Livin' it up in Buenos Aires

In my last post I mentioned that we were in Buenos Aires and loving it. That hasn't changed. At all. We stayed in our first apartment for a week in the lovely neighborhood of Belgrano. Then we had to move to a hotel while we found another apartment, which was only a small hassle, but now we are settled into a studio apartment that we will remain in for the rest of our time in BA.

The good life

BA in the spring is just amazing. The weather is cool and when the sun is out its just perfect. Suzanne and I just love walking around the city exploring the different neighborhoods on foot. We both love looking at the buildings and their old architecture that stands out in such contrast to the concrete blocky ugliness that dominates cities of the rest of Latin America (barring the colonial centers of the capitals). We love resting our feet in cool little cafes, sipping a coffee or latte and watching the people go by. We like having the free time to sleep in every day till 11. We love the fact you can get anywhere in the city by subway or bus for less than 50 cents. We love having our friends Ximena and Andres show us around and take us to the authentic places we would never go otherwise. In short, we just love this city!!! So much so that we often stop by the realtor windows where they are selling apartments. Since the country revalued its currency and screwed a lot of its citizens, everyone sells property with US dollar prices. It seems you can buy a great apartment in a fantastic neighborhood for only $100,000! In the US this would be at least $500,000!

So what do we do every day? Well, we have this guide book that the tourism office gave us that has a section on each neighborhood in the city with a nice little walking tour for each one. So we do that during the day and at night we're trying to take in a little culture. We're going to go to the opera, maybe see some ballet, and possibly take in the BA philharmonic orchestra. Additionally, we're going to go to a Tango show and take a week or so of Tango lessons. I think we'll be plenty busy and at the end of our time here we're going to wish we had more. I'm even thinking how great it would be to take a month off of work later on in our life and just come down here and hang out with our future kids. :)

Escaping bad luck?

We've had a bit of bad luck though. A couple of things have gone wrong and we hope that our bad luck has run out. The first thing was our first attempt to go to the opera. The Colon Theater is considered one of the best theaters in the world and was recently fully renovated and might now even be the best! It just reopened in May of this year. We figure, why not go? So we bought our tickets and headed to the theater. Well, we stood in line to go in for awhile while the time slowly ticked closer to show time, but they wouldn't let us in. After curtain time passed we still waited for fifteen more minutes and then everyone started leaving. Turns out the employees of the theater decided to strike. We were assured by several locals standing around us that this had never happened before. Strike 1. Disappointed, we headed back to the subway station to go home, only to have the train stop for some reason for another 30 minutes while we just waited... Strike 2. Strike 3 came while we were staying in a hotel between our apartments. Ximena and Andres came to pick us up for a night on the town and as we were heading outside, we looked out the window and saw several young men with sticks yelling with some other people while our hotel clerk called the police saying “No Salgan!” (don't leave). While we waited for the gang (what else do you call them?) to disperse with the aid of the police, the clerk told us that this had never happened, especially in an otherwise tranquil neighborhood. Strike 3. We sincerely hope that we don't have anymore “This never happens” moments while here!

Next stop, Iguazu falls!

The only out-of-city destination we have planned for the end of our trip is the famous Iguazu falls. The falls are on a lot of people's don't-miss list and were a big reason (besides BA) for coming back down to this part of the continent, especially since we're dissing Brazil. Due to a strange system in Argentina of charging foreigners over four times the price of locals for flights, we decided the only affordable way was to take a bus again. While the prospect certainly does not appeal to us (it's a 15 hour bus ride), we take comfort in the fact that we're going first-class and it will most definitely be the last 15 hour bus ride we will take in many years!!!! My next post will be about the falls.

~Mike