The first thing we noticed in Buenos Aires was that we were once again blending in with the crowd. We have gotten used to being easily identified as the “tourist” in South America. Buenos Aires was just like stepping off the plane into Spain. Even the Spanish language in Buenos Aires was different…which did not help our cause at all! Any Spanish words that had a double “L” were pronounced as a “zh” instead of the usual “y”. So chicken was no longer pronounced ‘poyo’, it was ‘pozho’. And rain was ‘zhuvia’ instead of ‘yuvia’. Plus, the Argentinians were as rapid-fire as the Chileans with speaking. Given that we no longer stood out as tourists, the Argentinians would just start talking to us in Spanish so we were lost in a sea of rapid-fire zhuzhing. After checking into our hotel, we walked along the waterfront boardwalk that lined our part of the city. We felt at home with the many marinas filled with sailboats and enjoyed two quick tours of old schooners that were docked at the waterfront. The waterfront was a hive of activity with restaurants, bars and even tango dancers performing for the crowds. It was a wonderful introduction to Buenos Aires! Our first full day in Buenos Aires started with a trip to a very unique bookstore. The Ateneo Grand bookstore was housed in an old theatre complete with box seats for reading nooks. It was amazing! I could have roamed for hours but we had to move on to the next unique event for the day…the Water Museum. As we approached the Water Museum, we felt we had made an error because it looked like a palace. In the late 1800s, Buenos Aires had a deadly outbreak of cholera. The leaders decided they needed to make clean water the focus of the time and they certainly did it in a big way. The incredible building was definitely a tribute to how important their cause was and the museum was very interesting. The overall architecture in Buenos Aires was based on the Beaux Arts movement (which Bill actually guessed correctly and won our debate! Who knew he was such the architecture connoisseur?). Breathtaking buildings stood on every corner. Amidst the buildings in Buenos Aires was nestled one of the most famous cemeteries in the world…La Recoleta. La Recoleta was home to over 4600 mausoleums which lined concrete walkways like a small city. Mosquitos were everywhere and we had to make a quick stop to douse ourselves in repellant before continuing on our way. While the mausoleums were impressive and housed famous figures such as Evita Peron, La Recoleta did not have the same vibe as the cemetery in Santiago. However, La Recoleta was a bucket list item I had so I can mark that one off the list. The funniest part of our day was witnessing the Buenos Aires dogwalkers. Dog walking is a fulltime job in Buenos Aires and they do it up with style. One dog walker would have anywhere from four to a dozen dogs on a leash at the same time. When one dog walker would meet another dog walker, the dogs would all bark and jump and get entangled. It was a chaotic mess but the walkers seemed to handle it perfectly, do a little Jenga type disentanglement and go on their way. Fascinating! Our last stop of our very busy day was the Galerias Pacifico Mall. Yes, it is unusual for us to visit a mall but this mall was special. It had ceiling murals that were reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel so we had to stop in and take a couple of pictures. Buenos Aires certainly loves art!
Our second day in the city, we started at the train museum which was reviewed as “okay” on the internet. Not sure who was doing the reviewing but we found the train museum to be much better than ‘okay’! The museum was housed in an old train station and had two trains with old cars you could tour. There were hundreds of items on display from old cash registers, adding machines, clocks, whistles, bells, etc. Maybe we are just dorky but we loved it! We then wandered down the street to the clock tower and local park. This area was the only area in Buenos Aires we visited where we had to side step a few homeless people. For the afternoon, we had a scheduled tour at the Teatro Colon. Our English tour was actually in English this time and our guide clearly loved the theatre. The theatre was opened in 1908 and looked as if it stepped straight out of the Gilded Age in New York. It was voted one of the top ten best opera houses in the world and we could definitely see why it was so popular. Our last stop for the day was to another Buenos Aires institution….Geurrin’s Pizza. As we approached, the crowds reminded us of The Varsity in Atlanta (if you have never been to the Varsity, then your life is not complete). We were seated and I ordered a Fuggazeta pizza (must translate to huge pile of yummy onions) and Bill ordered something that must have translated as “huge monstrous meat pizza”. When the server delivered our pizza, we all had a good laugh at the amount of food on our table. The pizza was amazing and Bill had leftovers for days! The next morning, we visited the Holocaust Museum. Buenos Aires had one of the largest immigrations of Jewish people in the 1930’s and 40’s in the world. It also housed some of the most notorious Nazi’s including Adolf Eichmann who had supervised over the death camps. It was another interesting part of Buenos Aires’ history. For lunch, we ventured over to the San Telmo market and found an Argentinian man making Swiss Raclette. It was a cheezy bowl of goodness! We spent the afternoon trying to locate the Metropolitan Cathedral. You would not think they could hide an entire cathedral but we walked past it several times before finally discovering the entrance. It was worth the search and we called the day a success. The final day in Buenos Aires was an odd hodgepodge of activities. We attempted to visit the Planetarium but it was closed so we wandered down to the Japanese Gardens that were across the street. We then wandered to the Eco Parque zoo which was no longer a zoo and was in need of some love. Our final adventure was attempting to pick up our money from Western Union. We went to several locations only to be told that we needed to go to another location. We finally found the correct location and the line was very long. As we approached the front of the line, there was a man getting pesos. He had a huge duffel bag and loaded it with pesos. He took that duffel out to his car and returned with another duffel and then another. I don’t know how much money he got but it definitely looked like he robbed a bank! After much ado, we picked up our heist, retrieved our luggage from the hotel and headed to the airport for our flight to Iguazu Falls. Iguazu Falls sits on the border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Argentina and Brazil share the falls so we knew we would need to cross into Brazil to see the “Brazil side” of the falls. After reading online about the slow, hours-long process of taking a bus across the border, we decided to hire a taxi for the day to hopefully streamline the process. As our driver approached the border, he stopped at the Argentine side, showed our passports and drove right across the border. At the Brazil checkpoint, he just blazed on past without even a wave. We voted right then the taxi had been money well spent! Our first stop was the Itaipu Hydroelectric facility. Itaipu was the third largest hydroelectric facility in the world secondary only to two plants in China. Itaipu was shared by Brazil and Paraguay because the border of the countries split straight down the middle of the dam. As a result, equal numbers of Paraguayans and Brazilians worked in the facility. The facility was huge and we enjoyed learning about the process and seeing the huge generators at work. The facility supplied 100% of Paraguay’s electricity and 10% of Brazil’s which was an impressive task given Brazil is the 5th most populous country in the world. Take that solar panels and windmills! Following our tour of the plant, we met our taxi driver who shuttled us over to the Brazilian side of Iguazu Falls. We hopped on a shuttle bus at the national park and after a long ride through dense forest, we disembarked at the falls drop off point. We followed the crowd down the stairs and as we approached the first viewing area, we heard a roar of water and felt mist on the air. Bill turned the corner just ahead of me and when I heard “holy shit!” I knew it was going to be spectacular. Iguazu was like a scene from a Walt Disney movie. Words and pictures could never do it justice. We walked along the falls with Bill towing me along at times with my camera still on my eye. Our amazing day ended with another blow past the Brazil border guards, a brief check at the Argentine border and a not so good dinner at our hotel restaurant. I had a hard time believing the Argentine side could beat the Brazil side but I could not wait for the next morning to arrive! The Argentine park was about a half hour drive from the hotel so our trusty taxi driver picked us up and started our day. When we arrived at the park, we boarded a train (much like Disney World) and chugged through the forest to the falls. The difference between the Brazil and Argentine sides was the Brazil side offered the expansive view of the falls while the Argentine side allowed you to literally be on top of the falls. The park had metal walkways that meandered about the falls and we decided that no matter how poor Argentina had been in its’ history…those people could build some first class walkways! The view points were placed on the edge of the falls and the power of the water was terrifying at times. We could not visit the most famous area of the park, Devil’s Throat, because the river had washed away the walkway earlier in the week. One attraction that we chose not to do was the speedboat ride. The boat would take visitors under the falls and we watched from a distance as they were pummeled with water and disappeared into the mist. As the day drew to a close, we were sad to leave the falls. We also realized that we no longer need to go on death hikes in search of “falls” again because nothing could ever top the Iguazu experience. The last morning in Iguazu, we walked through a small biopark that was adjacent to our hotel and finally saw some orchids. Our flight back to Buenos Aires was uneventful and we spent the evening resting and preparing to leave our warm weather to travel south to Patagonia. Luckily, I had purchased a new coat in Buenos Aires so I was somewhat prepared for what was to come….Ushuaia, Argentina….the city at the End of the World! ****Mores pics on Pictures tab (especially for my foodies!)
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AuthorSally Miller Archives
May 2024
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