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Hola Chicos
Don´t cry for me Argentina. Welcome to Buenos Aires home of the Tango, Steaks, Maradona and not talking about the Falklands.
We absolutely loved Buenos Aires and as a result spent 10 days there. Why 10 days you ask? Well if you want to learn to dance the Tango it takes a little time. But before we get into that there was a slightly different type of music to observe. See Oasis had apparently heard that we were in town and had scheduled a gig on their world tour accordingly. So a day after our awful airport experience (see previous blog) we found ourselves in the ´River Plate´ football stadium rocking to Oasis. It's very strange how even on the other side of the world there is music and songs that can take you back to your teenage years and your first sips of that sweet, sweet alcohol! Of course Liam then brings you back to reality by drawling ´Buenos Noches Buenos Aires´ into the microphone which drives the crowd wild but in a broad Manchester accent just sounds funny. (Go on try it I promise you´ll laugh and no one in the office is looking!) Anyway a great night.
So Tango: well it's bloody hard. We found some great lessons with a teacher who spoke very little English but had a fantastic ´tache and a perm-a-tan which frankly is more important when it come to these things! Pete really enjoyed learning how to Tango because in Tango the man gets to lead. Therefore for the first time in a long time (well ever really) Polly had to do exactly what he wanted and what he said. Brilliant. Being more of a free spirit Polly found the Tango a bit harder than say breakdancing. See Polly´s natural way of dancing is to shake the butt and bust some moves pretty much deciding when and how see wants to shake it. In Tango that´s not the way. There is structure, steps and a pattern you can´t just twirl when you want.
So we had some great arguments learning how to dance (¨you're not leading strong enough¨ ¨get your effing foot off my effing toes¨ ¨If you tell me again what to do we are walking out this class¨ ¨when are you going to get a haircut¨) The usual Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire kind of thing. But my then end of the week we had mastered some basic moves and even a couple of not so basic ones. This meant that on our last night we could join the rest of the city in a giant dance night on the main street. There was a free festival of dance on and it all cumulated with a giant milonga (dance party). Actually dancing in the streets of Buenos Aires was really something quite special.
It's a very romantic dance the Tango, and after our classes we could sit and watch the locals do it. Old women dressed up to the nines wearing more makeup than Michael Jackson, would be swung around the dance floor by old men in swanky dance shoes their best suits and panama hats. Buenos Aires feels like a city where people know how to enjoy the good things in life. They eat amazing steaks, drink surprisingly good wine, stay out late, dance and love watching and talking football. It's a great city where people seem to enjoy life. London take note no one works too hard.
That said there are a couple of things that did make you think Argentina perhaps just wasn´t that stable. I mean they had a huge economic crash in 2001 and it does kind of feel it could happen again. For a start in the short time we were there we saw three protests - including one about a public servant who had over claimed on his expenses (it would never happen in the UK). There are also lots of homeless people, but rather than being the smack riddled drug addicts we see in the UK these are cleaner, neater homeless people who just got unlucky in 2001 and haven´t quite made it back yet. The final niggle with BA that just made you think it was not quite running properly was its issue with coins, or the lack there of. No one has change, and when people get it they don´t want to part with it. Shops refused to serve us because we didn´t have the right amount, and the attitude was very much it was our fault. All the shops display ´no change´ signs and when you get change you have to hoard it because…the city buses only accept coins. Utterly frustrating, I mean it slows down the natural flow of business in the city. Just mint some more coins Buenos Aires.
All that said, we loved BA and will be think we will be Tangoing our little feet back here at some point in the future (two weeks left and we're already planning our next trip!)
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