Buenos Aires, Argentina
Of course I tried to see a soccer game while I was in town. Argentinian soccer games are famous for their awesome (and sometimes violent) atmosphere. The biggest clubs in Buenos Aires are River Plate and Boca Juniors. Boca was away the week we were there, so I tried to go to a River game. Everything online said you go to the stadium the day before and buy tickets in person. So we trekked all the way to the stadium, which isn't really near any metro stations and I saw a huge group of people in line. I noticed that everyone was carrying a piece of paper and asked someone what was up with that. Turns out you need to buy tickets online AND come to the stadium the day before for a ticket. So I was out of luck. Oh well, I saw the stadium and caught some of the game on tv.
One day we went to the Buenos Aires zoo, an old urban zoo that was pretty remnicent of the Chicago zoo.
Except in Chicago you don't have a bunch of these randomly wandering around. Like a mix of a deer and a rabbit, but about the size of a dog, these things are evidently called Maras.
The zoo fairly well summed up my general feeling of Buenos Aires. It was clearly once a grand world city with a ton of money and beautiful structures, but now feels decidedly third world.
Like there were some cool animals at the zoo, but they also let you buy food to FEED the zoo animals like a petting zoo! They had these little slides where you could just roll the food down into the monkey cage or whatever.
Of course you can also feed the Maras.
The fine arts museum has this bad ass flower that evidently closes at night and opens in the morning.
Here's kind of a crappy picture from the deck of someone's house. We went to a "closed door" restaurant one night, which is basically a restaurant in someone's house. It's unlabeled, you find out about it online and see if you can get an invite. You have dinner around a table with a bunch of random people. The food was pretty good and it was interesting meeting other travelers and speaking a little English for a change!
Ok, here's something Evita related. We went to the Evita museum and they had some fancy dresses. Remember how I said they don't speak English here? Well they don't seem to get many English tourists either, although we saw lots of tourists in areas like this, almost all of them spoke Spanish. The funniest thing is the real big tourist sites will have "English translations", which are clearly just some Spanish pasted into Google translate. I wish I had taken a picture of some of the things they said because it was hillariously bad.
So those are the "highlights", honestly we spent most of the time wandering around exploring the city, eating and hanging out. So here are a few other fun things about Buenos Aires and Argentina. First they seem to have absolutely no laws around truth in advertising. Compare the outside of this package to the actual product inside:
Also note this Budweiser bottle. While it looks familiar, the writing has this most audacious claim on it: "This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood Aging produces a taste, smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price". Which, if you've had any other beer and any other price, you know is complete bullshit.
The roads in Argentina were an endless source of entertainment for me. They seem to have basically no laws (or enforcement) at all. Lines are completely optional and you often see people just milling in one or two lanes. A one lane road easily becomes two or three lanes as people just drive wherever. They had four way intersections where NO ONE had a stop sign. It seems like the rule is just, whoever gets there first keeps going, and if you can squeeze in, then your direction has the right of way. It seems like it would cause accidents but I didn't see any, and it was surprisingly efficient.
So about Argentina's economy. While the buildings look like Paris, it really seems like everything is crumbling a little here since the currency crisis. In 2001, Argentina defaulted on their debt, and if you had $100,000 in the bank, overnight it became worth about $30,000. People tried to get into dollars, but the government put tight controls on it. Their government now lies about growth statistics and you can tell the country is really starting to go downhill.
Consequently it's a great place if you have dollars right now! The catch is the "official" government rate is an artificially strong 7 pesos to the dollar. But there exists a strong black market in dollars such that you can get 14-15 pesos to the dollar if you go to some backroom dealers. We took advantage of this "blue rate" and consequently could spend like kings. We tried to find the most expensive bottle of wine in the store for our last night, and it was the equivilent of $7. No one uses credit cards here because everyone tries to hide money from the government (and credit cards give you the official rate).
As such it definitely feels third world. You see construction sites where the protective scaffolding is just like some card board and a board or two. The sidewalks are crumbling and dirty. I've heard it described as the Paris of South America, but the closest I can find is all of the dog poop everywhere. Like it's even worse than Paris. You get really good at dodging it though. Poop aside, I found the laid back don't really stress about things nature of all this to be awesome, it gave it a gritty, but laid back character.
We had a great time in Buenos Aires, but next it was on to Santiago Chile. I'll compare both at the end!
Next To Chile
One day we went to the Buenos Aires zoo, an old urban zoo that was pretty remnicent of the Chicago zoo.
Except in Chicago you don't have a bunch of these randomly wandering around. Like a mix of a deer and a rabbit, but about the size of a dog, these things are evidently called Maras.
The zoo fairly well summed up my general feeling of Buenos Aires. It was clearly once a grand world city with a ton of money and beautiful structures, but now feels decidedly third world.
Like there were some cool animals at the zoo, but they also let you buy food to FEED the zoo animals like a petting zoo! They had these little slides where you could just roll the food down into the monkey cage or whatever.
Of course you can also feed the Maras.
The fine arts museum has this bad ass flower that evidently closes at night and opens in the morning.
Here's kind of a crappy picture from the deck of someone's house. We went to a "closed door" restaurant one night, which is basically a restaurant in someone's house. It's unlabeled, you find out about it online and see if you can get an invite. You have dinner around a table with a bunch of random people. The food was pretty good and it was interesting meeting other travelers and speaking a little English for a change!
Ok, here's something Evita related. We went to the Evita museum and they had some fancy dresses. Remember how I said they don't speak English here? Well they don't seem to get many English tourists either, although we saw lots of tourists in areas like this, almost all of them spoke Spanish. The funniest thing is the real big tourist sites will have "English translations", which are clearly just some Spanish pasted into Google translate. I wish I had taken a picture of some of the things they said because it was hillariously bad.
So those are the "highlights", honestly we spent most of the time wandering around exploring the city, eating and hanging out. So here are a few other fun things about Buenos Aires and Argentina. First they seem to have absolutely no laws around truth in advertising. Compare the outside of this package to the actual product inside:
Also note this Budweiser bottle. While it looks familiar, the writing has this most audacious claim on it: "This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood Aging produces a taste, smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price". Which, if you've had any other beer and any other price, you know is complete bullshit.
The roads in Argentina were an endless source of entertainment for me. They seem to have basically no laws (or enforcement) at all. Lines are completely optional and you often see people just milling in one or two lanes. A one lane road easily becomes two or three lanes as people just drive wherever. They had four way intersections where NO ONE had a stop sign. It seems like the rule is just, whoever gets there first keeps going, and if you can squeeze in, then your direction has the right of way. It seems like it would cause accidents but I didn't see any, and it was surprisingly efficient.
So about Argentina's economy. While the buildings look like Paris, it really seems like everything is crumbling a little here since the currency crisis. In 2001, Argentina defaulted on their debt, and if you had $100,000 in the bank, overnight it became worth about $30,000. People tried to get into dollars, but the government put tight controls on it. Their government now lies about growth statistics and you can tell the country is really starting to go downhill.
Consequently it's a great place if you have dollars right now! The catch is the "official" government rate is an artificially strong 7 pesos to the dollar. But there exists a strong black market in dollars such that you can get 14-15 pesos to the dollar if you go to some backroom dealers. We took advantage of this "blue rate" and consequently could spend like kings. We tried to find the most expensive bottle of wine in the store for our last night, and it was the equivilent of $7. No one uses credit cards here because everyone tries to hide money from the government (and credit cards give you the official rate).
As such it definitely feels third world. You see construction sites where the protective scaffolding is just like some card board and a board or two. The sidewalks are crumbling and dirty. I've heard it described as the Paris of South America, but the closest I can find is all of the dog poop everywhere. Like it's even worse than Paris. You get really good at dodging it though. Poop aside, I found the laid back don't really stress about things nature of all this to be awesome, it gave it a gritty, but laid back character.
We had a great time in Buenos Aires, but next it was on to Santiago Chile. I'll compare both at the end!
Next To Chile