As all things must come to an end, we finished our trip by spending a week and a bit in the capital, Buenos Aires, a metropolis of roughly three times the population of New Zealand. So this will be our last blog posting, written from the grey drizzley climes of Vancouver where we are staying with my cousin Glyn and currently trying to find jobs and set up a new life.
Needless to say we were pretty busy during our time here exploring the city and getting used to the extreme nocturnal time frame of the Portenyos (folk from Buenos Aires). Our first stop was the Evita Museum, set in a former halfway home that she had set up in a rather plush part of town. On our way we passed the botanical gardens complete with it's large population of contented stray cats which were cared for by the local community, there were little shelters and piles of cat biscuits spread throughout the park. Having not seen either the musical (I cant stand Lloyd Weber) or the movie, neither of us had much idea of what Evita Peron had done or why she was particularly famous, so the museum was an eye opener in terms of the politics of the time, all the social programs she set up, and the wierd corpse napping and defilement of her body after she had died of cancer.
Later in the week we visited the Recoleta Cemetery, which sounds rather morbid but was actually pretty cool. It is basically a small city of crypts for the elite, famous and historical of Buenos Aires dating back to the early days of the city's history. It is filled with crypts in various states, from the brand new which resembled a Prada-ish high fashion store to the deteriorating plaster and bare brick of the neglected. Everywhere there were ornate carvings, grieving marble statues and intricate stained glass messiahs. The key attraction was Evita's grave which was surrounded by punters trying to get a sentimental photo of her modest crypt battling with the nosy types who kept getting in the way by peering in through the heavily tinted glass to try and spy the coffin itself. I was more fascinated by all the gothic carvings and statues, and spent most of my time wishing I was a better photographer with a better camera.
A true South American experience that we had foolishly put off until the end of our trip was to see a live football (soccer) match. When we arrived we started asking how we might get tickets to the upcoming Boca Juniors (one of BA's top club sides) home game but we were consistently told we would need to join a tour group because; A: it wasn't safe for tourists to go to the rowdy games by themselves and B: because there was no way we could get tickets otherwise.
These tour group tickets were typically around five times the original price of a ticket, and who needs a guide at a football match anyway? So we figured we would try and buy tickets at the gate on the day with some other folk from our hostel. By the time we finally found the ticket booth we learned that we had just missed out on gate sale tickets and after wandering around hopelessly trying to find a nearby pub that showed the game we thought we may as well try our luck with the dodgy scalpers in the streets surrounding the stadium. We asked a guy who appeared to be quite drunk and who promised us he had tickets and we began to follow him towards the stadium. He soon got "nabbed" by a cop and scarpered while the cop told us of the dangers of buying fake tickets from scalpers. The cop, who was obviously in on it from the start, then offered to sneak us into the game for a price. He handed us dodgy tickets and then led us through all the ticket checks to the turnstile where the ticket guy grabbed our dodgy tickets and helped us jump over the turnstile. We were a few minutes late to the match and stuck right in the "dangerous" supporters zone but we had made it in! The atmosphere of the game was fantastic especially when Boca took the early lead, the stadium was filled with chants and shaking fists but it never even came close to becoming violent or dangerous. Boca eventually lost 2-1 to Estudiantes and the crowd left feeling disappointed, apart from us because we had a good story to tell...
The area surrounding La Boca is meant to be also quite dangerous but also has a quaint arty, working class, area of tango bars and art stalls. Unfortunately I think we arrived there a decade too late because it had been converted into some kind of tourist hell. Although the few streets of the caminito were very colourful, it was packed with naive, middle aged tourists with shorts, sandles and expensive cameras and annoying street hawkers trying out their english and trying to annoy you into going to their restaurants. Outside these few streets (in the "dangerous" working class areas) the streets reverted to a normal city setting. About the only genuine part of this spot was the pungent smell eminating from the 100 year old stagnant water of the old harbour.
The highlight of Buenos Aires for me was our trip to the School of Trapeze Art for a, aerial theatre show that we had seen advertised. Its a little difficult to describe and we weren't able to take any photos but this was possibly one of the coolest shows I have ever seen. The show was done almost entirely with UV light effects and with the performers clad all in black. This took the focus of the show away from amazing acrobatic tricks that the performers were doing and blended to whole thing into one great spectacle. While we sat back in couches below the action, there were dayglo pois and people abseiling down dayglo sheets and crazy visual effects made simply with a huge curtain of fabric. It was all very Cirque du Soleil and very, very cool.
For Tessa the highlight was the weekend designers fair that we stumbled across in the centre of Palermo. Essentially they set up stores with spaces for individual clothing designers to exhibit and sell their wares. Even the bars in the area clear out their dancefloors to pack the place out with racks and racks of trendy, cheap clothes. We were both whipped into a strange shopping frenzy by this discovery and jostled our way through the packed out fair to pick through the endless racks of cheap designer clothes. Tessa says "it had clothes". Insightful...
The central area of town was worth a look around. We walked past the roman parthenon style engineering school and found ourselves at the pink house, the argentine presidential palace. Nearby was the moshpit of Av. Florida, the main shopping street which was so crammed with streams of people that we had to start adopting road rules just to get through the crowd. We wandered up to the congress building past the monolithic obelisco. Outside the congress buildings were packs of professional dog walkers wrangling handfuls of tetchy hounds.
One french guy we met happened to have spent the last three years living in Wellington, just around the corner from our old place in Newtown, and spent a month working at Tessa's old work!
We met some great folk at our hostel and went out on the town in San Telmo on a few occasions. We went out for parillada and wine with our new found crew, and I foolishly ordered the ribs which turned out to be much much bigger than my head. This sheer amount of meat wrote me off for the rest of the night and put me on a week long meat detox but Tessa kept partying till the not-so-wee-hours. We also found a cool jazz bar with delicious platters not far from our hostel which had a live band every night and by the end of the week we were pretty much regulars.
But just as we were getting settled into the groove and grind of the life of a traveller in Buenos Aires, the time came for our flight out to Canada. We were both excited to be starting the next chapter (and to not have to pack our bags again for another arduous bus ride) and also a bit sad that our adventure had come to end...
SO this brings to an end to our story. The blog comes to an end here, I hope you've all enjoyed reading it, your comments and emails have kept it going. I could keep writing about us settling into normal boring lives here in Vancouver but that just wouldn't be as much fun, would it? Sleep tight and don't have too many nightmares about lightning strikes, giant condors, creepy shaman and burning roadblocks. Thanks for joining us through the blogging medium on our adventure. If you want to keep in touch you can reach us through facebook or post a comment on the blog and I'll get back to you.
That is all.
Needless to say we were pretty busy during our time here exploring the city and getting used to the extreme nocturnal time frame of the Portenyos (folk from Buenos Aires). Our first stop was the Evita Museum, set in a former halfway home that she had set up in a rather plush part of town. On our way we passed the botanical gardens complete with it's large population of contented stray cats which were cared for by the local community, there were little shelters and piles of cat biscuits spread throughout the park. Having not seen either the musical (I cant stand Lloyd Weber) or the movie, neither of us had much idea of what Evita Peron had done or why she was particularly famous, so the museum was an eye opener in terms of the politics of the time, all the social programs she set up, and the wierd corpse napping and defilement of her body after she had died of cancer.
Later in the week we visited the Recoleta Cemetery, which sounds rather morbid but was actually pretty cool. It is basically a small city of crypts for the elite, famous and historical of Buenos Aires dating back to the early days of the city's history. It is filled with crypts in various states, from the brand new which resembled a Prada-ish high fashion store to the deteriorating plaster and bare brick of the neglected. Everywhere there were ornate carvings, grieving marble statues and intricate stained glass messiahs. The key attraction was Evita's grave which was surrounded by punters trying to get a sentimental photo of her modest crypt battling with the nosy types who kept getting in the way by peering in through the heavily tinted glass to try and spy the coffin itself. I was more fascinated by all the gothic carvings and statues, and spent most of my time wishing I was a better photographer with a better camera.A true South American experience that we had foolishly put off until the end of our trip was to see a live football (soccer) match. When we arrived we started asking how we might get tickets to the upcoming Boca Juniors (one of BA's top club sides) home game but we were consistently told we would need to join a tour group because; A: it wasn't safe for tourists to go to the rowdy games by themselves and B: because there was no way we could get tickets otherwise.
These tour group tickets were typically around five times the original price of a ticket, and who needs a guide at a football match anyway? So we figured we would try and buy tickets at the gate on the day with some other folk from our hostel. By the time we finally found the ticket booth we learned that we had just missed out on gate sale tickets and after wandering around hopelessly trying to find a nearby pub that showed the game we thought we may as well try our luck with the dodgy scalpers in the streets surrounding the stadium. We asked a guy who appeared to be quite drunk and who promised us he had tickets and we began to follow him towards the stadium. He soon got "nabbed" by a cop and scarpered while the cop told us of the dangers of buying fake tickets from scalpers. The cop, who was obviously in on it from the start, then offered to sneak us into the game for a price. He handed us dodgy tickets and then led us through all the ticket checks to the turnstile where the ticket guy grabbed our dodgy tickets and helped us jump over the turnstile. We were a few minutes late to the match and stuck right in the "dangerous" supporters zone but we had made it in! The atmosphere of the game was fantastic especially when Boca took the early lead, the stadium was filled with chants and shaking fists but it never even came close to becoming violent or dangerous. Boca eventually lost 2-1 to Estudiantes and the crowd left feeling disappointed, apart from us because we had a good story to tell...
The area surrounding La Boca is meant to be also quite dangerous but also has a quaint arty, working class, area of tango bars and art stalls. Unfortunately I think we arrived there a decade too late because it had been converted into some kind of tourist hell. Although the few streets of the caminito were very colourful, it was packed with naive, middle aged tourists with shorts, sandles and expensive cameras and annoying street hawkers trying out their english and trying to annoy you into going to their restaurants. Outside these few streets (in the "dangerous" working class areas) the streets reverted to a normal city setting. About the only genuine part of this spot was the pungent smell eminating from the 100 year old stagnant water of the old harbour.The highlight of Buenos Aires for me was our trip to the School of Trapeze Art for a, aerial theatre show that we had seen advertised. Its a little difficult to describe and we weren't able to take any photos but this was possibly one of the coolest shows I have ever seen. The show was done almost entirely with UV light effects and with the performers clad all in black. This took the focus of the show away from amazing acrobatic tricks that the performers were doing and blended to whole thing into one great spectacle. While we sat back in couches below the action, there were dayglo pois and people abseiling down dayglo sheets and crazy visual effects made simply with a huge curtain of fabric. It was all very Cirque du Soleil and very, very cool.
For Tessa the highlight was the weekend designers fair that we stumbled across in the centre of Palermo. Essentially they set up stores with spaces for individual clothing designers to exhibit and sell their wares. Even the bars in the area clear out their dancefloors to pack the place out with racks and racks of trendy, cheap clothes. We were both whipped into a strange shopping frenzy by this discovery and jostled our way through the packed out fair to pick through the endless racks of cheap designer clothes. Tessa says "it had clothes". Insightful...The central area of town was worth a look around. We walked past the roman parthenon style engineering school and found ourselves at the pink house, the argentine presidential palace. Nearby was the moshpit of Av. Florida, the main shopping street which was so crammed with streams of people that we had to start adopting road rules just to get through the crowd. We wandered up to the congress building past the monolithic obelisco. Outside the congress buildings were packs of professional dog walkers wrangling handfuls of tetchy hounds.
One french guy we met happened to have spent the last three years living in Wellington, just around the corner from our old place in Newtown, and spent a month working at Tessa's old work!
We met some great folk at our hostel and went out on the town in San Telmo on a few occasions. We went out for parillada and wine with our new found crew, and I foolishly ordered the ribs which turned out to be much much bigger than my head. This sheer amount of meat wrote me off for the rest of the night and put me on a week long meat detox but Tessa kept partying till the not-so-wee-hours. We also found a cool jazz bar with delicious platters not far from our hostel which had a live band every night and by the end of the week we were pretty much regulars.But just as we were getting settled into the groove and grind of the life of a traveller in Buenos Aires, the time came for our flight out to Canada. We were both excited to be starting the next chapter (and to not have to pack our bags again for another arduous bus ride) and also a bit sad that our adventure had come to end...
SO this brings to an end to our story. The blog comes to an end here, I hope you've all enjoyed reading it, your comments and emails have kept it going. I could keep writing about us settling into normal boring lives here in Vancouver but that just wouldn't be as much fun, would it? Sleep tight and don't have too many nightmares about lightning strikes, giant condors, creepy shaman and burning roadblocks. Thanks for joining us through the blogging medium on our adventure. If you want to keep in touch you can reach us through facebook or post a comment on the blog and I'll get back to you.
That is all.
2 comments:
oh wow, you guys have had a fantastic travel year. I've loved reading your blogs, ah I'm gonna miss them. Hope we meet again soon in South America, New Zealand or EE.UU.
Nos Vemos.
Un abrazo
Hey guys - you have had a fantastic trip, I've loved reading about your little adventures, some sounding quite scary! Good luck in Vancouver, I'm sure you'll have a great time there too. Love, Isa (and Luka of course)
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