Buenos Aires

Buenas Aires

Tereza “I loved and hated this city”. Buenas Aires has many facets and contradictions.
The city is a dissected compilation of beautiful French architecture, dilapidated colonial buildings that must have been exquisite in their time and some unimaginative modern structures, punctuated by parks, plazas, statues, homeless people, trash, dog shit and graffiti. We loved the stained and crumbling colonial facades that stared despondently into the streets and plazas, like the proud masks of fallen aristocratic women, ignoring their running makeup they maintained a sense of dignity. Presented with this tragedy of fallen grandeur, we were left to wonder as to how they looked in their heyday and who decorated their now vacant-eyed windows and empty balconies.

We did a self-guided walking tour through a maze of quaint French cafes exuding steaming trails of coffee, bustling lanes of shops and bakeries filled with delicious caramel-filled pastries and lavish shopping centres. It felt a bit like a mix of New York, Paris and Lima rolled into one. Elegant Parisian apartments, boulevards and cafes gave way to the bright New York billboards, shops and boutiques of Florida street teaming with shoppers, commuters and touts; but it was still South America with its own dialect of Spanish, begging Indian families and foreign politics. There was a perpetual low intensity riot taking place in the busy plazas and streets around the presidential palace, known as Casa Rosada (Pink Palace). Mothers were protesting the historic disappearance of their children, agitators putting up posters of politicians with a bloodletting of red writing scrawled across them and police erecting barriers, expectantly. This was clearly a common ritual because most locals seemed oblivious to the impending storms, blithely continuing with their daily routines or sunbathing in nearby parks.

Ricky, “Because I have a fascination with military history, the Plaza del Armas bears mention. It was as if I had stepped into the UN’s archive of weapon stashes from around the world. Hoarded inside this seemingly innocuous building was the largest small arms collection I’ve ever seen. There were: medieval swords, pikes and axes, oriental samurai weapons and armour, literally hundreds of different makes of Mausers and Enfields, just about every type of pistol and rifle used in the 1st and 2nd World War, James Bond’s Walter PPI, beautiful sets of duelling pistols… you name it, it was there! My childhood imagination was resurrected: King Richard the Lion heart set out on the Crusades with his heavily armoured knights; the Three Musketeers duelled dark foes, knitting the air with their rapiers; ghostly World War I soldiers, shrouded in noxious gas, rose from muddy trenches to meet their doom and Rommel’s Africa Korps raked great clouds of dust from the desert as they raced their Panzers towards Tobruk where the dogged 8th Army was waiting for them with their distinctive round helmets just visible over the sandbags.”

Some things stick and for Tereza it was the dog shit – just about everyone has dogs, but they don’t pick up the mess. This explained why everyone wears their jeans rolled up above the ankle and no slops are evident on the streets. But there was compensation in the lovely warm people and beautiful boutique shops. If it comes from a cow, it’s half the price in Buenos Aires. The leather goods were so cheep we couldn’t pass up the opportunity and Tereza was enticed into buying a small leather handbag and Ricky bought some new shoes (Ricky “Later Dom would have to pay the price of carrying them back to South Africa for me in compensation for help with his bestman’s speech for Caspar’s wedding.”).

We continued to follow the cows to a parrilla (type of restraint) aptly called “Follow the Cow”, in Spanish. What a deal – for US$5 each we could gorge ourselves on a vast spread of quality salads, eat as much meat as we liked, wash it down with some reasonable house wine and, if you could still fit anything in, there was a range of puddings. The meat was out of this world - every cut of beef, lamb and pork you could imagine, barbequed to perfection. It is safe to say that when we waddled back to our hostel, the world wobbled with us.

On the theme of wobbling, while it is a fading tradition, Buenos Aires signature is the Tango. There are numerous Tango shows and locals dance in milognas (small festive local Parisian style café), both young and old, age is not important. What a lovely concept – everyone shares their passion and love for Tango. A clear highlight for us was taking a one hour Tango lesson and then joining the locals in a milogna and providing entertainment with our clumsy wooden imitation of their elegant romantic dancing.