.
The cute place we entered felt kind of bad for us and called the chef who was on a break to make us diner, good old southern hospitality. We had a filled chicken breast with a mustard sauce which filled our tummies pretty well, then a " Budín de pan" ( bread pudding) which reminded me of the one my
mom used to make, only hers was better. :D
Armed with medicine, tea and alfajores we went back home to chill, watch Netflix series and to get fit.
To get an impression of a big city ( BA has around 14 million inhabitants, in the center close to 3 million) the best way is to jump on a hop on hop off bus and get to know the city's areas.
After the bus we hurried up to watch Germany play France and what better place than the Mercedes Benz center on the Libertadores Ave. As we know the results were not very positive....
One of the most colorful places in BA, literally, is La Boca. The old area, were the Bombonera ( Boca Juniors Football club stadium) and " el Caminito" are. The area where the city shows its different face. Where the gap between the classes couldn't be more obvious, where they recommend you not to be alone at night. But during the day it is full of colors, full of Tango, full of something mystical.
The bright-funky colors of tin walled houses come from the times they would paint them with the ship paint that was left over
from painting ships at the harbor.
It is like going back in time. A bit Gypsy like.
Besides the tin houses there are also many nice but old and damaged houses with a flair of the beginning of the 1900's, a real Barrio with the full meaning of the word.
El Caminito ( the little road ) is a famous area of about 2 square blocks. Renown for it's picturesque buildings, the market like streets with vecindarios ( communal housing-like buildings ) that have small artisanal shops, the local cafes with accordion players, tango dancers and its livelihood. After a walk and watching some tango dancers and gipsy looking crowds we took off to the Recoleta Cemetery.
Here all - most of the once upon a time influential Argentineans - are buried, generals, bankers and of course, the Peron's including world famous, Eva Peron or Evita as she became known.
An interesting, macabre and why not, if you think about it, obscure tour, nevertheless enriching for its history, and if we might add, a great place to take almost mystic pictures and a place to reflect.
To kill the hunger ( sort of speak ) we went to Rodi's Restaurant,
well appreciated by the locals, here we had-again- some good empanadas and some very good Argentinean beef with a very nice Cabernet Sauvignon, this time no dessert.
Adventurous as always we decided to walk back home, which turned to be easier than expected, this allowed us to breath the city and mingle even more with the locals, something we do love to do.
Surprisingly it had been a very quiet day for a country that was celebrating it's 200 years of independence, we both wondered why it was so calm....
Sunday was the day we were about to fly to El Calafate in the southern part of Argentia's Patagonia, considering the airport was not too far we left some room into our travel time, just in case. Big unpleasant surprise, as we got to know that it was today and not on the exact day of the Independence day that these guys decided to celebrate big time....so big that the whole army paraded through the main streets of Buenos Aires for the first time in 12 years ! ( the Kirchner's, -first him and then her- that ruled Argentina for all those years were not very fond of the armed
forces, and so they kind of forbid this parades) A ride that would normally take us 20 mins took us 1:30 hours resulting on us missing the flight and having to go back, took another 1:30 hours back to our hotel in Palermo Soho.
This area is full of nice boutique hotels and shops, very lively and trendy, and full of younger people, like us. 😊
Next morning we found what we were looking for in the last 3 weeks, good, healthy, dark bread. After a good meal we headed back to the cute boutique hotel and rested for our afternoon flight.
No way we were going to miss this flight again so we headed with way enough time to the airport and checked in like 2 hrs ahead of time.
As we waited and waited for our flight, red flags started to go up, there was a delay due to "bad" weather in El Calafate...suddenly the tannoy ( speaker) went, ding-dong.... and the voice informed us that the flight had been cancelled, this after waiting for 5 hrs, back to Buenos Aires, back to Palermo Soho, back to the nice dark, healthy bread.
The good thing about traveling as
we are doing now is that you don't need to be anywhere at a certain time, therefor you take this kind of incidents a bit lighter.
Whilst we enjoyed our bread and healthy salads we explored our trip a bit more and marked some interesting destinations, El Salar of Uyuni being one of them.
As the flight had been moved to the international airport we needed 1 hr to get there,
fearing of course that once again something was going to happen to the flight -luckily it didn't, and so we took off to Patagonia.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.19s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 15; qc: 56; dbt: 0.0527s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Celinasan
Celina Freudenthal
just lovely!
Well aren't you two a treat!! Now I want to got to Buenos Aires even more. I hope you feel better now and have had a successful onward journey. Great pictures! But your selfie-skills need to be improved :D Get a stick, it sure helped me, my arms are just too short :) Have lots of fun and take care!