The porteno life

With an excellent exchange rate and a smogasbord of places able and willing to accept foreign spending, our days in Buenos Aires were spent living in excess. Numerous trips were made out to the Casino Flotante at Puerto Maderno. More numerous yet were visits to our local mall, Abasto, which housed shops, a Hoyts cinema, and an indoor theme park named Neverland.

A few days were spent wandering the delightfully shiny Buenos Aires locale. Avenida Santa Fe provided a particularly good spread of shops and people to consider. The suburb of Recoleta made for decent cemetery tourism, as well as hosting laid back crafts fairs on the weekends. Other nights (and post-casino early mornings) were spent at Puerto Maderno, whose ritzy restaurants, well-lit sidewalks, and water views reminded me much of Sydney Harbour and home.



Despite my aspirations of writing, finding freelance work, and mastering the Spanish language, day after day was spent on general lazy pleasures: sleeping in, lounging around, dining well. Even our few trips out to nightclubs stank of lethargy, as we would stumble home way too long before sunrise, and tipsy on cocktails far stronger than those at home.

Dinners were perhaps my favourite Buenos Aires activity. Favourites include: La Cabrera for excellent pepper steak; Parrilla de Abasto for an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet; Tandoor for much-missed Indian cuisine; Gibraltar for Thai green chicken curry; DF for Mexican food (especially prawn fajitas!); a restaurant above the Bahrain nightclub for very good steak and grilled fish; and Marini for what might well have been the best buffet I've witnessed in my entire life.

Another noteworthy experience was a dinner and tango show at the Tango Rojo. At US$150 per head, this was easily the priciest meal we've had in South America, but to me, the experience was well worth the cost. I finally had my first and only taste of creviche, which is raw fish marinated in (and said to be cooked by) lemon juice. While this was found to be much easier to swallow than sashimi, it is probably not a dish I would opt for again. A very well prepared duck was my main course, which was then followed by a dessert platter of chocolate and caramel.

The intimate, red-lit dining room was a perfect setting for the Tango show that followed. There were no more than fifteen tables, with two to four people seated at each. To the back of the room was a stage on which a pianist, two accordionists, a bassist and a violinist played. Another platform to the front of the room staged the tango show rife with singing and dancing and romance. I was surprised to find the show able to finally fulfil my Hollywood-inspired dreams of the Moulin Rouge, especially since the real deal had been unable to do so during my trip to Paris a few years back. To top things off, Tango Rojo even featured the movie version of "El Tango de Roxanne". Perfect!

At the recommendation of our Spanish language instructor, Vera, we took a day trip out to Tigre at the end of our third week in Buenos Aires. Set on the Paraná Delta, Tigre is said to be a popular porteño weekend destination, reached by an hour-long journey on the train. From the train station at Tigre, it took us another 40 minutes on a rather foul-smelling boat ride before reaching a waterfront parrilla for lunch. We had intended to return to central Tigre soon after lunch to explore a theme park near the train station, but travelling down a stinking river after lunch on a very warm day did not bode well for my stomach. So we settled instead on an hour in the air-conditioned casino before heading back to Buenos Aires with what must have been all of the city's inhabitants on the train.



During our final weekend in Buenos Aires, we took a day trip to the beautiful Uruguayan city of Colonia. While my initial reasons for the trip were purely to do with the amusement of my brothers, the trip did me a surprising amount of good. A UNESCO-listed heritage area, the city had an old, small-town feel to it. I felt much reinvigorated from the new atmosphere, and very much excited to get back on the move and out of the familiarity of Buenos Aires.

All joy aside, much of my month in the city of Buenos Aires was spent in a tussle with the postal service between Correo Argentina and Australia Post. One unregistered package from my parents containing contact lenses and mobile phones went missing upon leaving my dad's hands in Bondi. A second package (registered this time) encountered addressing issues - which were, admittedly, largely my fault - and ended up being held by the Argentinean customs office for two weeks.

One final diary note: friends may find this hard to believe, but Jim and I lasted an amazing two weeks before our apartment degenerated into an inhabitable mess. The cleaning lady's non-appearance on the second week may have had much to do with our eventual failure, but in all, I am proud of our housekeeping efforts!

posted by liz at 12:57 PM