Buenos Aires, AR… Again

We arrived at Chill House, Buenos Aires, and were immediately greeted with a recommendation for a local restaurant. We tucked in straight away to a meal loaded with forbidden beer, red meat, onions, and garlic. It was fantastic. Having already seen quite a bit of the “touristy” side of the city we instead used the time to make our final flight plans with Qantas, and Skype with various members of the family. We had also took refuge in the air-conditioned comfort of a nearby cinema to watch ‘Ano Nuevo’ (“New Year’s Eve”), starring a huge cast of well-known actors, including the likes of Halle Barry, Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfieffer.

On Sunday, we met for lunch with Diana, and Andy & Jo, with whom we visited for a while, reminiscing about our all-too-brief time together. After lunch Christina and I left along with Diana to check out the San Telmo market, taking in the various artisan stalls full of mate cups, leather goods, stone jewellery and carved out coins from all sorts of countries.

She had been earlier in the morning, but missed the statue of Mafalda, a famous Argentinian political cartoon character. We parted later that afternoon, taking the subway back to our hostel for a siesta.

The following day we did a walkabout around our neighbourhood, strolled the short cobblestone street of Zelaya and photographed some of the wall murals. We also had a peek at the Konex cultural center, which was conveniently 4 blocks away from our hostel and was where we were planning on meeting some of our friends to watch La Bomba, a drumming show. In the afternoon we picked up our laundry, which we had dropped off early in the morning; two loads had been washed, dried, and folded for 37 pesos. I thought it was a screaming deal.

In the evening we returned to Konex for the show, where we met Diana, PJ, Tiffany, and a couple of newer girls. Inside we got some drinks and watched the show.

It’s worth mentioning that while drinks were priced not that differently from bar-type drinks at home, the volume was greater by an order of magnitude.

My beer was nearly a litre and Christina’s rum & coke was about the same. The show was well attended, and very entertaining. There were enough drummers to keep the rhythms complex and lively, with features including a trumpet, and some bossa nova style vocals for some numbers. It didn’t go very late, however, and we left the girls at the gate where we departed for home and they went looking for an afterparty.

Tuesday we left town in the evening, after killing time during the day at the Abasto mall. We watched ‘El Gato con Botas 3D’, which was probably more entertaining in Spanish than it would be in English, since we picked out a few linguistic details that made jokes for us where none were intended. One last walk around the neighborhood was enough to put away the afternoon for us, and it was time to be off. We took a taxi to the bus station, and presented ourselves for the Cucero del Norte service bound for Iguazu.

The ride was surprisingly smooth, since our last long-distance bus benchmark was in India. We found that if the comfort of this service was to be placed somewhere between the bus in India and the 1st class train in Europe, it would probably be closer to the Europe side of things. Our seats were on the top floor, right at the front of the bus, giving us a grand view out of the forward window. I wouldn’t claim that it was a great night sleep, but with a smooth ride, several movies, a hot meal, and some deeply reclining seats, it was a much better ride than our Iberia Airlines flight to Buenos Aries from Madrid.