So the title is slightly misleading as there is no tango blog (yet), we´ll get that up when we get a chance. Tango is awesome...if you were wondering.
Anyway, Buenos Aires or BA as we travellers call it (yeah, we label ourselves as travellers). We rocked up after our awesome bus journey, with good vibes about BA. After checking in to the hostel I went for a gentlemanly trip to the bathroom and was met by some ego boosting women.
Being in the party mood after some chilled out nights, we wasted no time in grabbing some hostel BBQ and meeting a cool Scottish couple and having a party in the actual hostel. Seemed this lad Scott was also a toy boy as he´s 27 and his mrs Hollie is 29. Reminds me of somebody else, I like your style Scott.
After a few long island iced teas (which were loaded full of alcohol but tasted like they weren´t) we hit the dance floor and I taught this guy a move or two from the rogers school of dance. 1-0 rogers.
After a good old sleep we set off to explore BA. Having heard that pasta and pizza were good here we went into the first cafe type restaurant thingy we found. We weren´t overly hungry so I suggested we ordered one pasta meal to share but Jen was having none of it so we ordered one each. 10 minutes into eating her meal it still looked like Jen hadn´t even touched her meal, maybe should have listened to Jackie!
We´ve already blogged about the day of strop and football so won´t go into it again here! all you need to know is I had a moment, and it ended in me getting a footy shirt....the end. So on Sunday we went for a stroll to the San Telmo Sunday market. We stumbled across some people doing tango in the street to some live music, with a bbq on the side and loads of people chilling out eating, drinking and watching.
The market itself was massive, both sides of the road for a good mile (might be a slight exaggeration but it was massive!). They sold loads of random things, its an antiques market with lots of war memorabilia, random old telephones, cassette decks etc. Of course people selling footy stuff which is where I ended up getting my shirt.
And what market is complete without a crazy looking chap in an outfit that makes him look like he´s walking into strong wind. He pulled some awesome faces if anyone put any money in!
Only having booked 3 nights in advance we had to move to a sister hostel to the one we were in which ended up being quite handy as we had booked a week of spanish school which was just round the corner. Having left our bags in the empty luggage room we weren´t so impressed to come back and get them. Our bag was on the back wall, in there somewhere! Who knew other backpackers had luggage too?!
Checking into the sister hostel we were disgusted to see this dirty image on the wall.
We closed our eyes past the cheating douche and dropped our bags in our room. We realised we´d been in BA for a good 3 days and hadn´t even got a steak yet so off we went to correct this error. Here I am about to munch on it. After all the hype of how amazing these steaks we we tucked in to discover that this one wasn´t actually that amazing. I mean it was good, but nothing worthy of a worldwide reputation. It was just a rump though so we looked forward to our better cut of steak. A few days later though we ordered their tenderloin which was literally amazing. Then a butterfly steak later in the week which was also awesome! shame they love well done steaks in Argentina....the first steak we order medium rare which came out medium well, the second steak we anticipated being overcooked so we ordered rare and it came out medium. Still super tasty though!
Spanish lessons were pretty cool although tough at the same time. We were all complete novices but one guy picked it up a bit easier as he was already fluent in 5 languages! The teacher was speaking as little English as possible so we were immersed in the language which we found pretty difficult. Lots of pointing and sign language! We were asked at one point to describe where our hostel was in Spanish of course. We were living on a street called "hipolito yrigoyen" (who is a former Argentinian president), and this is pronounced something similar to hip-o-lito Il-ee-o-ce-en. Our Spanish teacher had a thick BA accent and when she was saying this road name I had no idea what she was saying....she kept saying this at me and in my confused state I asked ´why do you keep saying Billy Ocean at me?!´ She had no idea who Billy Ocean was but it made the Spanish class laugh, probably lost on you lot reading this!
The Spanish students were really sound so we went out for drinks and things after lessons. One night we went to a tango lesson and show thing which ended up being a tango lesson and a spanish matador dancing show. It was still awesome though, with cool drumming and music and guys with amazingly quick feet.
At this place we ate as well but were all disgusted with what was served up to us. Being an organic vegetarian place we thought that the food would be half decent as thats all they do. However we were presented with a cardboard pizza, literally broke on the table when tapping it. I ended up taking the cheese and spinach off and just eating that leaving the base behind. Everyone else got pants food too like watery pasta (note the girl´s disgusted face in the background), and rubbish rice.
I also have to point out that an American girl on our Spanish course named Meagan Rust (cool name) not only mixes BBQ sauce and mayonaise but amazingly also called it barbinaise like I do. It´s catching on people!
Not satisfied with our lack of tango we decided to go to another tango show later in the week which was so epic it deserves its own blog (when we get round to it). Anyway with a week of spanish lessons out the way and feeling like we hadn`t really learnt anything except to say how old we were, we used our now free time to do some more exploring. There was some tower thingy and a memorial to soldiers killed in the Falkland Wars (which is where we funnily spoke our best Spanish trying to not sound British).
Pretty cool statue, worth a mention
And some drumming band who were marching to the statue above with some random guy who decided to follow them at the back trying to blend in, didnt really work though.
In the centre of the city there is an obilisk, with a maccy D´s on both sides of it, cos 1 just isn´t enough.
It took us 6 days to even notice this massive building which was only down the road from where we were staying. We kept walking the other way to get places though so when we finally walked the other way it wasn´t hard to come across this bad boy.
At one point there was a vintage car parade as well as markets selling authentic food from around the world in their own little stalls. No English stall though, surpirse surprise. To be fair, I don´t think meat pie and chips would cut it here seeing as Empanadas are massive here and are the same but taste about 100 times better.
And I just thought this was worth a mention as they were everywhere and there´s no bloody way a shop can be open 25 hours a day! It wound me up.
We met up with our Argentinian friends we met in Ilha Grande in Brazil and they took us for a drive around the city and acted as our own personal tour guides. We found out more about the city doing this than we had in over a week so that was cool. They took us out for Argentinian ice cream and dinner which Argentines don´t eat until 11pm so we were starving by then! Anyway, they took us by an area called Recolatta which was cool so we went back to explore even further the next day.
A famous architect designed this bad boy, and it opens in the morning and closes at night.
And this is the famous cemetary where Eva Peron is buried. It´s quite bizarre really, it´s like a small village of crypts which have families buried in them. Quite spooky really, especially when you can see the old rotting wood inside some of them with coffins propped up against walls.
So enough of the culture, it was time to party so what better way than to go to a club which is renouned for having transvestite dancers on stage. It was as weird as it sounds and wasnt the most enjoyable night ever. Girls in florescent leotards prancing about wasn´t too bad and neither were the breakdancers on stage.
But it got too much when some guy in a thong was being pushed about whilst struggling to remove the dancing pole from his ass cheeks right behind me. I could almost feel the heat from his arse on the back of my head. Thanks to Jen for capturing this stupid photo which almost looks as if I´m imaging him with a creepy smile on my face, Just needs a thought bubble around it!
We went to a different club which wasn´t so weird and had a pretty good time there, bumped into some lads we met back in parati, only 18 years old the little nippers....... me and Jen showing that travelling can be done by the oldies!
But the night was cut short when we lost our mates somewhere in the club and then Jen fancied a water which was massively overpriced, especially seeing as beer is so cheap here!
Another cool night out was the Bomba de Tiempo which was a bunch of blokes playing the drums. Doesn´t sound that impressive, but it seriously was. Quality music, everyone having a bit of a dance. All the hippies were there smoking cigarettes with a few extras in there, they all looked like they were in a trance!
This photo had to make it into the blog! We were in the hostel partying away (seeing as it`s a party hostel) and Jen was disgusted to see this blokes neck. Give it a few years and she`ll have to put up with this herself (reference to me being hairy....not Jen!). Forgot to say that our hostel was next to a sex cinema which was a bit surreal. We`d wake up in the morning and go to the toilet and all you could hear was women groaning outside. We thought it was just a couple using the privacy of the bathroom instead of those who just don´t care in the dorm rooms, but then the next day the same noises were there but even louder. Only later we were told that we were nextdoor to a sex cinema. You kinda got used to the noises in the end!
Deciding that we were getting through a bit too much money early on into our trip we thought we´d exhange some dollars out here as they seem to love them. We can get 5 pesos to the dollar officially but there is a street here where loads of blokes change it for 7.5 pesos per dollar so we thought we´d give that a go. We thought it would be back alley stuff but there were loads of these people shouting out exchange ("cambio" actually but thats spanish for you) so it was easy to find someone to sort it out. He took us to a building which seemed legit enough, we exchanged money and then went back down only to find out we were locked in. Thought it was a bit dodgy but nothing too bad and were let out after about 5 minutes when the bloke turned up with the key. Upon examining our money the next day our suspìcions of dodgyness were confirmed when we tried to pay for a taxi with the money we had exchanged. Of the 1,200 pesos we got from them, two of the 100 peso notes were fake. cheeky douches but we still would have got less than 1,000 changing it officially so its all good!
Finally we went for a stroll to the neighbourhood of Boca, cos it has the football ground obviously but also some famous colourful houses so we got a bit snap happy there!
All in all BA was an awesome city and I`d recommend it to anyone. Loads to see and do, cool nightlife (especially if you like electro music) and the footy is a must. But onwards and upwards to the place, Puerto Madryn where the sea life is. So after the 6th person commented that I looked like Gerard Pique (which is now 7 as I write this!) we put on our backpacks and set off on our new more relaxed adventure!
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