What was planned to be a reasonably leisurely 2-night stay in Buenos Aires turned into a whirlwind tour courtesy of a bus depot strike in Montevideo. After arriving with plenty of time at the bus station, Annaleise (a fellow backpacker I met in the Montevideo hostel who was coincidentally going to the same hostel in BA) and I discovered, after finding someone who spoke English, that there was a strike on at the Bus depot and they couldn't tell us what time we were going to leave. After a couple of hours of waiting around they made us walk a couple of blocks from the depot with all our luggage and they picked us up there. When the bus we were on seemed to break down on the way to Colonia we wondered whether we would ever get to BA, as we had missed our connecting ferry (luckily with the same company) and were nearly 3 hours late! The put us all on the ferry and we arrived at our hostel around 8 pm, not leaving any real time for sightseeing that day! We headed out for dinner at a parradilla (though stuck tot he safe option of steak) then caught a bus with some of Annaleise's friends (2 Mexicans) to visit a mutual friend who lived in the BA 'burbs. He was very welcoming and it was pretty cool to see what kind of place a 20-something rents in BA as opposed to Sydney. The boys decided to head out to a club later in the night (around 1am) but we headed home - I only had 1 full day left in BA and wanted to make the most of it.
The next morning I booked a bike tour of the south side of the city for the afternoon and hit the streets of the north side of town. I headed up to La Ricetta Cemetery - "the place" to be buried in Buenos Aires. Its quite an amazing place with "streets" of mausoleum. It has a kind of surreal atmosphere and houses pretty much all the famous people in Argentinian history! From here I headed back south through the city, checking out the widest Avenue in the world (Avenda de Julio 9), the houses of parliament and one of the few remaining Spanish style buildings. There is a pretty clear divide in the city, north of the Parliament building is very French in style, wide boulevards, 1800s French architecture, while south is more Spanish and Latin with winding streets and older buildings.
After walking about 10 km around the city I was glad to reach the bike tour place for my afternoon's entertainment. We headed south through the older parts of town to La Bocca, which has a large reasonably famous football stadium which is painted bright yellow, and the "Tango precinct" of town, Caminito. It was obviously set up for the tourist trade, but I loved it anyway, there were couples "tango busking" on the streets and they were excellent! From here we headed to a park region which was set up by the government 10-20 years ago to reclaim some of the land along the river - it was a beautiful park with lakes and causeways and obviously very popular with the locals. That evening I wanted to see some more Tango and was tossing up going to a show or just a local restaurant with some of the girls from my dorm. I decided on the restaurant and we saw a small show with four dancers and a couple of musicians. It was good but I'm definitely going to a full show if I ever get back to BA!
The next morning I got back on the ferry/bus and headed back to Montevideo for my conference. The return journey went smoothly with none of the frustrations of the outward trip. I made the most of the 3 hour bus trip catching up on some zzz and re-aligning my brain into work mode by reading papers rather than the holiday mode I had been in up until this point.
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