Buenos Aires

After arriving in Buenos Aires, we decide it would be a good idea to explore the new city straight away… Pick up a map from the hostel and step out the door to find…… a socialist protest march!! Big shirtless guys with balaclavas and large sticks! Interesting… We safely weave our way through the protest and go searching for some real non-airplane food (preferably a local steak which is what Argentina is renowned for), a local beer and a sim card.

Around dinner time (8pm) we find a restaurant serving 7 dollar steaks, and as soon as it is served we realized why it was so cheap. It wasn’t burned, but looked overcooked and not very appetizing. It was served with only a slice of tomato and a plastic knife. But wow were we in for a treat, the most amazing steak I have ever had, and the plastic knife sliced through it like butter.

We decide that we need to make this first weekend count, so that we don’t regret not taking the later flight, so we ask a few of the guys in the hostel where to go, after a few beers down the road at Millhouse hostel, we get a cab to Pasha (nightclub) around 1am, pay 20 peso’s to get in and it is dead. We thought we had been stiffed good but were soon to learn a vital lesson about Buenos Aires life.

Being a 24 hour city we soon realized that they really do live life around the clock. We eventually got into the Buenos daily timetable which was – wake up around 12-1pm, have breakfast and look at different parts of the city during the day til about 8pm. Then have lunch, have a nap until midnight, where you then get up to have dinner, and THEN start drinking around 1-2am and then eventually hit the clubs at 3am, only to get home around 9am to do it all again! VERY different to Sydney! haha

Waking up at 5pm on the Saturday, we get a cab to la Boca. This is a place you do NOT go at nighttime as it is very dangerous, (apparently Mike Tyson got rolled there lol) but is a must do in Buenos during the day.. Aftertrying to show the cabbie where we wanted to go on the map, we ended up driving down afew‘wrong’ and unsafe looking roads we ended up getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Great, already starting to get dark and we are lost in the area tourists are not supposed to be! We obviously skipped travel 101. We found La boca soccer stadium and walked around this, and eventually found two guys who spoke English and told us where to go.

Now Argentineans are nuts for soccer over here, they literally breathe it. People are playing in any space of grass/cement/space available. It seems to be all just random people who join and leave the game as they wish.

We end up finding a market with tango dancers on the streets which were all lined with amazing colourful houses. We then get a bus back to the city, the tickets were 1.5 pesos or around 45 cents AUD (come on Sydney transport!). Bought a litre of vodka, a couple of beers and 5 litres of soft drink from a small supermarket for the equivalent of 8 or so Aussie dollars! Then went out to a club with a couple of American girls from the hostel and stumbled home around 8am. We were definitely making the most of this weekend.

For 15 million people and such an old city, Buenos Aires is very clean and everyone is so friendly, a lot of homeless people but even the locals don’t seem mind sparing a few coins to help them out. but we definitely seem to stick out like Andrew Bogut in the NBA as everyone just stares at us... not in a threatening way but just because we are different. Imagine what it would be like in the rural areas of Argentina! We spend the day walking around the city and go to an all you can eat steakhouse for lunch. We decide to try at least everything that was available – When in Rome! The steak and chorizo sausages were amazing, the intestine and some poo-ey looking sausage was not so much. But at least we can say we ate poo in Argentina! Lol

With an early morning ferry to Uruguay pending, our last night in Buenos Aires we decide to head out for a quiet coffee. We make a pit stop at the bank; get a cab to a ritzy suburb called Palermo. We try paying for the cab with a 100 peso note (only about 30 AUD but that goes along way over here!), the cabbie takes it, says he doesn’t accept it and gives it back to George. So we pay the bill with another note, and go enjoy our drinks. Afterwards, we try paying for the coffees with the 100 Peso from before, the waiter walks off, and then comes back and starts speaking to us loudly in Spanish. We pick up on words such as fake, no accept etc. Now being as stupid as him, we start explaining we got it from the bank in English thinking he will understand us. People around us start to look around and then we get shown that the money is a fake. Eventually we accepted that we got rorted somewhere along the line, so we pay the bill. On the way back to the hostel we try to figure out wtf had happened. Could it have been the cabbie, waiter or even the bank that gave us the wrong note??? No idea! So George cops it on the chin and we figure it’s not too bad, but at least definitely a valuable reminder that we are not in Australia!

So all this in less than 70 hours of our trip, lucky we didn’t stay in Sydney! This seems like it’s going to be an exciting ride over here! Is currently 5am local time again charging our iPods for our 6 hour bus and ferry combo trip to Punta Del Este in Uruguay at 8.30am. Looking forward to the amazing beaches, restaurants and beautiful people for the next couple of days!