10 Amazing Things About Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires Futbol Amigos

One of the things about travelling is that you don’t get the chance to do very much exercise. You may walk a round a lot but that doesn’t really cut it so by the time we got to BA I really wanted to do some proper exercise. Enter, Buenos Aires Futbol Amigos. BAFA run friendly games of football at a handful of sites around the city. Anyone can play – locals, travellers, ex-pats, students. You just sign up online, turn up at the pitch with your match fee and join in. The weather was stiflingly hot so the pace and standard of the game was mixed but my team won out in the end. It was really good fun and would recommend it to anyone in BA who fancies a kick-around.

Recoleta Cemetery

Is bonkers. Imagine a small, picturesque village in rural France full of tiny individual houses, each with their own style, colour and sculptures. And then realise all these beautiful tiny houses are, in fact, people’s graves. And that’s Recoleta Cemetery, oddly wonderful. Evita’s tomb (the highlight of the trip for most) was disappointing in comparison to many of the others, many of which Chris and I would have happily settled for as our next home! 

Japanese Gardens

I am a sucker for a Japanese garden, so much so I included one in my ideal house as constructed in our Spanish lessons! So despite the entry fee we went to the gardens up in Palermo’s parks and they were beautiful.

La Catedral

I think it’s fair to say we were both a bit sceptical about going to a milonga. Many of them are incredibly touristy and neither of us were sure about doing a tango lesson. But La Catedral came highly recommended and a few people from our Spanish school were up for going so along we went and I am so pleased. For me this was the highlight of our time in BA. We’d had a few great nights out prior to this, but they all felt like they could have been in any big city whereas this felt really Argentinean. The building was beautiful; tall crumbling walls covered in huge art and the room lit by coloured lightbulbs. We gave in and did the hour and a half tango lesson and I would argue we were pretty good (the move in the shot below was not instructed and may not be a tango move). We then enjoyed watching others do much better tango while eating the best cheesy croquettes I have ever tasted!

La Bomba de Tiempo

This Monday night fiesta has really grown in recent years and again I was a bit concerned it would be super touristy but I was massively pleasantly surprised. Housed in the outdoor space of Konex, La Bomba de Tiempo is 14 guys having a lot of fun on stage with drums and percussion instruments. For us it was a night of bum shaking, jumping and cheering, surrounded by a brilliant mix of locals and travellers.

The La Cabrera Night

Buenos Aires has an amazing energy about it and it loves the night. On 30^th December we met up with our friends Clare and Chris for a quiet one that turned into an incredibly drunken late night which led to a somewhat less heavy NYE! But that’s one of the things I love about BA, those nights seem to just happen. We started in a square in San Telmo which has tango on a Sunday night and also had a samba band. After dancing around with beers we set off to a recommended restaurant which no longer existed. So we jumped into a taxi where I recited the name of another restaurant, which the taxi driver had never heard of! So we ended up at La Cabrera (highly recommended, but to the point where it makes you worry a bit). After putting our names down to wait we had two cocktails and sat down to eat about 11.30pm. The steak was INCREDIBLE and they put so much effort into all the extras. By 2am we realised we were the only ones in there and were given free champagne (I think to encourage us to then move along!) We then went on to a club which was, to be fair, rubbish! But still a super fun, totally unexpected night out with everything from the poshest meal we’ve had to the rankest club I’ve experienced.

NYE

New Year’s Eve is not a big deal in BA. Most people travel to Uruguay or Rio but we’d been to Rio and Uruguay would have been MEGA expensive. Amazingly we managed to pull together the random people we’d met along the way who were in BA and we went out together in Palermo. On the streets was a samba band with female dancers in full carnival costumes. We had such a fun night drinking on the streets and dancing with strangers. This 50 something year old took quite the shine to Chris, in fact I was forcibly removed.

El Pasaje

We spent two wonderful weeks learning Spanish at El Pasaje and can now conjugate verbs… hurrah! The school itself was tiny and run by the most fantastic group of people. We were taught by two different professors, both young, interesting, funny and great teachers. And we learnt with a fantastic group of people who we had a lot of fun with and will absolutely stay in touch with. My expectations of what we’d achieve were totally out, we barely scratched the surface of Spanish but we’re now much more confident and are really looking forward to using it more as we travel north. Also loving the emails from friends and family with various tests in them… brilliant!

San Telmo

We stayed in San Telmo for the duration of our stay in BA and though many people choose Palermo I’m really pleased we didn’t. It is a beautiful neighbourhood full of colonial architecture, graffiti, colour, crumbling walls and doors, great bars and an excellent craft and antiques market. We loved our time here and are now proud owners of an old ‘banos’ sign. We will officially have the best toilet sign outside South America.

The Black Market

As deadly as it sounds, the black market in BA is THE place to go to change dollars for pesos. It comes with risks, plenty of stories of fake notes and occasional muggings but when you can get an extra third for your money it seemed worth the risk. As you’ll imagine, Chris and I planned this with great detail. I was to wait outside Burger King with all our things where I could see Chris. Chris was to suss out the potential cambio men and make a judgement on their eligibility before changing a small amount of money first to try it out. Lessons learnt from first experience: 1. Don’t check the money high in the air for legitimacy… it makes you amount of money you’re carrying highly visible. 2. The man wasn’t dodgy. This turned into a daily meet of Chris and his new found friend and my affection for the exterior of Burger King.

Smith (with a guest entry from Mc)