“Paris of the South”- Buenos Aires

After basically killing time in Sao Paulo, we made our way to Buenos Aires, Argentina (Sorry Cristina Learman).

We basically went to Adelaide going to the Evita museum (thanks Tres).  “Don’t Cry for me Argentina…”   It was kind of a crappy Museum and everything was in Spanish but it only cost 3 bucks.  One of the comments in the guest book was “This museum was hard to follow and I don’t understand how Evita got famous”; at least we weren’t the least cultured ones there. 

The Recoleta Cemetery is where all the Argentinean Elite are buried.  It is a pretty amazing spectacle to see the above ground tombs, especially the enormity of some of them and of the cemetery in general.  Eva (Evita) Peron is buried here, there wasn’t anyone else that we had even heard of though.

We went to La Boca, a town of Buenos Aires, where the most popular futbol team in Argentina – Boca Juniors plays.  Maradona used to play for this club, who is arguably the best soccer player of all time (Pele from Brazil being the other).  We took a tour of the stadium, and we wanted so badly to go to a game.  Unfortunately, the Boca Juniors weren’t playing until after we leave, so we instead went to go see Lanus play their first game in the America’s Cup (basically all the countries in North and South America participate except for US and Canada), which is very similar to the UEFA league in Europe.  Lanus was last year’s Argentinean champion.  The crowd there was crazy; there is either a barbed wire fence or literally a moat separating the fans from the field.  The home team fans aren’t permitted to leave the stadium until the opposing fans leave the surrounding area – I think they should start implementing this at the Horseshoe at Ohio State.

We also tried to go to a theme park in Buenos Aires.  I felt like Clark Griswold from the National Lampoon’s movie “Vacation”.  In this case, we didn’t travel by station wagon halfway across the country to find out Wally’s World was closed; we traveled across the globe to go to a closed “Saint World,” themed after Jerusalem.  Instead of holding up the security guard to go on all the rides, we just went across the street and bought some ice cream and watched the ocean until we decided to go back to our hostel.  We heard about this park from the magazine “Budget Travel.”  Someone had sent in their story from the park.  See their story below. 

“Our Buenos Aires guidebook recommended Tierra Santa [Saint World], a religious theme park that resembles Jerusalem.  All we knew was that highlights were said to include a laser-light show of the creation story.  Upon entering the park, we heard a voice over the loudspeaker: ‘We regret to inform you that Christ will not be resurrected due to high winds.  We will resume the resurrection as soon as possible.’  Twenty minutes later the winds died down, and sure enough, an eight-foot-tall Jesus emerged from the mountain in the center of the park.”

Now Jill would like to add something before we make our way to Chile. 

Argentina is known for tango.  There are several opportunities for beginners to try and learn the art in Buenos Aires, but Matt would have absolutely nothing to do with lessons (though in the end, it’s probably better that way – it saved me from inevitably several broken toes).  We went to an Argentine restaurant, which happened to have a tango show.  After several glasses of wine, Matt agreed to at least watch the show.  So we had a steak dinner with drinks and a show for the same number of pesos as it would have cost dollars in the US for a night out in the “Paris of the South” – certainly not bad for a third of the price. 

Our hostel is just off of a road called 9 de Julio, which according to wikipedia is the widest street in the world.  It is at some parts 10 lanes wide (in each direction) plus a huge median.