City of Tango

Food, Argentine style: Bife de Lomo and a bottle of Mendoza red for Dorthe´s birthday

We´re back in Buenos Aires. And we can unresevedily say that it is good to be back. Last time that we were here (two years ago), we found that Buenos Aires is a different style of city - its not like Rio or Paris or London, where there are a defined set of things that you "must" see - in fact, Buenos Aires doesn´t even really have all that much to see. Rather, its more like Copenhagen, or Dunedin (to use personal examples), its a city that you have to go to, be there, and just soak up, to really appreciate. Realising this from our previous trip, Dorthe and I set about soaking it all up as best we can.

We arrived in Buenos Aires on Tuesday night after a 20 hour bus epic from Puerto Madryn, our last stop in Patagonia. We´ve spent most of the time here revisiting our old haunts from two years ago - we went to our favourite restaurant here for Dorthe´s birthday (see the photo of Bife de Lomo above), and are even staying in the same hotel as last time. Similarly, we have spent our time here filling in a few gaps from the last trip. We paid a visit to Ricoleta Cementary, where Argentina´s rich and ruling elite are buried (including the grave of Evita). The unique thing about Ricoleta is the nature of the graves - each is a marble or stone tomb at least three metres high (and often more), decorated with all manner of angels, statues, and other details. The effect when you get many of these lined up next to each other is a kind of small city, a "City of the Dead", if you like - It is a really quite fascinating to walk around for an afternoon.

We also paid a visit to the beautiful Casa Rosada, Argentina´s presidential palace, from where Eva and Juan Peron used to hold their famous rallies. The exterior of this palace is a rather different shade of pink. The interior, though, is beautiful - everything is in the old spanish colonial style, and is beautifully decorated. Very nice.

But the one thing that Buenos Aires is really associated with is, of course, Tango. It is everywhere, from the Tango shops selling Carlos Gardel memoribilla, to the buskers in the pedestrian malls dancing tango. Last time we were here, we went to a Tango show, and it was impressive. However, this time we wanted to do something a bit more realistic of what Tango is really about (and a bit cheaper) - we thus paid a visit to one of the many Milongas around the city. A Milonga is a tango club, where the locals go to dance the dance. And that is exactly what they did. The place we went was in a beautiful old colonial hotel, and it was absolutely full to the brim. The clientale ranged from the old couple who must have been pushing eighty - not particularly flamboyant, but they were definitely groovers in their day - to the exceedingly smooth 60 year old in the stylish grey suit with slicked hair who sat there smoking his cigarettes, and after much study, choose his partner very carefully - he was, of course, a legend on the dance floor - to the late 30s group who were into the more flamboyant aspects of the dance. Dorthe and I were the only non-locals there, and although we obviously didn´t dance, it was fascinating just to sit there and watch the locals do their thing. It is, after all, what you do, when you visit the City of Tango.