La Boca, Palermo and the WORST TOUR EVER

Posted by Dave and Zephie

In our last few days in Buenos Aires, we finished our Spanish course which was amazing! Our teacher, Alejandro, was a legend and was teaching us on our own for the last week so zoomed through all the stuff we really wanted to learn faster than we should have gone! So now we can converse quite well, but we are determined to get better so have bought some bilingual books to get stuck into!

Here is a pic of us with Alejandro, proudly displaying our certificates, which I will be surprised to see making it back to England, but you never know! I (Zephie) am also looking a little strange in this, but never mind! I blame the intense heat!








In our last few days, we also realised we had better see the rest of the sights in Buenos Aires that we had thus far neglected because of our love for San Telmo. One of the highlights was definitely LA BOCA! Football fans will recognise this as the name of a famous Argentinian team, others (including myself!) will likely associate it with the AMAZING multi-coloured buildings and TANGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

We spent an afternoon here checking out the amazing buildings and sipping beer while watching a really touristy, but actually really impressive, Tango show.











We also went to Palermo, which is said to be one of the cooler barrios of Buenos Aires, but we found it to be a less cool but more up-market version of San Telmo - a San Telmo wannabe, you might say. There was this place called Espacio Dada which, we were told, was supposed to be awesome and inspired by the artist ... it was weird and a bit creepy, so we left as soon as physically possible.


While we were booking our bus tickets to our next destination, we thought we may as well book ourselves on the tour to Tigre, a little town not far from Buenos Aires, which was on the Tigre Delta river. Since we hadn't ventured outside of the city we thought we may as well and at 65 pesos each, we thought it was a bargain! Little did we know............

It started out badly...we were told to meet the tour bus at Tortini Cafe, one of the oldest Tango cafes in the city. It was a cool day, early in the morning, so the mosquitos were out in force and we got bitten to death waiting for the bus that came LATE.

Then, we went around the city collecting other people from hotels for TWO AND A HALF HOURS (the whole "tour" lasted 5 hours and it took another hour to get back - you do the math(s)). We were VERY BORED. When we finally arrived in Tigre, after the "guide" had made a half-assed attempt at pointing out some "sights" along the way, the thousand or so people crammed onto this tour were shepherded onto a boat. The boat trip was depressing, frankly. There were shipwrecks and flooded parks all along the banks of the river, which meant it was also deserted and creepy, despite the WIERD privet hedges that lined the shore!






Grim no?


It lasted about 20-30 minutes and then we were herded onto a train where we spent 15 excruciating minutes squished up next to all the other sweaty tourists. We arrived at a disgusting shopping complex (Dave called it a very literal tourist trap) outside of Tigre where we were instructed to buy stuff and look at the "Gothic Cathedral" which had been renovated a few years ago, meaning it was not Gothic at all. Completely exasperated we sat in a little park for the meagre 30 minutes we were allowed before put back on the bus and dumped in the middle of Buenos Aires.

We were thoroughly P*SSED OFF!!!!!!!!!! And left with a feeling of not really having seen anything...!

But it didn't ruin our day. We went home, had a long siesta and then went out for one last lovely night in Plaza Dorrego.