Buenos Aires - Part 1

Buenos Aires is known as the Paris of South America. We arrived in Buenos Aires on Tuesday and were greeted with rain. Thankfully we kept our treasured Brasilian umbrella. We are staying at Hostel Florida right in the middle of Calle Florida which is a long pedestrian corridor that runs across the downtown area. The street is lined with shops, street vendors, buskers and performers. This corridor has about one million people walk it each day. It gets really crowded at the peak times. Our hostel is more of what I would call a traditional hostel, compared to the others we have stayed at during this trip. It’s quite large with about 80 rooms consisting of private and dormitory style. We found the location to be very central and convenient for our stay. A couple blocks up from the hostel is the Galerias Pacifico, an impressive shopping centre with many familiar name brand stores. The architecture of this shopping centre is amazing and is of colonial style. A little further down is the San Martin park. Buenos Aires has a lot of green space, which is really nice to see for such a large city. I have to also point out that at the end of the block by the hostel is a three-level Burger King. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Having just arrived and with it raining, we weren't quite sure what to do our first evening. We noticed on the activity board at the hostel that they could arrange a Tango evening. Besides the beef and wine, Argentina is famous for this sultry dance. I had wanted to see a tango show, so it worked out perfectly. We paid $398 pesos total (or about $105 CAD) for a three course meal and tango show at La Ventana. The interior of this place creates a very intimate setting for viewing the show. Let me say this…this was well worth it. We each has an appetizer, a steak cooked to perfection with potatoes, a dessert and a bottle of wine. After dinner we were entertained for about 1.5 hours by a wonderful show with amazing tango dancing, singing, folk dancing and music. I wish we had been allowed to take pictures, because I just can’t describe adequately how amazing this show was. They finished the show off with a heart-felt tribute to Eva Paron singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” in Spanish. This was a great start to our 4 days in Buenos Aires.