A week of partying, eating, music, people and ... exhaustion. Wholly moley what a freaking cool huuuuggge city. This place seems to have everything except coins and a good public transport system. The parks are huge, green and everywhere. Carla is in her element if you know how much she loves parks. We stayed in a pretty cool hostel in Palermo - an area that oozes charisma, history and art.
Argentinians are stunning, if you are an ugly argentine you´ve definitely drawn the short straw. Long legs, unblemished brown skin, shiny thick hair and bodies that make you want to cry - a little out of awe, a little out of desire but mostly out of jeolousy.
We met up with Dan (a mate from oz) who lives here in B.A and has become our unpaid chaperon to bars, restaurants and house parties. We also finally got to meet Picu - gorgeous argentine family friend and her flat mate Veronica equally as wonderful. They took us to another house party - and the argentines know how to party. And it´s crazy how late everything starts here. People don´t have dinner until 10/11/12 at night, shops close after midnight and clubs don´t open until 2am, even these house parties didn´t start til after 1am.
We managed to fit a few sight seeing outings in there - La Boca for the tango, football and colour, Recolletta for the markets and cemetry, etc it is hard to fathom how much money the rich spend our their tombs. We are returning for another 9 days for more music (carla is aching for some jazz), new years, museums and some tango chicos!
Derek´s foot was stil pretty painful and swollen. We had 1 visit from the doctor and 3 trips to this grimey, run down public hospital jam packed with the queing sick. It looked strangely similar to a music festival - endless lines of ppl, unforgiving heat (no ventilation) and unhappy over worked, underpaid staff but no music...just screaming babies. It was really difficult to find help and the staff were less than willing to speak more slowly so we could attempt to understand where we had to go and who we had to see. We were momentarily assisted by a nice old maintence man fixing the elevator...which was a lost cause but none the less lovely and so we hired a crutch from a chemist. Now Derek gets around with a backpack on his back, a smaller bag on his front, a surfboard under one arm and a crutch clung to the other. He definitely gets some looks.
Headed to the coast for 10 days. We had met an Argentinian guy a month ago who insisted we go to a little coastal village called Chapadmalal for good surf and gave us his friends details (Cholo) to look up. Caught a bus there from Buenos Aires and got dropped off around 9:30 in the night at what kinda resembled a bus stop. There was nothing around, the wind whistled and the spinafex rolled past. Where the hell did this guy send us? We approached two locals who luckily happened to know this friend Cholo. In minutes they had arranged this lovely toothless little man hidden under a weeks worth of motor oil to pick us up in his held together with some sticky tape car and take us to Cholo´s house. Cholo and his mum were great. The mum talked at a million miles an hour and in turn we did alot of feined comprehending head nods. I´m pretty sure we got away with it. We had a little unit to ourselves which was relieving after weeks in hostels. But this little coast village was really pretty disappointing, the beaches were not very nice and the weather was pretty bad. We decided to move on to the most popular beach destination in Argentina for Derek´s birthday, Mar del Plata (5 hours from B.A.). Dan met us here and we hired a unit for 4 days.
Derek´s birthday consisted mainling of drinking, watching a football match and a little more drinking out and about in Mar del Plata. We did also hit the local casino to try our luck on roulette. We lost 100 pesos (AUD50) within 10 minutes and pissed off the security guard. Dan the instigator. Dan the photographer. Bad Dan.
The water at these beaches is very cold but the air temperature is around 30 degrees. You get so over heated but still you have to psyche yourself up to dip your toe in the water. Even so, derek wetsuit clad braved the water to go surfing each day and Carla braved it for 5 minutes.
For 4 days including Xmas we stayed in another beach town Miramar - which we have just left to return to B.A. These were 4 great, great days. For xmas Carla made rumballs and her world renowned trifle. We ate all day, went to the beach to kick the ball around and managed to get quite drunk while battling it out in ping pong for hours. Derek was hands down champion but in Carla´s defense they were close matches. We finished off the night with a huge alsado (an extremelly cool argentinian bbq) which was cooked to perfection by Andreas - a new found friend and miramar local.Andreas, his wife Valeria and 2 sons Dedaeo and Casper were amazingly hospitable - took us for another alsado, to some local sights and good nearby beaches. It was sad to say goodbye to them.
Miramar is now another favourite of ours. The relaxed, gentle atmosphere of this place was wonderful and the beaches were alot nicer here. Because this was a tourist town primarily for argentinians everyone was so intrigued by this ´exotic´ country we come from and bent over backwards to make us feel welcome.
Now we head back to Buenos Aires. Mel arrives tomorrow which is really exciting!!
Hope everyone has a great xmas and new years! Feliz Navidad and Año Nuevo chicos! We are definitely adding a more consistent blogging approach to our new years resolutions.
peace out homies, more photos are soon to follow.
