BA Part Deux

We've now left Buenos Aires with heavy hearts after three fantastic weeks living there, and we're back on the road! We enjoyed BA so much, and were getting so much out of our Spanish courses, that we seriously considered staying there a bit longer, but after listing all the places we still want to see we realised we really had to get going if we wanted to see them all.

Living with Susana really made our BA stay something special. She was great fun and always made the time to sit and chat with us in Spanish so that we got lots of practice. She also took us out in her car a few times to show us round some of the suburbs of Buenos Aires. We´ll miss you, Susana!

One weekend we took the train out to Tigre, about an hour north of Buenos Aires. Tigre is a pretty town in the Paraná Delta, and lots of porteños (people from BA) go there on weekends. The town is surrounded by interconnecting streams and rivers, and lots of people are out on boats, canoeing, rowing, or motoring down the street-like waterways. I'm afraid to say we forgot to bring our camera on the trip, so I can´t post photos, but it was a beautiful day. There were lots of market stalls selling artisan furniture, jewellery, food, etc, so lots to see and do. We took a boat trip down the waterways in the afternoon, and we really got a sense of how the waterways were like streets - there were houses along the banks of the rivers and every house had a jetty and a boat to get around. Smaller streams branched off the main rivers like smaller roads, and lots of people were out on their jettys sipping their evening mate and waving as we went past.

We also paid a visit to the Mate Museum in Tigre. As Stu mentioned in his last post, mate is drunk in Argentina and Uruguay with the same regularity and enthusiasm with which us Brits enjoy a nice cup of tea. We always see people out and about in town with their mate cup in hand and a thermos of hot water tucked in the crook of their arm to keep it topped up. Mate is a caffeinated drink brewed from yerba mate (green in colour, quite bitter, sometimes sugar is added). It is drunk from a gourd through a metal straw with a filter on the end to filter out the leaves. The Mate Museum in Tigre had a very large display of mate cups made in hundreds of styles and lots of different materials.

We got back to BA that evening and hopped in the car with Susana to go to a tango class! The class was held in a big, spooky room with echo-ey tango music played loudly out of the shadows. The other people in the class already knew the basics and looked pretty good at tango, and we headed into the fray to give it our best shot. But it was so much harder than it looked! You have to have your feet really close to your partners, which resulted in Stu and I treading all over each other most of the time! You need to be so tuned in to your dance partner´s steps, twist your hips and cross your feet over each other´s a lot. Phew! Needless to say, we stuck with practising the first basic steps while the rest of the class worked on some more complex flourishes. It was in equal parts interesting, embarassing and hilarious, but I´m very glad to have given it a go! Here are some of the more accomplished students in the class - it was very atmospheric:

The Friday just gone was our last day at Spanish school, and we both received our certificates! I can´t speak highly enough of the classes we had at Íbero - the teachers were great and I really learned a lot and got lots of practice. Special thanks to our teachers, Alejandro and Marina!

I will also miss our local lunch spot just down the road from our school. This nameless, veggie, help-yourself buffet place had loads of delicious fresh salads and yummy veggie takes on Argentinian food, like aubergine tortillas and pumpkin empanadas - yum! We went there almost every day...

Being studious types, we got some extra language practice at 'Spanglish', which was an evening event for people wanting to practice Spanish and locals wanting to practice English. It was like a language exchange crossed with speed-dating: you sit at a table with someone fluent in Spanish, and you chat for five minutes in Spanish, five minutes in English, and then move on to the next table to talk to somebody else. All this, and in a pub too! Spanglish nights had the added bonus that we made some new friends in Buenos Aires.

On our last night in BA, we drove to Palermo with Susana. Palermo is a posh area of BA, with lots of shops, cafes and restaurants. It was a really nice to have a wander about the area, chatting and peeking in shops and market stalls. We even saw a very nonchalant stilt walker at one point, who gave the impression that he didn't know why people were looking at him. Here we are with Susana having dinner in Palermo:


I would really like to go back to Buenos Aires one day - it's certainly been one of the highlights of our trip so far.

BA Life

We have been living in Buenos Aires for just over two weeks now, so we thought it was high-time you got an update! As well as seeing the beautiful city and enjoying all it has to offer, we are here to learn Spanish and are taking classes at Ibero, a school on Uruguay Street here in BA. We are both really enjoying it! I am in the beginner class as my knowledge of Spanish was absolute zero when we arrived; Ania is in the intermediate class, having studied the language up to A-Level.

We asked Ibero to arrange a home-stay for us here in BA, as we wanted to practice the language outside of school. So we are living with the lovely Susana, who has a beautiful apartment with the highest ceilings I've ever seen, in a fashionable and lively area of BA called San Telmo. We have our own room and share the kitchen and bathroom with Susana. It's been so nice to unpack and not live out of a backpack for a bit. Here's the view from our room:

San Telmo really comes alive every Sunday, when it has a busy market with stalls selling everything from jewellery to mate cups (pronounced 'MA-TAY', it's a kind of South American tea that's really popular here and in Uruguay) to antiques to delicious street food. The market takes over a whole cobbled street called Defensa. At one end of the road is the square, the Plaza Derrego, where on our first weekend we stood fascinated while dozens of people danced the tango with a live band at night:

Same market, different day. A shot of Defensa during the day one weekend.

Of course we have done the tourist thing here in BA, but the thing that occupies us the most is studying! We have class 9am - 1pm, Monday to Friday, I mean 'Lunes a Viernes'; and we get lots of 'tareas' (homework!). Thankfully we have a big desk in our room at Susana's. It's times like this I'm glad I'm not staying in a hostel:

Our class sizes vary, but most people do the beginner classes, so Ania's group has been smaller than mine. In my first two weeks we had nine people, so it was slow going at times, but I have learnt a lot. It's really satisfying to be able to talk to people in shops now, or ask for directions. Before we did our classes, we were completely reliant on Ania's Spanish ability, so I'm pleased to be able to contribute now, even if it's only in a small way!

People from BA, or 'porteños' as they are called, live life late! Dinner is at 9 or 10pm and the nightclubs have special deals, letting the early birds in for free before 3am! We haven't been clubbing here actually (we prefer the pubs), but they open until 6 or 7am. I'm getting too old for that! Earlier I mentioned how San Telmo comes alive on a Sunday. Well the setting of the sun or the closing of the market doesn't mean the fun stops there! At dusk people remain on the streets, sharing enormous, litre bottles of beer (ok, I'm dressing it up, it's called 'street drinking'!). Here's me and my friend Jonee from my Spanish class, who interestingly enough is Jonee Duggan!

'But Stu,' I hear you ask, 'You're in Buenos Aires, you're street drinking, what more could you possibly want?!' Well, how about a live percussion band?! Every Sunday there are a few of these groups banging around in the street, but this one is our favourite. They seem to be the biggest and therefore the loudest. If you watch the video below you can see their 'conductor', a crazy character in the middle who controls the tempo and the rhythm with a whistle!



We can see BA's enormous obelisk as we walk to school every morning. Here's Ania standing in front of the landmark.

The unique cemetery in the neighbourhood of Recoleta. We went here last Thursday. All of the tombs or graves are above the ground; and you can see the coffins inside. It was quite spooky! As you can see below, the statues and carvings are extremely ornate and the 'streets' of the cemetery go on for ages!


The grave of Eva Perón. She was the wife of Argentina's President in the 1940s and 50s and Madonna played her in the film Evita.

A scary statue in the cemetery. This reminded me of the Resident Evil computer games series! You can see a cat in the bottom right hand corner. There are loads of cats in the cemetery that appear to be strays. It reinforces the Egyptian idea of cats as the guardians of the underworld. Please don't lock me in here at night!

Tango dancing is hugely popular here and it seems to be going on everywhere. I took the following video one Sunday in San Telmo. We were in the market when it started to rain, so Ania, Jonee and myself took shelter in this cafe. A couple of tango pros were dancing with a great duet playing live music (guitar and some kind of Argentinian squeezebox/accordion thing). It was one of those wonderful, spontaneous moments that you just can't plan:



For once I haven't mentioned food in my blog post, but don't worry, let me rectify this grievous error! Argentinian food generally is ok and we've had to learn that the supermarkets generally are a bit crap. It's more like it used to be in Britain, where you go to town to do your shopping and visit the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker, etc. You know, before Tesco bought everything. The food here mainly consists of bread, meat and potatoes with little spice available (which surprised me). They do really like pasta though so Ania has managed to find veggie food, and of course like any other big city, BA does have a variety of restaurants. But if you're eating out here what you really want to go for is the steak. The beef here puts the stuff we have in Europe and the stuff we tried in Oz or NZ to shame! It's simply in a different class! Last week we went out for a meal with some of our classmates, to a restaurant called Desnivel, handily just around the corner from our house in San Telmo. Desnivel is a 'parilla': an indoor barbecue restaurant specialising in steak. I got the Bife de Lomo (tenderloin or filet mignon) with roast potatoes and we had a nice bottle of Argentinian red wine. Honestly one of the best meals I've ever had.