* Sorry for the technical terminology, Lilly tells me that laymen call this style 'impressionist'.
Back to our hostel for a screening of El Secreto de sus Ojos, an Argentinian film that won this year's foreign language Oscar, and it's a very solid effort.
Then back to the riverside for dinner at Siga la Vaca (Follow the Cow) - for the princely sum of ten English pounds each, we received unlimited grilled meat, salad and appetisers, plus chips, a dessert and a drink - 'a drink' being half a bottle of wine or a 2-pint jug of beer of soft drink. There's a grill area with a couple of chefs cooking many joints, and they'll hack you a chunk off on request - normally a very large chunk, and then they'll toss you a large chunk of something else for good measure. I had some pork, lamb and chicken, as well as two types of steak. Lilly had more Sprite Zero than any human is meant to drink.
On Wednesday we took a bus back to La Boca. Strange area - there are a few streets aimed entirely at tourists in an otherwise unsavoury dockside neighbourhood, home to Boca Juniors. The eye-catching detail is the houses, which sport a rainbow of colours, often on a single building. But you can also watch tango dancers, have your photo take with a Maradona lookalike, buy souvenirs, etc. Shame we didn't escape from the clutches of our group when we came to the football, because you can see it all pretty quickly. We also popped into the PROA contemporary art gallery and watched a video about Futurists. It was alright - a nice-looking but expensive cafe on the roof.
In the afternoon we headed back to Palermo. On our first night we went in a graffiti-covered bar, the Post Street Bar, which was advertising a graffiti tour - Graffitimundo. We signed up for it and came back to do it.
As I mentioned previously, there is a lot of graffiti in BA, and some of it is just tags (people squiggling their names with aerosols) but a lot is illustrative, sometimes on a huge scale. It seems that sometimes businesses or homeowners will permit, or even commission, large-scale graffiti because it tends to keep the taggers away - public walls are more of a free-for-all, but graffiti is not only tolerated, it is used by politicians, who pay people to go around with aerosols (and guns), spray-painting their slogans on every accessible wall at election time.
The tour is unexpectedly run by an English girl - my first impression* is that there's a judge in Hampstead wondering whether to be disappointed or proud that his daughter has followed up an Oxbridge degree by heading to South America, meeting a load of graffiti artists and organising tours/otherwise promoting them. If so, he should be proud, because it's an interesting tour and something genuinely different. Having found the tour's starting place - no easy task - we walk for a while in a well-graffitied area, then hop on a minibus to see some other highlights and visit a couple of very small galleries/shops (there is no hard sell) and she even buys everyone a beer to finish back at Post Street. Her enthusiasm and personal knowledge make it something worth doing, though I fear she hasn't quite come to terms with the impermanence of graffiti as an art form. One of the local artists also tagged** along - it turned out that a big cat we'd admired a few days earlier was his work.
* I should point out that this is a private joke in case it sounds incredibly harsh.
** No pun intended. Much.
In Dunedin, NZ (of all places) I read an article about craft beers in Argentina. Sadly I failed to note any details at the time, and we largely failed to find any here. I must single out the Breoghan Brew Bar - of its 5 home brews, including one being promoted on a blackboard as NEW, only the cream stout was available, and it had no red wine left whatsoever. FAIL.
We had much more fun at Bar Seddon, partly because its owner was several sheets to the wind but a very nice guy. At one point I saw him pouring beer into very small glasses. And then he poured in some blue liquid. Boy, somebody's ordered something weird, I thought. And then he handed them to us as a bonus drink.* If Barrie opened a bar in Buenos Aires...
* Don't fret, loving parents, there was nothing underhand going on, the blue stuff came out of a proper bottle and we weren't drugged.
On Thursday we went to Recolata, the most up-market barrio, full of fancy buildings (lots of mansions for the 19th century super-rich) and posh shops. Our amigo Gaz has been kind enough to give us a few tips from his time here, and when he said that La Rambla serves the best steak sandwich in BA (and therefore possibly the world) he wasn't even joking: I have never had such a tender piece of cow. You could eat this steak with your teeth out. Thanks Gaz.
Recoleta is also home to Our Lady of Pilar Basilica, an attractive white church with a few inessential religious oddments in its cloister, and a cemetary of the landed gentry - it caused some controversy when Eva Peron was added to the roster - probably upset their Aires and graces. We saw one guy who had procured a map from somewhere, but I don't think it's full of memorable names, so we saw Eva, then had a quick scoot around the brooding mausoleums (to give you an idea of the typical shape and size, the TARDIS could land here and fit right in) and large cockroaches.
The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes is definitely the 'if you only visit one art gallery' gallery, and it's free. A fairly impressive range of European art on the ground floor, with plenty of minor works by big names, sets up a large collection of South American art, in a vast range of styles and enough to make us revise our opinion slightly upwards, upstairs. It's also well laid out to lead you around, apart from two rooms at the back which appear to have had an entire collection crammed into them - you could make an entire gallery in Japan out of those two rooms.
In nearby United Nations Square is a giant metal flower, Floralis Generica, whose petals open in the morning and close in the evening. Very cool.
For dinner Lilly managed to order - but not finish - a calzone as big as her head. I'm amazed there aren't more fat portenos*.
* Local term for BA natives.
Despite not knowing what to expect, we've enjoyed BA - it's got a good sense of energy about it and although it's by no means a tick-off-the-sights place, it's an enjoyable place to stay for a few days (I would spend a few in Palermo and a few in San Telmo).
A few random thoughts - it has a bit of a litter problem - the binmen made a fantastic mess outside our hostel one night! Public transport is very cheap and efficient, although a bus map wouldn't go astray. The subway seems permanently busy but is quick and some stations are nice decorated, with painted tiles and the like. It feels safe in the main tourist areas. And free wifi is pleasingly ubiquitous - the inverse relationship between how 'developed' a country is and the availability of free wifi continues to hold.
Now we're off for a flying - well, boating - visit to Uruguay. There are frequent ferry services with a modern terminal and a painless immigration process. Partly we're killing time because we're not sure where to go next - we're in no rush to get to flooded Rio - but it's an easy trip and seems worth seeing. We will, as always, report back.
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