Street art – BA-style
Those in-the-know casually refer to it as ‘BA’ but until we get to know each other better, we’ll start with the more respectful ‘Buenos Aires’ 🙂 It is another of our ‘Bucket List’ cities that we have wanted to visit for many years. I read the story of Eva Peron some years before it was brought into popular culture by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber and was looking forward to seeing the city’s ‘Evita Landmarks’. But although Eva Peron (arguably after Diego ‘Hand of God’ Maradona) is the world’s most famous Argentinian, there is much more to Buenos Aires than her memory.
On the outskirts of the city we spotted below us from the fly-over, a ‘Museo de las Malvinas’. Hmmm… this could be interesting… Marcus spent some time in the Falklands during his RAF years and was curious to see what they had to say in there. First problem was working out how to get off the main road, around the one-way system and down to the museo – it wasn’t signposted or easy to get to. Also, this is well outside the main tourist areas of the city and not mentioned in the tourism literature. It did not seem to be particularly intended as an attraction for international visitors, especially we thought, maybe not English visitors. Perhaps we’ll give it a miss for now.
Wonder why it’s called the Casa Rosada? 🙂
We drove on down to the harbour and parked-up in a noisy but very convenient spot in the dockside car-park, ready to explore the city’s intended tourist attractions. Incidentally, it was from this spot on the Saturday morning that we spotted a Grimaldi ship sailing past Buenos Aires on its way to Montevideo, just as we had around 10 days ago! We wonder whether those passengers are as frustrated as we were at that final stage of the voyage! But let’s not digress… let’s stay with the sightseeing in Buenos Aires…
Gift from the Brits
In Plaza Martin stands a large bell tower presented to the people of Buenos Aires by the British ex-pat community of 1916. The two countries were rather chummy in those days; the park in which the tower stands was called Plaza Britannia and the tower, with its scale-replica of the clock and bell housed in London’s ‘Big Ben’ tower, was intended to cement the friendship. Well, it worked for over 60 years, but the tower was subjected to bomb attacks during the 1982 Falklands War and not restored until some years later. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Plaza was then renamed after Argentina’s own national hero of independence, Martin, and the British connection was played-down a bit.
There’s lots to see around BA (we’ve been here a few days now, I think we can move on to more familiar terms 🙂 ) a whole host of art museums and lots of beautiful old architecture. But we focussed next on the Eva connection – the Casa Rosada balcony from which she (and subsequently, Madonna in the movie) made the rousing speeches; her resting-place in the Cemetario Ricoletta; and the museum dedicated to her story.
The not-quite flag-lowering ceremony
The Casa Rosada now houses the government offices and outside in the Plaza de Mayo the Argentinian flag is raised and lowered at dawn and dusk each day by a ceremonial guard. At dusk we watched the team of soldiers march smartly out for the duty. The whistles blew and as a single soldier marched forward from the ranks to lower the flag, the lone trumpeter sounded. The soldier untied the lanyard and fiddled with it, but it was stuck. The trumpeter sounded again and the soldier juggled with the lines some more – still stuck. Now getting a bit comical, the trumpeter sounded a third time as the soldier continued to struggle with the caught cables. It was no use, it wouldn’t budge. It was all a bit embarrassing for them with scores of tourists stood watching, but the funniest bit was that the soldier, unable to contain his frustration, rather than smartly doing an about-turn and marching to re-join the ranks, threw his hands up in despair, shrugged his shoulders and sauntered in a most un-military fashion back to his colleagues. The flag remained hoisted as they all marched back to barracks. We guess it can happen to anyone 🙂
Another great feature of BA is the street-life. As you walk the considerable distances between the various ‘must-sees’ there is usually something interesting to look out for: green spaces with fountains and monuments, beautiful architecture, pavement cafes, food vendors, tango dancers, street art, the night-life of Palermo Viejo. It has wide tree-lined boulevards like Paris and it boasts the worlds widest street, Avenida 9 de Julio. Like many capital cities it is huge and sprawling, but unlike many others, it is in most areas attractive, clean, safe and the people very friendly. After 5 days there, we rather liked the city… and yes, we are now on sufficiently familiar terms… it is definitely ‘BA’ rather than Buenos Aires 🙂
But there are so many more places to go, things to see, people to meet! We can’t just hang around BA you know! It’s time to head on south… Patagonia!!!
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