Internet access has started being less accessible as we've moved on in our travels. Will post some pictures as soon as I a find strong reliable connection.
Our second day continued with the rain….seems like we are bringing the rain with us to all the major cities we are visiting. Thankfully the Iguassu Falls had fabulous weather. We decided to take the bus to an area called La Boca. We knew that the buses only took coin currency, of which we had none. These elusive coins were hard to come by. We stopped at the tourist information centre to find out which bus we needed to take and also asked where we could get coins. She pointed out the window to the building across the street and said “at the bank”. Now, I felt a little silly, being a banker, that I had not figured that one out. I guess I must really be in vacation mode. So we went into HSBC, the world’s local bank, and they happily exchanged bills into coins. Off we went by bus to La Boca. This area is home to the local football team, Boca Juniors. This is a quaint little area on the river. The buildings here date back to the 1950’s and are all brightly coloured. The streets are lined with restaurants and shops. It was rather slow in the area and right as we entered the main street, many of the restaurants had people out trying to entice people into their restaurants. Some of the restaurants had live tango dancing going on and I felt a little bad for the women in their dresses because it wasn’t that warm. The rain was a bit of a damper on this excursion, but it was fun nonetheless.
After we toured La Boca for awhile and purchased some little souvenirs at tourist prices, we headed back to downtown. We stopped for lunch at a little restaurant called La Continental Pizza y Empanadas where we dined on empanadas that only cost $4.50 pesos each. The food was good, but the service was really slow…might have been because it was a little busy in the restaurant or it was because the waitress was a little disorganized.
I noticed that many of the streets in Buenos Aires are named after neighbouring countries, like Chile, Brasil, Peru, etc. The streets are mainly made of brick-type materials and are quite uneven, though the sidewalks are in much better condition than they were in Brasil. Unfortunately, there is a lot of graffiti in the city and several of the historic monuments we walked by were defaced; it was rather sad to see.
We found ourselves at Plaza de Mayo. This plaza has a long and sometimes dark history to it. It is the centre of many demonstrations and protests. In fact, we saw a bunch of signs hanging around the plaza, but were unsure what they were for. In our walking around we also encountered a peaceful demonstration by the food worker’s union, or so we think that was the group, marching along Avenida 9 de Julio. Apparently protests and demonstrations are quite common in the city.
Avenida 9 de Julio is a site to see. This is a 16-lane street and claims to be the world’s widest avenue. There lanes also appeared busy regardless the time of day. Pedestrians are able to cross at several crosswalks, but it takes more than one light to get across, so there are three islands for you to wait. In the middle of this majestic traffic corridor is a plaza with obelisk.
Aside from Calle Florida, there are many other pedestrian only streets, like Lavelle. Again, this street is lined with many shops and cafes/restaurants. There is no shortage of shopping in Buenos Aires, that’s for sure.
The rain didn’t seem to want to let up, and we had talked about taking a day trip over to Uruguay. So we looked into doing that on our second to last full day in Buenos Aires. We found a company by the name of Buquebus which had an online deal for the ferry ride and return, a sandwich lunch and a city tour all for $324 pesos, and we noticed we could get a first class ferry ticket for the same price. So what does one do about that? We booked the first class ticket of course!
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