Intro to Buenos Aires

Hey fellow travel lovers.  Another South American update for you…this time from BA! 

When last we met, I was happily drinking back my $50 buy-in fee in the Admirals lounge at JFK.  I made it to my gate on time and was standing there pleasantly buzzed when they made an announcement that all Americans and Canadians needed to come to the counter to show our reciprocity documents.  See the USA (and Canada, I guess) charges Argentinians a fee when they enter so they do it to us when we enter.  You have to pay before you go and print out a bar code showing that yes you did pay.  We had to show those papers to the gate people before they let us board.  As a side note, I had already had that done back in Portland by the helpful American Airlines dude when he got me my seat assignment AND my boarding pass said “docs ok” on it…but it wasn’t enough.

I went through the line and got mine checked and then moved off to wait for boarding.  About 10 minutes later, they made an announcement that one of our fellow passengers hadn’t gotten his done, had cash for it ($160 for you detail oriented readers) but didn’t have a credit card and the website where you pay only accepted credit cards.  Now I don’t know why one of the employees for American didn’t do it, but they asked for a volunteer to charge the fee on their card in exchange for the cash.  I was in a glowy happy mood and thought “that would totally suck for the guy not to be able to go” so I made my way up to the counter and told them “I got it”.  Gave over my credit card, got the cash from the guy, he was thanking me, the counter guy asked for my boarding pass, tore it up, handed me another one…upgrade to business class!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Good Karma pays off!

This is no US business class with wider seats that barely recline…no sirree.  These were international business class with almost completely reclining seats, booties, a little travel kit with socks, mask, toothpaste & brush, other neat stuff.  Good food (had shrimp and scallop curry for dinner and cheese omelet for breakfast) along with complimentary cocktails and Bose noise cancelling headphones for use while sleeping or watching a movie (watched The Bourne Legacy).  And friends…that wondeful reclining seat with pillow and comfy blanket allowed me to actually sleep (not well, but still) for about 5 of the 10 hour flight.  Can you hear the angels in the background singing?  It was glorious….except for one small problem.  The really kind elderly gentleman next to me had a small case of old man farts.  Karma has a sense of humor.

Business Class Seat Control on American.  I like the zzz position!

Made it to BA and then got to stand in line for a little over an hour for customs.  The sad thing is the Argentinian line was longer than ours was.  Every now and then, they would break into spontaneous clapping and cheering.  It was pretty entertaining.

The hotel situation here was pretty crazy.  We had a place called San Martin Suites booked but while I was waiting at JFK, Marci sent me a text telling me to go to a completely different place with “long story” added.  So I went to the new place only to find a note from Marci there saying “go to San Martin”.  Of course, the taxi was already gone by that time but the two places were only 10 blocks apart.  So I hoofed it…pulling my giant roller bag along the streets of BA in the afternoon sun.   A little over 28 hours after I woke up in Portland, I rolled (literally) into the San Martin.

Shower!!!!

Oh and it was great to see Marci again.

After a bit of a rest, we decided to go out and do a bit of a walk about.  There is a barrio (or neighborhood) called Recoleta near where our (final) hotel is so we headed towards that first.  I think this was about 3 in the afternoon.  We will say 3.  This may or may not be referenced later…might not be…who knows?  They have a Saturday market there so we were going to some late browsing.  Along the way, we passed embassy row.  Some beautiful buildings of foreign countries’ embassies and one we don’t know where it was from.  Check the flag out.  Free mention in a future blog to anyone who can ID the country of origin. 

Where is this flag from (best I could do on a windy day)

We made it to the park where the market was and wandered and weaved through the booths looking at various tourist what nots that you seem to see in any country you go to even if they might change what is being offered based off where you are.  It’s something you might not have seen before, but it has that same level of “crap” that screams “this is for a tourist”.  Not a bad thing.  Just felt the same as the booths in Thailand.

Couple dancing tango under a tree that requires support for its branches!!

During our wandering we came across a cemetery that had crowds going in and out of it.  As you may have guessed already, it was the Cemetario de la Recoleta!  What you may not have guessed is this is where Eva “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”’s family mausoleum (with special guest, Eva) is located!  We wandered through the rows of mausoleums for a good hour.  Some of those things are incredible!  Well worth it.

Inside one mausoleum.  They stack those babies in there...even in the basement!  Creepy

The Duarte Family Mausoleum

Not sure who this guy was, but love the statue outside his crypt.

After that we cruised through the rest of the market and then started heading in a random, northerly direction to check out the city.  BA, if you didn’t know, is called, by some, the Paris of South America.  We picked the wrong direction.  Soon the soothing voice of Marci was proclaiming “I just don’t see it” and “what are these people talking about” through the next hours’ worth of wandering.  There might have also been a bit of “what the hell are we going to do in BA for a whole week?!?!?!” thrown in for good measure by both of us, but we continued on.

We decided to change direction and head towards a barrio called Palermo.  This was supposed to be where it’s at!  Awesomeness around every corner…great places to eat…a whole row of fun and funky bars to parade through…great nightclubs.  You name it!

Ehhh…not so much.  It was fairly pretty in a park, oh there’s the zoo, more park kind of way.  And to be honest we are planning on going there tomorrow cause the art museum is there and we both want to go see it.  But “Paris of South America” it is not.

We then tried to go up into Palermo Soho and a bit of Palermo Hollywood.  These are really supposed to be the shit.  But we still didn’t find anything.  We finally started heading back to the hotel looking for somewhere to eat dinner.  Lots of pizza places here.  Wow, are these people ape $hit about their pizza…I mean seriously every corner = pizza place, but we both were thinking “pizza?”

Down here, Kentucky is synonymous with good pizza.....

So we settled on a more traditional place where we had a chicken in cream sauce with potato dish.  Sort of bland, but the bottle of Malbec (an Argentinian specialty) went down nicely.

We wandered back into the hotel at midnight…9 hours after we left.  Seriously, I have not mapped how far we went and I forgot to wear my GPS watch mainly because I didn’t think we would be walking around for NINE HOURS but we covered some major ground.  My dogs were TIRED. 

We talked with the front desk guy about what there is to do in BA and he helpfully pulled out a map and pointed out where the great places were in Palermo Soho (another half mile or so farther than we made it), as well as other cool locations in the opposite direction of where we headed today.  Included is this Sunday flea market that is famous.  Even the kind, older, gassy gentleman on my flight talked about the flea market.  So we added that to a “must do”.  He also mentioned going across the river on a ferry to Uruguay and visiting Colonia, which we will do…and we also will be going to Tigre…where the river delta is and checking that out…on top of more wandering.

Good ideas…sleep came.

Today I made it to about 10:30 (5:30 PST) before waking up.  Marci and I agreed to the Sunday market but we lazed about a bit before showering and heading out a noon.  The Sunday market is in a barrio called San Telmo which is in the opposite direction of where we went yesterday.  On the way there, we passed a pretty incredible mall (we entered just to see the architecture and the Brad Pitt love fest. 

The mall of Pitt love

We also passed the government building…or as the locals call it the pink building as its made or reddish stone.  We also passed (and went into) the metropolitan cathedral that really looked more like a library or opera house.  No huge spires…just columns out front.  As its Sunday, I felt a little weird about wandering through, or along the sides of this cathedral especially because they were having mass while we were there, but a lot of people were doing so…and I got to see the tomb of General San Martin who was the man who won independence from Spain for Argentina.  2 guards in full dress uniform (swords included) were standing guard there.  Really impressive.

The flea market was more of what we saw yesterday…time 10.  Again no actual mapping and I forgot my GPS again, but there had to be at least one if not two miles of booths along the roads of San Telmo.  They had bands periodically that would be playing some great music as well as cool little cafes where we stopped to get some empanadas.  Awesome meat filled pastries that were very yummy.  We stopped at one place and got one of chicken and one of carne picante (spicy beef) and both were good…although man, that spicy beef was awesome!  A couple hours later, we stopped at another place that had a duo (guitar, accordion, both sang) doing traditional songs (really well) and had another empanada…not as good as the first, but still pretty good.  I also got a liter of beer!!!!  LITER!  Sure its lager and light enough you could drink it all day but it hit the spot on this warm day.

Marci's favorite stall of the day.  She was browsing for about 20 minutes until she saw me start to take the picture and bailed out before I could get proof.  For reals.

1 Liter of beer.  Mmmm

The best part of the day is this neighborhood really did look much more like Paris.  The architecture and the cool funkiness of it…Marci started brightening up and saying “okay…I am starting to get it”.  I had great fun, throughout the day, pointing out how this building or that had a great Parisian quality about it.  Good times.

They know how to do book mobiles in BA!  Make them tanks!

After the market we went to another barrio called La Boca.  This was supposed to have brightly painted buildings.  We actually found a large park with a local market (real clothes…etc) and wandered through it looking for these colored buildings.  They were not there, but a museum commemorating the founding of Argentina was.  It was fairly sparse, but had some really cool objects from the people of the time.

We figured out from our tourist map we needed to head deeper into La Boca to get to the painted goodies.  On the way we stopped to get some Halado at a local neighborhood Haladoria.  Replace the H with a G and it starts looking like gelato which is what it was.  Wow…insane good.

We finally got to the painted buildings, but most of the places were closed (Sunday) and it was getting later in the day so the lighting sort of blew for pictures.  We didn’t hang around there for long before heading towards Puerto Madero, a neighborhood on the way back to the hotel.  This involved walking towards a pretty sketchy neighborhood, but we were able to walk sort of along the waterway (BA is on the water and this was sort of docking along a long cement walkway) behind a fairly tall fence.   It took us around the worst of it and we ended up in a relatively neat looking neighborhood with lots of people out walking about.

We followed these people (mainly because they too were headed towards Puerto Madero) and walked along their waterfront for a bit.  We were going to turn left to go across the water back towards the hotel, but the crowds were heading right and we could hear music in the background.  We followed along….clear to an outdoor amphitheater where they were having a free concert.  We walked through the gate along with the rest of the crowd not knowing who or what the heck was going to come on. 

Turns out, BA does a series of free concerts in February and we were at one.  World (or at least Argentina) famous pop/folk group Los Nocheros were performing and they came out with a bang!  4 dudes singing tight harmony and the crowd was into it.  They knew the words and were singing along.  It was a blast…for about 6 songs….and then it sort of started blending together in a “I have little idea of what they are saying” kind of way.  I mean each song was Corazon this or Corazon that (heart) indicating love songs, but the rest was pretty much lost on us. 

Los Nocheros in concert!!!!

At this point sore feet and hunger won out so we headed for dinner.  I tried to find a place one of Marci’s friends recommended, but the street we were on (the right one) looked pretty desolate so we stopped at the first place that was open.  Turned out to be not too bad French food, but not what we were hoping for.  What we were looking for was another 4 blocks down, but by that time we were very hungry and food was needed.

After dinner, we wandered back to the hotel.  I bought another liter of beer along the way because I knew I wanted to get this done.  We got back at 12:30.  That’s right…12 and a half hours walking around with maybe 2 or 3 hours actually sitting during meals.  The rest was on my continuing to be sore feet.  Wow.  Not blaming Marci at all and it really is a great way to see a city…good and bad.

Tomorrow we are going to hit the museum and then I dunno.  Tuesday we plan to go to Uruguay (a whole ‘nother country!).  Wednesday is sort of up in the air although Marci wants to go to a tango gathering and perhaps tango (not with me since I don’t know how and it’s relatively involved in learning…but man does she want to tango).  Thursday sounds like the delta and then Friday we head to Rio. 

We went from “what the hell are we going to do” and “this is NOT Paris like at all” to having a pretty full plate and, after today, Marci is digging the place.  I am having a good time too…if I can convince my feet of it, anyway. 

Love to all!

Jim