Notes on the city

   It’s hard to write about a city when you’re staying still for any length of time.  The observations can seem inane, or overly personal, or heaven forbid: preachy and self-righteous.  After all, how many comments does anyone want to read about the jolt I get every time I see a toddler living on a traffic island?

   Most of our time in BA has been light and amusing.  It has been easy to perplex our Spanish teachers through a combination of bad grammar and terrible punning (which seems to be a very English brand of humour).  Both Kizzy and I are improving - we successfully changed the booking for our bus journey and avoided the penalty charge - in spite of some ongoing frustrations.  We’ve not yet learned the past tense so all our conversation is about the future.  In fact, we’ve now finished our two weeks of lessons so “no vamos a hablar Español en el past-a tense-io”. 

   We have learned a lot of the marvellous ways of Buenos Aires.  They do do good steak here but you need to go to the right places.  We found a simple test last night at the wonderful El Desnivel (I know it’s raved about all in the guidebooks but it really is very good food): when you ask for your steak vuelta y vuelta (properly rare) the waiter thanks you, nodding his approval.  It’s a really nice touch and it was one of the two best steaks I’ve ever tasted. 

   The locals have a love of queuing that far surpasses the British.  This photo is of a queue for a local bus.  That’s right, 65 people (we counted, what else do you do in a queue?) patiently waiting in a precise single file line with no cutting-in or encroaching.  And when the bus arrives they all wait their turn patiently.  It helps that buses are plentiful and cheap.  But the bus queues are nothing compared to the Sube queues.  The Subte is the subterranean metro train system.  The Sube is the new magnetic payment card for Subte and bus travel in the city.  In order to pay bus fares, people horde loose change here (evidently there’s a shortage).  The Sube brings freedom from this, but the queues are madness.  We went to the bus terminal yesterday to buy our onward tickets to Patagonia.  On our way back, no more than 20 min later, a Sube card application point had set up and already had a queue 300m long.  That is over 600 people who have stopped whatever they were going to do in order to queue for a long time to get a bus pass that they plan to use some time in the future.

   Everywhere in central BA has air-con.  Scratch that.  Everywhere in central BA except our hostel has air-con.  (That’s fine, the hostel is roasting but it’s like getting a sauna experience every evening.  I’m so decadent I’ve started indulging in an invigorating cold shower before bed.)  However, it’s all single units that hang off the side of the buildings, generally just below or often through a convenient window.  A 15-story apartment building will therefore have about 45 units hanging off the side.  What this adds to the BA experience is an irregular pattern of dripping water that you encounter as you wander the streets.  It’s marvellously surreal.  For the first week I couldn't work out where these big drops of rain were coming from as I sweltered in the 37˚C heat under bright blue skies.  The one day where we did get proper rain it was torrential and it lasted for hours.  There was no need to look around for the source, it was everywhere.  The sort of rain that obscures your vision as you try to avoid the spontaneous rivers on every street and footpath.  We figured it was just one of those things but our mate Sean popped over to Uruguay the next day where in Montevideo “the cataclysmic BA weather” had made the news, so I guess it was worth getting excited about.

   BA has been a lovely home for two weeks (although it is nice to have finished school!).  Tomorrow we sail to Uruguay for a weekend in Colonia del Sacramento and then Montevideo, before coming back to BA on Wednesday to catch the deluxe cama suite bed bus down to Patagonia.  The first leg is 18 hours, but we’re told it’s “better than flying first class!”  Admittedly that’s from someone whom I suspect has never actually flown first class.  Nevertheless, we’re looking forward to Uruguay and very excited about the bus!

Life in BA

   Less than a week into our stay in BA and we already feel like locals.  To save money we’ve been walking most places, getting to know our way around the central districts pretty well.  We had our second day at school today – 7:30 alarm for a 9:30 start.  I think we had both forgotten how tiring concentration can be.  We returned home this afternoon and I promptly lay down for a nap!  We’re not at any useful conversation standard yet, although I am starting to have a few of those moments where suddenly a light turns on somewhere in the brain: this is why people were looking at me funny.  It turns out that Argentinian Spanish is like Spanish Spanish, but with some different words and lot of shooshing (words written with "ll" or "y" in them tend to be pronounced with the "shh" sound) – yes Jason, you did tell me it would be like this. 

   Tonight we met up again with Sean, our friend from Posadas.  It was lovely catching up over dinner and as we started heading home we found Dan and Gita hailing us from the window of a friendly bar.  More beers ensued and now Kizzy is pleased as punch that although we’re thousands of miles from home, “we have a social life!”  Dan and Gita are doing a very similar trip to us. It turns out they were on the same flight from London, spent the same day in Rome and the same three days in Rio.  We overlapped again in Ilha Grande, Paraty and Iguazu Falls but until today the only time we’ve actually run into each other has been on the 6 hour bus journeys,  It was really nice to have a few drinks together.  Just a shame we could only stay for a couple – it’s a school night and I’ve got homework to do!