Buenos Aires is a massive city set out in a nice grid structure like Melbourne making it very easy to walk around! There are old European buildings everywhere and you can just stroll around street to street, as long as you look up you’ll see some awesome sites! Beautiful buildings, cool open, long and narrow shopping strips, restaurants and cafes (other than Starbucks which is EVERYWHERE)! The pictures really tell the story…
However if I was going to tell a story other than what the pictures tell you…
When we arrived at the hostel we got a little information sheet that gave us some tips for the city. One was, if you get paint thrown or “dropped” on you don’t stop, keep walking and get out of that area! It’s a way they rob you! They drop paint (or ink) on you then come and help you get it off, and then rob or pick pocket you!
We were cautious but figured it was just something you hear might happen but doesn’t happen often. But then… we were talking to a traveller we met and it had happened to 3 people he had met!! One got his bag knicked because he stopped, and two had nothing happen because they kept walking… Moral of the story, keep walking (or is it drink Johnnie Walker??)!!!
The picture below brings us to story number 2! Boca! This is the area you DON’T stroll around. From what Matt had read there is a good tourist part of Boca but the general suburb you need to be careful of. We did a tour of Buenos Aires by an open top double decker bus, this drove us through Boca. The bus was one that had set stops along the way where you could get off and explore, then jump back on. When we went through Boca we thought about getting off at the stop as it did look pretty happening and cool (people demonstrating tango, restaurants and colourful buildings). But then I saw some grafitti on the tourist bus stop that said “enough of the tourists”. And since it was later in the day already and it was Boca… we decided to stay safely inside the bus and take pictures from there.
Talking to our mate who had the friends that got mugged, he himself had decided to walk to Boca. He figured that being from London he would be fine and could take on anything. He stuck to the main streets and walked in. Then on the way out, a guy in his 20s came out a street and asked him where the police station was, because he’d just been robbed at gun point. He promptly pointed the guy to the police station and jumped in a cab to exit Boca!!! We were glad we took the advice about the bad areas! 🙂 
The cool things to see in Boca was the stadium, the home of the Boca Juniors which is one of Argentina’s top teams that many international soccer players have come from. The other team is River Plate which we went to a match for later in the week.
We visited the Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires city which is the burial place of many past presidents and a woman who received a state funeral, Eva Perron or “Evita”. I did a bit of research on her, she died of cancer at age 33. She was an “illegitimate” child as her parents weren’t married when she was born and in Argentina at that time, the law at that time gave less rights to people born out of wedlock. When she married her husband (soon to be president) she forged her birth certificate to say she was younger so that people wouldn’t pick it up. She later helped have the legal name of “illegitimate” children changed to “natural” children as well as help the laws get changed.
Because of her background she was able to keep in touch with the locals and appeal to the public and helped get her husband elected. To this day in Argentina, people have a picture of her up in their house next to the Virgin Mary. Her image is also on both sides of a main building in the main street of Buenos Aires (9 de Julio). She was a bit of a big deal in Argentina!
Her grave is the one with the flowers on it in the above collage. I’m definitely my fathers daughter taking pictures of graves but Matt and I were so fascinated here!! They were all above ground open Mausoleums (probably have that wrong hey dad??) but they were crypts, above ground and you could look in them and see the coffins! Then little staircases down to where other coffins laid! Like Apartments for the dead!!! hahaha… tell us your thoughts on this dad… have you been here??? hehe
We headed to the Zoo later in the week… We had a nice stroll around checking out the animals… The pictures speak for themselves really. We loved the bear as he seemed to close and had a nice coat on him… He looked pretty healthy which was good!! We also got a picture of one of Heath’s distant cousins…
You can see how close the bear felt and how much we liked him by seeing these pictures!!! I think he was working out if he could make the jump to eat Matt…
Our last night in Buenos Aires we headed to a football (soccer for you AFL’s) match not in Boca… It was the home of River Plate which is Boca’s rival team. Like Collingwood and Essendon I suppose.
We went with a guide because we were a little worried about whether we’d survive. We got frisked by armoured guards on the way in so it must be safe inside yea?? So after passing the security checks and frisking we got in…
The crowd where ALL River Plate and they were playing a smaller teamed called Colon… (said Cologne hahaha) River Plate were a bit cocky playing this tiny, small young team and ended up losing 2-0!!! The whole time the game was playing there were about 10-15 drummers playing under the sign in the below picture. So the whole time, drums and dancing (over there, unfortunately not near us, it would have been my style of watching soccer)! Then once Colon soccered…. Silence, drums stopped…. Then it was as if they went… “so that didn’t happen” and then would start drumming again.
I was secretly going for Colon because they were Black and Red… but I didn’t dare make a noise… You could have heard me from the other side of the stadium if I clapped!!!
That was it for Buenos Aires! We also joined the English Cong there during the week and met some lovely people. But typically being in a big city, I got some kind of bug and we didn’t get to see them again on the weekend for fear of spreading the love/bug…
Other highlights were eating Japanese at a Japanese Garden (although that could have made me sick). Not highlights were the Double Decker Open Roof bus.. we got on it too late in the day and so didn’t have time to stop at many places, and it got FREEZING up there.. when we went downstairs to the inside cabin there were no spots and they wouldn’t let us stand… So we FROZE some more. You could have also travelled to all the main spots yourself, we thought they would tell us cool stuff about Buenos Aires but most of the time they had this incessantly annoying Spanish 30 second song repeating over and over again (Suze you would have hated it!)
Timeframe: Tuesday 20th – Saturday 24th August 2013
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