BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA (part 2)

One of the “checklist attractions” that I put off until my second to last day was the famous Recoleta Cemetery featuring the final resting place of Eva Peron. She was the once-poor wife of a socialist dictator who was beloved by the lower classes and died of cancer at the age of 32 in in1952, and of course is better known as “Evita”. To me, visiting a cemetery is not high on my list and I have never seen the musical or the movie of Evita so my interest was low. The cemetery happens to be in the most touristy section of the wildly upscale neighborhood of Recoleta and I went past it many times going from a bar to a restaurant and so forth. I decided I should check it out so I incorporated it into a “tourist day” where I would roam the general area checking out the most common attractions. I was most interested in seeing the giant steel flower in a nearby park with four huge petals that open at dawn and close at dusk. It was always open when I saw it, but it was still an amazing piece.

The cemetery is in the middle of a grassy park, so I was very shocked to discover not a single blade of grass once inside. It’s free to enter, which is nice. I walked in not long before closing at 1800 and opened my guidebook, which described the circuitous path to Evita’s grave. As soon as I did this a very attractive local girl approached me and asked if there was a particular grave I wanted to see, and she asked in almost flawless English. I sheepishly admitted that I was most interested in the Evita grave and she introduced herself as a tour guide, then quickly introduced me to her boyfriend, who spoke no English. Evidently, he works there and gives tours on the side and she translates into English for “donations”. I was impressed with her introduction and English skills so I said that I wanted a quick 20-minute tour and off the three of us went.

On the way to the Evita grave she told a story about a girl who was supposedly buried alive because her parents didn’t approve of her boyfriend. Ouch! Then we reached the rather modest Duarte Family tomb where Evita is and I snapped a photo while she told me a bit of detail of why Evita was so popular. Instead of graves in the traditional sense, every single person buried there is incorporated into extremely elaborate tombs which all have a first floor and several floors underground, but some also have floors above ground and extraordinary decorations on the tops of the buildings. Each tomb is maybe 10’ by 10’ or so and they are all touching on the sides. One of the other odd things is that people leave their cats in the cemetery while on vacation and evidently old ladies feed them. I saw perhaps a dozen cats sleeping and roaming around.

We went to another couple of tombs then the boyfriend opened one up so we could go inside. It was amazing the amount of money that some people spent on these things. Only the super-rich were buried there and this place is huge so it is even more obvious that Buenos Aires was once a very rich city. I originally had planned on giving 5 or 10 pesos to them, but I was very impressed with the presentation and her comments about the charity she supposedly works for made me give 20 pesos at the end. They said “bless you” as I’m sure that is one of the higher donations they ever get from a single person, but it was only $7 to me and I was feeling generous.

The food is an experience that makes Buenos Aires worth traveling to all by itself. I had heard people say the beef there is “the best in the world.” After my time there I would say that if it isn’t the best in the world, it’s damn close. Beef is served at virtually every restaurant in town with the truest being known as parillas. Those are places which specialize in barbequed meat, mainly beef, that is cooked slowly over a wood fire. Honestly, it seems like about a third of the restaurants in town are parillas and even the ones that aren’t almost all serve steaks along with whatever else. You have many cuts to choose from, and the first one I tried was Bife de Chorizo, which is sirloin steak back home. It was excellent and huge, although it had a large piece of flavorful fat along one whole side. From there I switched to Bife de Lomo, AKA fillet mignon, and pretty much never switched back.

It really feels decadent at the time, but another bizarre thing I noticed was that not only do the locals eat large pieces of beef all the time, but they are almost all quite thin too. I ordered salads as a side dish a lot, sometimes a caprese salad, which consists of tomatoes, basil, and provolone cheese. Those were on almost every menu, as was proveleta, which is a large slab of provolone cheese that is grilled to a wonderful crisp on the outside and soft on the inside consistency, with a few spices added. De-lish! I honestly think most of the locals are doing Atkins without even realizing it. They would always have some rolls on the table, but they always seemed to have a day-old texture so it was easy to leave them alone most of the time. You could order papas fritas (French fries), but they were fairly expensive compared to everything else.

I honestly ate steak every single day. Sometimes for lunch, sometimes for dinner and sometimes both. The cheapest was at a jam-packed place in San Telmo where my delicious bife de lomo was about $3.50 and the most expensive was what is actually known as the best restaurant in town. I met up with a couple of other yanks watching football one evening and we agreed to meet the next night at La Cabaña at the suggestion of one of them who has eaten there many times. He worked for IBM and was in town on business and the other guy owned a landscaping company and was in town to have sex with the attractive Latin prostitutes. My lomo there was about $12 a la carte, but after the wine and extras we spent around $40 each. It’s possible that it was the best piece of meat I had while in town, but it is all honestly so good and well prepared that I wouldn’t bother going to a super premium place.

Overall I could not be more impressed with Buenos Aires. The city is beautiful even though it isn’t particularly photogenic. The only thing that stuck in my mind that I wanted to photograph before I arrived was the giant 18-lane boulevard that runs through town. It turns out that it’s really two 4-lane one-way roads on the outside with an 8-lane boulevard in the center of them. There is also grassy area in between all of it, which adds to the overall size and also ensures that it’s un-crossable in one light sequence. Luckily that boulevard is really just a dividing point of the city so you only really cross it when you are going from one neighborhood to another.

I mainly just hung around and spent a ton of time at the travel agency working on my future plans. I booked two side trips out of Buenos Aires and each of them took about 3 separate trips to the travel agency from inception to ticket-holding. I didn’t mind though as the travel agency was always full of attractive women for some reason. I booked a 3-day trip to the Iguazu Falls, which I had never even heard of before arriving in Argentina, and a 4-day trip to Uruguay.

From Buenos Aires I had decided to fly to Rio de Janeiro and then Lisbon. I first went into the travel agency and asked about a one-way flight to Rio and was told it would be around $320. That sounded high, especially since I had already done a ton of online searching and it seemed that the cheapest fare from Rio to Lisbon was still over $1,000. This was looking very expensive and then I mentioned the ITIC (teacher ID) card that they made for me in Antigua. “Oh, that’s different,” she said. She never asked if I actually was a teacher, as the card was enough. The fare from BA to Lisbon would be about $480 plus tax, including a free stopover in Rio. Bingo! My mood improved instantly. It seems this teacher card will make this trip far cheaper and even more flexible.