Summer in the City

Breakfast at the Reino Del Plata is a fairly elaborate buffet, with very strong coffee. Andrea, our guide, met us in the hotel lobby at 9, for a great private 4 hour city tour of various Buenos Aires neighborhoods. Julio drove the large sedan. It was a beautiful late summer day. The first stop was the busy Sunday morning San Telmo neighborhood flea market. The next stop was La Boca, a colorful tourist neighborhood. Tango was invented here. We walked around La Boca, stopping at shops and for pictures. Houses here display the flag and colors of the immensely popular Boca Juniors soccer team. On the way to our next stop, we passed by the Boca Junior soccer stadium. Julio took a slight detour to show us the elegant mansions of the Chico Palermo neighborhood. The final stop of the tour was Recoleta, a very busy upscale neighborhood. Here, Andrea seemed to know people, from all walks of life, from the elderly artisan woman selling her linen crafts at the flea market to the honorable and distinguished Elisa 'Lilita' Carrio', a popular politician who finished 2nd in the last presidential election. People strolled the park-like cemetery behind the church this Sunday afternoon. The cemetery has neatly laid out streets, filled entirely with upper class family mausoleums. We paid our respects at the Duarte family tomb, where Eva Peron has been securely buried for the past 24 years. (The whereabouts of Eva Peron’s corpse for the prior 24 years would fill a book.) At end of tour we chose to remain in Recoleta. We walked around the flea market and we sampled great street food - baked beef empanadas, purchased from a street vendor for about $1.25 each. We walked to the nearby National Museum of Fine Arts. This free and outstanding museum houses world class paintings, drawings and sculptures by impressionists and other well known artists. After about 90 minutes in the museum, we took a taxi back to the presidential palace area for pictures. Then we we walked down into the Peru St subway station, near the hotel, looking for the 100 year old wooden cars that are still running. We saw only a modern train with graffiti. We rested at the hotel for a few hours before being picked up by the Esquina Carlos Gardel bus for their tango dinner show. There were around 200 tourists at the tango show. We sat with a couple from Holland and a couple from Brazil. We had a very nice 3 course steak dinner, with wine. We enjoyed the 1.5 hour professional tango show with several intricate dance numbers, accompanied by a 7 piece orchestra. We got back to the hotel around midnight for a few hours of sleep.