Archive | March, 2010
When you move to a new country there are a lot of things you need to do to get yourself established. Find a place to live, get a job, make new friends, learn the language, learn to sidestep the dog poo and holes in the pavement and so on. It’s not surprising that things like exercise and playing sport take a back seat.
On the other hand, look at it this way: if you’re living in Buenos Aires, you’re already on an Atkins diet, why not go the whole hog and exercise as well? When you go home, either for a visit or for good, your trim, muscular physique will be the envy of all your friends.
What are the options for endeavors of a sporting nature in Buenos Aires though? Let’s take a look at four of them.
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You might have noticed that Argentinians love to talk: all day, every day, with anyone who’ll listen! For this reason it’s no surprise that the Rio Platense Spanish that has developed in Buenos Aires is full of unique words and idiosyncrasies. Unfortunately that can make things difficult for the Spanish leaner who wants to be able to communicate here.
Explaining all of the differences between the Spanish in Buenos Aires and the Spanish in, say, Madrid would of course fill an entire book, but then again some words are much more common and important to know than others. Here are the top five:
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Closed-door restaurants, a.k.a. restaurantes a puertas cerradas, are big in Buenos Aires. Never heard of them? What closed-door restaurants do is to blur the line between restaurants and dinner parties. They often occur in what is actually the home of the chef, and so necessarily they’re limited to small number of diners. Menus usually change weekly or even daily according to the whims of the chef. They also almost never offer you a choice of dishes; you just get what the chef is cooking on the night you go, which is actually kind of liberating.
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Posted in Food on 25. Mar, 2010
There’s no denying that food is central to our existence, and not just in the sense that you die if you don’t eat it! For many of us, eating great food, talking about food, and bragging to our friends about the amazing restaurant we just discovered forms a large part of our weekly activities. Expat life in general and Buenos Aires in particular can be problematic on this front, because it’s sometimes hard to get your favorite foods here. In fact it’s not unheard of for expats who move here expecting to stay a long time cutting their stay short because of ‘the food issue’ (granted, they’re usually vegetarians).
Without further ado, here are five foods that you might miss while you’re in Buenos Aires, along with some suggestions for how you can get what it is that you want.
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Like every big city, Buenos Aires has a thriving theater scene. The ‘Broadway’ of Buenos Aires is the section of Avenida Corrientes that’s between Avenida 9 de Julio and Callao. Most of the city’s 40-odd theaters are located here. They show musicals, plays, opera and music revues, just like similar areas in other parts of the world. The vast majority of the productions are, of course, in Spanish.
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Do you have a favorite building in Buenos Aires? Mine is the one on the corner of Belgrano and Perú in San Telmo (see a picture of it here). The bottom two floors are nothing special – just roller doors that are always closed and then a set of shuttered windows – but on the third floor there appear a series of giant stone men who are carved so that they seem to be supporting the floors above on their shoulders. Then there are five or six floors of pretty balconies, and then it gets really wacky: three or four more levels built into a steeply sloping tiled roof topped by a pair of cupolas. It’s brilliant.
The architecture in Buenos Aires is easy to love. But how did it get that way?
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It’s possible to divide the countries of the world into two categories: those that have pay-by-the-hour hotels, and those that don’t. It’s not a big concept in Australia or the United States, for example. But in Japan, they’re ubiquitous. In Mexico and Guatemala, it’s the same. And in Argentina too, they abound: there are 150+ pay-by-the-hour hotels in the Capital Federal district alone.
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Feel like getting your Wild West on? You’ve come to the right country. Argentina’s answer to the North American Midwest, the Pampas, is a vast plain that stretches to the south and west of Buenos Aires and covers some 800,000 square miles. It’s one of the largest fertile plains in the entire world. And as far as the culture goes, switch ranch for estancia and cowboy for gaucho and you’re already a long way to understanding this region. Maybe that’s because cattle and sheep are cattle and sheep no matter where you are in the world…
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Anyone living in Buenos Aires is going to want to take at least a couple of trips inside Argentina during their stay and will want them to be cheap. The two big destinations are of course Iguazú Falls in the north of the country, and Patagonia in the south – towns like El Calafate, Bariloche, Ushuaia and Puerto Madryn. These places are absolutely unmissable.
Argentina is a big country though, so how are you going to get there? Bus? That might work if you have: a) a penchant for suffering; b) a healthy supply of Valium, and c) an entire day (or more) to waste, but otherwise it’s a terrible option. Puerto Iguazú is a 17 hour journey from Buenos Aires by bus, Bariloche is 19 hours, and Ushuaia? You’ll need to block out a lazy 50 hours in your diary for that one.
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Posted in Clubs on 11. Mar, 2010
Perhaps more than any other, Buenos Aires is a city of the night. Many of the best things to do here are night-time pursuits, and locals find doing them in the depths of night utterly normal and natural. Meeting your grandmother for a coffee at 1am? Normal. Meeting friends at a bar at 2am? Normal.
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