Our city tour of Buenos Aires was quite nice but mainly a drive around to see buildings and such and sometimes get out to look at such, like the generic flower. But we did get a feeling for the area and realized we weren't going to be looking at great distances to go back and visit anything on our own. Some of the museums looked interesting. We had our stop at La Casa Rosada - the presidential home - and a stop at Eva Peron's statue in the park. We had passed the parliament building on our way in from the airport and our guide did not want to go back to that area because she said a demonstration would be happening later that day. The household maids were striking for better pay. Demonstrations are almost an everyday way of life here, she said. But only on the weekdays as people don't want to mess up their own weekends. Hmm. I suspect British trains follow that same reasoning.
We found Buenos Aires to be an interesting and bustling city but rather faded. As if her glory was all in the past and she was just hanging on to the remembrance of her beauty and pride. La Boca was one of the more interesting areas of B.A. Like many of South American country capital cities, it does seem overburdened with keeping up with past memories and underwhelmed with the ability to try and fix them. A lot of graffiti and trash and yet some fantastic efforts at gentrification and beautification. money, drugs, crowding, crime, lack of jobs, lack of education, lack of medical care, etc. etc. all of societal problems showing up in most cities these days. Sometimes just rather more visible than others.
La Boca: one stop we made where we got out and wandered around quite a bit . It is a neighborhood in B.A. where early Italian immigrants, mostly, settled and is now a colorful and vibrant area of restaurants and shops and tourists and more. So La Boca was quite fun with its murals and colorful buildings (Several stories on the colors, the most popular one we were told is that immigrants used to beg small bits of paint from the ships to paint their dwellings so they got all kinds of colors) and its statues of immigrants hanging off balconies, standing in doorways, sitting on benches. Most of the early buildings for immigrants fresh off ships were corrugated sheet metal so color was important to try and feel something more homey. There are still people living there and of course now it is the "in" thing to have one of the old immigrant buildings but was rather commercialized and we were warned not to be here at night as everything closes and more "local color" comes out - which we didn't want to see.
As we'd just come in this morning, my hubby was feeling the flight and wanted a nap before our evening Tango Show! This was dinner and a show but it started with our hotel pickup at 9:00 p.m. - just a half hour before the time where we usually head up the stairs for some reading in bed! But we were game to try. There are many venues around the city advertising Tango Show and Dinner. Most of them start around 9:30 or later. And we had just arrived that morning. This was a group thing meaning there were vans all over the city stopping at hotels picking up people and dropping them into large rooms full of tables with tiny stages at the front. We were checked into our table which was a table for two and fairly close to the front - much better than the seats we had in Rio for the Salsa show (yes, we have seen many shows and most of them somewhat questionable in taste giving more umph to get the tourist dollar than cultural relevance or significance and yet we keep going).
Dinner was prompt and good Argentine beef - our first. The room only half filled but then we were on the shoulder season - not quite as many tourists in town. There is always some entertainment during dinner. Tonight it proved to be a movie - rather an old timey documentary of how tango evolved from the early Italian immigrants and the famous names of tango which included soundtracks of some of the singing and musical interludes. I didn't realize that most of what I knew of tango has come from bad movie dancing between spies or wanna be spies. It was after 10 before the actual dancing started. Dinner was finished although they were happy to keep serving the wine. Not sure what I expected but tango was definitely more intricate and vigorous and energetic and leg throwing and bending than I thought. Plus all the costumes were vintage roaring 20's and Al Capone gangster era style. It was interesting but with the big dinner, the wine, the room being rather warm, and not much sleep the night before, by 11:15, we were both falling asleep in our chairs despite the vigorous activity on the stage. So sorry to say, we bailed. There was probably another good hour left to the show which would have put us back at the hotel at 1:00 a.m. or so. Someone found us a taxi and we were back to hotel and in bed and asleep by the time the show finished. Think we got the main gist of the dance and there's no way we'll ever learn it but we do appreciate the gymnastics and intricacy of it more than bad movie spy dancing now.
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