Plaza de Mayo
After we had a nice buffet style breakfast this morning, we got a phone call at 8:45 from our guide, Jeremy, to check that we were ready for our guided tour. In just a couple of minutes we met him in the hotel lobby. We were very surprised to find that we were on a private tour with just him and the car driver.
We’d assumed we be on a group bus with a number of other tourists. However, our private tour was an excellent exerpt of the the highlights of Buenos Aires. We first started with the area of the presidential palace and the Plaza de Mayo which is where the mothers of the dissappeared still march to commemorate their missing children, and to work for social justice.
Across the street is the beautiful Catedral Metropolitan, which is where the current Pope was the cardinal. Our guide explained how the area of the Plaza de Mayo is still used for every demonstration, and that there are always police there (complete with several trucks with water cannons), and a rigid iron fence that can be used to block off the entire street.
La Boca stadium
From here we travelled to La Boca, and saw the football stadium, of the Boca Juniors, the former team of Maradona, in the colors of blue and yellow. We learned that those colors were chosen from the flag of a Swedish ship which happened to be in port when the team was looking for it’s colors. Even the emergency exit signs in the stadium are painted in these same colors — no red and white of the rival teams!
Shops of Caminito
Next we went to the cobblestone streets of Caminito, a very tourist designed area with many brightly painted colorful shops. A short drive away is the very ritzy area of Puerto Madero, a rehabilitated waterfront area where the old dock buildings have been converted into upscale shops and apartments.
Puerto Madero
Cementario de la Recoleta
Our final stop, after a drive through the very wealthy area of Recoleta, past it’s many well-secured houses and embassies, was at the Cementario de la Recoleta. The narrow lanes of the cemetary are lined with thousands of sarcophagi, most of them very large and impressive. A few though have fallen into total neglect for the family that owns them may have died off, or no longer pays the maintenance fees. It was the most fascinating cemetary we have ever visited. The most famous sarcophogus is the tomb of Eva Peron, which even today is still decorated with flowers daily by dedicated followers.
Our Say Hueque representative had suggested empanadas at El Sanjaunino, so when both our driver and tour guide suggested we should go there to eat, we decided to take their advice. We had lunch there next to three people from California, so I believe a lot of tourists find there way here. The food was good. The waiter put on a big act for us, though he wasn’t too impressed that we had Diet Pepsi to drink.
We walked the two or three kilometers back to our hotel along Av 9 de Juilo, stopping at Plaza Libertad, a small green space, to eat the apples and cookies we’d brought with us. As we walked about taking pictures in this park a woman came up to me and said “Watch your camera!”, which I was doing very carefully (and there were very few people close to us). But a few minutes later as we were crossing one of the extremely busy streets (against the light with hundreds of others), someone hit me very hard on my left side, so hard that it stopped my watch. My camera, and everything else was safe, but it does remind one that camera theft is one of the major problems for tourists in this city.
At 7:45 this evening we went to the lobby to get picked up for our tango show and dinner. We were still there waiting for at 8:30 when we gave up, figured no one was coming, so went back to our room. Both Enid and I read books assuming that was the end of the evening when the phone rang at about 5 minutes to 9. Someone asked me something in Spanish and I heard the word “tango”. We went down and there was a man waiting for us, but the bus was around the corner. We hurried there and got on. We were the only ones on and then about half way to the tango show theatre we picked up four more people. We are sure that they forgot about us as we were the last ones in and everyone else was finishing eating. We did have a very nice meal though with an excellent steak. The show was good. I enjoyed the orchestra as much as the dancers. We were not at all sure how to get back as it had been so disorganized when we arrived. However one of the men at the door was able to direct us to a van. After a trip down the very narrow streets of Buenos Aires late at night we got back safely.