Hello everyone!
We have just finished our 4th and last week in our Buenos Aires Airbnb. It was also our last week of Spanish classes which we are sad about. Over the last two weeks we have seen even more of Buenos Aires, we saw a show and took a weekend trip to Tigre, a town an hour north of Buenos Aires on a delta.
We finally saw all the main touristy neighborhoods of Buenos Aires when we took a tour of the La Boca neighborhood. This is a very special neighborhood for a variety of reasons. For one, it is situated at the mouth of the Plat river, which is where it gets its name, La Boca is Spanish for mouth. Also, since this neighborhood is located at the mouth of the river, it was the original port of Buenos Aires and was the city’s first neighborhood. When the first immigrants arrived in Buenos Aires from Italy, Spain, Portugal and other European countries, they settled in La Boca. It was this mixture of languages and cultures that stared Buenos Aires and the “porteno” culture here. Also, La Boca was the birthplace of Argentine tango! The working-class men in La Boca created this dance and it spread back to Europe. We took a two hour walking tour of the vibrant neighborhood and loved seeing the artistic flair of it. All the houses are painted different colors with cobble streets running between them. There were numerous art vendors painting and selling their works in the streets. The art mimicked the colors of the houses and was so beautiful that we had to buy a piece. Also along this tour, we learned about the importance of futbol, soccer, to the city. The city has professional soccer teams, but the best and most well known team is La Boca Juniors. Many famous players have come from La Boca including Diego Maradona and Carlos Teves. On our tour we visited this teams home stadium which is famous for how close the fans are to the field and how loud it gets during a game. We both loved learning a bit about the history of Buenos Aires and experiencing the artistic neighborhood.
Since being in Buenos Aires, we have wanted to go see a show of some kind. We had already gone to a tango show but we also wanted to see another form of Argentinian art. The famous opera house, Teatro Colon, was in walking distance to us, but all of the shows were sold out until January! Luckily, being a big city, there were plenty of other options for shows, the only problem was our level of Spanish understanding limited our choices. We knew a comedy show would not work because we wouldn’t understand any of the jokes and a Broadway play would also have been hard to understand and follow. We wanted some kind of visual art that didn’t depend too much on Spanish. We eventually found what we were looking for at the Kirschner Cultural Center. This center puts on all sorts of shows and most of them are free to the public! The building itself and all the shows are funded by the state to share Argentinian culture. We booked tickets for an Argentinian folk ballet even though we had no idea what a folk ballet would consist of. We came in with no expectations but were immediately fascinated by the first act! We quickly learned this ballet consisted of many separate contemporary dance pieces with ballet elements. The different pieces ranged from telling a story about the indigenous people of Argentina to contemporary love stories to the traditional Argentine tango. We loved the whole show and had a great evening together!
For our last weekend in Buenos Aires, we chose to take a quick trip to the town of Tigre. Tigre is a smaller town about an hour north of Buenos Aires that is situated on one of the largest inland deltas. The town has been known as a getaway from the business of Buenos Aires. Many people have vacation homes there where they go to relax. The most popular things to do there are to go sailing, boating or kayaking on the delta. To get there, we took a train from downtown Buenos Aires and arrived in Tigre midday on Saturday. We had booked an Airbnb for Saturday night so once we were all checked in, we started to explore. We first walked to what used to be an important fruit port that has now been transformed into an outdoor market. At the port, we got a late lunch of burgers and beer. We loved being able to sit at the port and enjoy a nice meal! After that we continued along the port and walked past many of the old rowing clubs which looked like old German buildings. The range of architecture in Tigre was quite interesting. The rowing clubs looked German or Austrian in style while many of the surrounding houses had more of a French and Italian feel. While on our walk, we stopped for a delicious ice cream and sat and watched all the boaters and kayakers on the river. There were so many boats and kayaks, it was overwhelming, and we couldn’t believe no one ran into each other. After our ice cream pitstop, we finished out the day by walking along the river for about 2 miles. This river walk was beautiful! The whole area was green and full of fun cafes and restaurants. We turned in for an early night so Nikki could finish up her PhD application at Carnegie Melon.
The next day was a bit rainy so we decided to go to a couple of museums. The two museums we wanted to see was a mate museum and an art museum. Mate is a traditional herbal tea that is extremely popular here. Almost everyone in Argentina drinks and loves mate! They would consider it a cornerstone of their culture even. We wanted to learn more about this tea and try some ourselves but unfortunately, the museum had closed permanently. So instead, we continued back along the river walk to the Tigre Art Museum. I wanted to see this museum just because of the beautiful building! The museum was situated in a large park right on the river and the building was a refurbished French mansion with a magnificent terrace. The art inside was also great to see! There was a photography exhibit showing what Tigre was like during the 1890’s and another exhibit showing a wide variety of Argentinian artists. We spent a couple hours there before walking back to the train station around 3 pm to head back to Buenos Aires.
On Tuesday we are taking a bus to Pinamar, a small beach town 5 hours south of Buenos Aires, to relax and enjoy the beach for the week leading up to Christmas! We hope everyone is doing well and we will write another post after a couple of days in Pinamar.
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