Three Weeks in Buenos Aires

Week One: Arrival

If you hadn't figured it out from the title, we have been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the past three weeks.  We arrived here on Sunday, June 13th, taking the direct ferry boat (Buquebus) from Montevideo, Uruguay, across (and up) the Río de la Plata to Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The boat landed at the docks in the Retiro neighborhood, which also happens to be where one of the major train stations is located and is near the heart of the city.  We caught a cab to Palermo, the neighborhood we're staying in, and spent the night at a fancy boutique hotel as a treat.  The next day, we took possession of the apartment that we've rented for a month.  We're staying only a few blocks from the subway, here in Palermo, on the edge of Palermo Hollywood, which it turns out (unsurprising by its name) has a bunch of fancy restaurants and clothings stores in it.  There's actually a news studio nearby, and a couple of nices parks.


We then spent the week getting ourselves accustomed to the area, and also to Karla's favorite neighborhood, San Telmo, which we visited to check out the South American Explorer's clubhouse and to participate in their free weekly Spanish lessons.  Karla also signed up for a four-day Spanish course that met for three hours each day in different parts of the city.  We spent some time acclimating to Argentinian Spanish (Spanish is hard enough, but every time we visit a new country, or a new region, we have to wrap our heads around regional variations, including grammatical constructs and tenses they failed to explain in school) and the new timetable (people don't have dinner until after 9 pm, and nobody goes out to clubs, which are open through dawn, until at least 1 am).

Finally, on Sunday (a week after first arriving) we managed to stay up late enough to go a night spot.  We found way to a big hole-in-the-wall place called Salón Pueyrredón, only a few blocks from our apartment.  Dark red lighting, a bar along one wall, secondary rooms (one big one with an empty stage, another with tables and a balcony where everyone was smoking), and 80s music set the tone.  In fact, the place was reminiscent of Club Charles or the Depot in Baltimore (which of course is a reference only our Baltimore friends are going to understand).  We had a good time hanging out there, drinking a few rounds of Cuba Libres, and Karla dancing.  Of course, we needed all of Monday to recover...

Week Two: Suzanne

Tuesday, our friend Suzanne arrived from the States for a week long visit.  We met her at Ezeiza (also known as Ministro Pistrarini International Airtport) to help her transition into this Spanish-speaking country.  That night, the three of us, along with some members from the South American Explorers club, went out to dinner to watch a tango show.  It was a pretty cool experience, although at first we weren't sure it was really going to happen as after we arrived at the restaurant the power cut out several times - some kind of neighborhood rolling blackout.  However, it seems the place had an emergency backup of some sort, and energy was soon restored.  The show was quite interesting and beautiful to watch, and followed what appeared to be a traditional progression for tango shows, rooting the tango in danger, violence, and eroticism, visiting several time periods in chronological order with changes of costume and music, progressing through several storylines that seemed to involve mobsters, jealous lovers, an occasional fight, and even an appearance by the authorities to arrest the participants, and finally culminating in the 21st century.  The show also involved audience participation, and several members of our table were pulled up to dance during these parts.

For the next few days after we proceeded to show her around to different neighborhoods, including a visit to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), and to eat out at different restaurants, including a tasty (and relatively expensive) sushi dinner at Dashi in Palermo Hollywood.

During this period, an emergency developed with my GMAIL account - it was hacked by Nigerians and they sent out an email scam asking people to wire money to a friend of mine in England who somehow needed money.  As if I'd actually ask people for money for a random friend, and not even name the friend.  However, the hackers did a pretty good job attemting to disguise the forgery of their email, going so far as to having read some of my previous emails (they referenced Karla and myself being in Buenos Aires) and using my signature line.  Fortunately, I have some extremely savvy friends who notified me via facebook of the account compromise, and I reclaimed my account in short order.  Still frustrating, though, and a good way to ruin a man's morning.  I'm just glad that this happened while we were staying put, in a place where we have dedicated Internet.  It would have been much more of a mess trying to fix the problem while actually en route to some other destination, forced to use a public terminal and pay by the minute...

Unfortunately, a few days later, and after a large quantity of grilled meat (Karla, suzanne, and I met up with Argentinian acquaintances of Suzanne's in the vicinity of Puerto Madero and went to a parilla called Sigue la Vaca [Follow the Cow]), both Karla and I contracted some kind of Buenos Aires flu.  Apparently it wasn't one of the normal strains, or otherwise our flu vaccinations we had just before embarking on our trip were sham.  That, sadly, knocked us out of commission for three or four days.  During that same time the United States was knocked out of the World Cup.

Week Three: Recovery

Suzanne left the following Tuesday.  Two days later, mostly recovered, we attended the grand re-opening party for Buenos Aires clubhouse for the South American Explorers club, in the San Telmo area.  It was a pretty good party, with a diverse cross section of ex-patriot members, non-members, and locals who live in or are traveling through the Buenos Aires area.  And we won one of the door prizes - a trip to Puerto Iguazú - something we'd been planning anyway!  It couldn't have worked out better for us.

Since we were both hungry, we left the party just a little early and headed over to Krakow Bar, purportedly a Polish (or Polish-themed) place.  We ordered pierogis, and, true to the South American interpretation of everything, they were an odd fascimile of the real thing, almost more like giant raviolis.  I guess the tomato sauce reinforced that idea.  But they did have pretty tasty beer, with even a local Pale Ale on top.

Then Saturday we headed over to our mutual Argentinian friends apartment to watch the World Cup quarter-finals match against Germany.  It did not go well, what with Argentina losing by four points in a shutout.  Too bad - both for Argentina - and for us, because we were hoping maybe they'd go all the way to the World Cup and we'd be here to see the city go crazy.  Instead, after the match, the World Cup ceased to exist.  At least, that's how our friends reacted.  "What's the World Cup?  What's this sport called Futbol?  We're following tennis here."  Oh well.  I'm sure there'll still be plenty of Argentinians tuning in next Sunday, especially if Germany makes it past the semi-finals, if only in the hopes of watching the German team go down in flames.

And then Sunday, yesterday, was the 4th of July.  It's weird being in another country during one of your nation's holidays.  I am not a nationalist by any means, but I do consider myself patriot, and do enjoy some of the freedoms the United States has to offer.  I suppose I was waxing nostalgic, or perhaps just missing friends and barbecue.  At any rate, I was definitely homesick.  In fact, Karla and I had planned to find this American ex-pat sports bar in the Recoleta neighborhood to see if any festivities were going on, but after an afternoon wandering the crafts fair near the cemetery, we wore ourselves out, and ended up at a nice tea shop instead, sipping fancy teas, and then gonig grocery shopping.  So much for fireworks and American hurrah.  Once we got back home, I did try to tune in to the White House broadcast of the Washington, D.C., celebration, but it kept conking out after streaming for 5 seconds.  We ended up capping our evening by watching Morgan Freeman save his niece from crazy serial killers in the good-bad movie Kiss the Girls.  What could be more American than that?

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Three weeks in Buenos Aires so far, with one week left - then we depart for other parts of Argentina and beyond.  There are still two months left in this journey, more or less, and many adventures ahead.