Exploring Buenos Aires

I have some trips in the backlog, so I'll start with this one that I did in September/October. I was in Argentina in the Iguazu area only, so I consider this to be the first time I really visited.

This time I went to Buenos Aires, for a month, to help with the Youth Olympics.

For starters, in this trip I was working, and because there were not enough people I worked a lot. I only had 1 single free day every 4 or 5, which means that this free day you need to do a lot of things together that you could distribute better if you had a full “weekend” or 2 days in a row. Also, this meant I would only visit the city, a trip further away would be complicated. And there was one more thing, one of my best friends was working there and I was going to visit her too and do things together, which means less time overall to do touristic things.

Nevertheless, I managed to get some impressions from this city and country and to see a bit of the things that were around me.

Buenos Aires seems…European. Maybe it´s the architecture or how the streets are organised, but the centre of the city reminded me of Madrid, or Paris a bit maybe, and also some Eastern European cities. It looked very different from Rio, but then again, I did not visit any other big city in Brazil, so maybe it´s not that different. The only thing is that you do notice the poverty, in the fact that buildings and streets look dirtier, more abandoned, less maintained.

I was staying in the centre of the city, in a massive square that contained the parliament, and where there were daily protests for any topic. However, this was the norm, so I never felt the protests were a problem or disturbed me. The hotel itself was like 2 minutes from work, which was great because I had morning shifts starting at 6:30. However at this day and age, there´s a thing that any hotel that wants to be respected must have: good internet coverage while in the room, be it cable or wifi. Sadly, my room didn’t have. The wifi lost signal plenty of times or it was too weak to use, to the point of not being able to send whatsapp messages. Especially when travelling this is a big deal breaker, and even after warning about it they said they could not do anything.

Anyway, being so centric allowed me to be near several nice spots, one of them being the same square I mentioned. It was big and usually sunny and felt quite relaxing. I also was at walking distance from the Obelisk, a big monument in the centre where there was celebrations and protests, and that looked nice too.

Apart from those scenic places, I did the tourism I enjoy more, which is to just randomly walk around and get a feel of the city.

As I said the centre reminded me of certain cities in Europe, but there was a lot more poverty, and you could see clearly homeless people. However, you didn’t feel the insecurity of Rio. Later I learned that this might have been not entirely correct (I heard shootings, twice, once right next to the office while we were on the roof of the building and some coworkers saw the shooter shoot against a house and leave), but in Rio a lot of the homeless people looked like on drugs, while here they just looked homeless.

Close to this hotel there was a big street filled with theatres. A friend that also lived in the city meet with me one day and showed me this area, and it was shocking the amount of shows and actors and events that were on display. I had heard lots of Spanish actors and musicians toured south-america in general a lot more than Spain, but before seeing this I may not have understood the true scope of such things in Argentina at least. Maybe in Barcelona or Madrid there are as many theatres, but in here the way they accumulated so many in such a small area was quite surprising. A bit further there was another beautiful section, Puerto Madero, next to the sea. I saw it at night, and with the lights it had it was very nice. 

My friend lived in an area called Palermo, so when we coincided we walked around there too. This felt more similar to Ipanema actually, had amazing restaurants and bars and was less centric-looking and more relaxed, very nice. We went a couple of times to a nearby restaurant strip that had very nice food and amazing cocktails, and we could see the night atmosphere, with people ready to go out. However, with the limited time we had, we didn’t really go out while in there, or at least no to clubs: It seems most places in Argentina were just playing “cumbia” music, and after seeing some examples we agreed we both despised it, especially her considering she had spent there some months already before me. Only one night we tried to go out, and the place we tried was busy with a private event and told us anyway we had to dress up more nicely, meaning a suit and a dress (and after that we hated it and would not like to go back there).

We worked too much these days to do much more, but we did have the chance to use a bit the fact that we work for such events, and we visited several stadiums around the Sarmiento park and Tecnopolis. This area was used to hold several competitions, and it looked curious. I'm unsure how Tecnopolis is used normally, seemed to me some type of science museum/exposition area, but it had funny statues and structures. Of course we had full access and we skipped queues and restricted areas, which makes you feel a bit special and good^^. This event is smaller than a normal Olympic of course, but it was organised in a way that there were plenty of people following the different competitions and it had a very nice and friendly atmosphere.

All in all, the month passed too fast because of work, and didn't get to see much, but what I saw was nice. It did had its problems though, of bad service sometimes, bad taxi drivers, massification in the centre, poverty, some lack of general maintenance of public things and other issues, but for a visit it felt like a relaxed place and I enjoyed it (when I had free time).

Ah! I cannot finish without mentioning a couple of things: Yes, the food was...weird. The beef they have there is really really good, but the cooking style is a bit weird, a bit too well-done for my taste. And they have a lot of fat food, heavy, with butter and sauces and oil. Or sweet, that's the other thing, they eat a lot of sweet things in the morning (facturas), and the alfajores and dulce de leche are awesome but they're digestive bombs (that didn't stop me from coming back with close to 6kg of the things). And the last thing: Argentina and elevators had a weird relationship. Lots of them are old, badly maintained and fragile-looking. I was stuck in an elevator, twice, in this month. It has never happened before in my life I think and here it happened twice. One of the times we even had to get out forcing the doors open while it was stuck between two floors, which was a bit scary but also a bit funny.

It was a short and busy visit overall, but I'd be curious to see more some other time if there's another chance.