Amigos Argentinos

Planning on spending my day wandering through the city, I set out with my mapa and guidebook and started heading down Avenida de Mayo only to be approached by an Argentinian man. He offered to show me around the city, in a non-creepy and incredibly helpful way, so after much consideration I decided to take him up on the offer. I mean, honestly, if he was really sketchy I could decide to leave at any moment. Also, his not knowing any English was a plus, it gave me a chance to practicar mi español!

We first headed to Retiro, my original destination. This small park with a monument of San Martín (el liberador de Argentina) should not be confused with the pure beauty of Madrid´s Retiro. We then wandered down to Puerto Madero, which is the newest part of BsAs. Sebastian (my new Argentinian friend) loved this area, although many residents of BsAs don´t even consider it part of the city, considering it´s lacking any history and is full of high rise apartment buildings. After this, we proceeded to visit his friends in one of the new apartment buildings - a girl he knew from his barrio north of BsAs and her Italian boyfriend. After grabbing a cafe at their house, we hopped in the taxi and took off to San Telmo. San Telmo is considered one of the oldest parts of the city and still has cobble stone streets, however it is not nearly as pretty as it sounds. There was trash and dog poop everywhere, transvestes in bars, and grafitti along almost every wall. Again, we stopped for coffee at El Federal, one of the oldest cafes in BsAs. Grabbing coffee seems to be the thing to do here, as we grabbed coffee three times over the course of the day. We again grabbed a cab to Recoletta, where they have the most amazing cemetary I have ever seen! Nothing is underground, thus coffins are placed in family "houses" in the cemetary. I finally decided to head back to the hostel, a full day of speaking Spanish exhausted me and I wanted to think about whether or not I should join them clubbing that night alone. They were very nice people, I just didn´t want to give them the wrong idea by spending all day and all night with them.