Today was our BA city tour. We were picked up by our guide, Alex, just after 9 am. He was also an architect, and very knowledgeable about his city. He wanted to show us everything. He pretty much did.
Among the highlights:
Of course, the Casa Rosada. We learned that the government (who still uses it) allowed Madonna to sing at the balcony, but in the movie, there is a roof over it - there isn't but at the time of the movie, there was an air conditioning unit above it, which of course wasn't there at the time of the Perons.
Side note: At breakfast at the hotel this morning, I heard a guy talking about his tour yesterday. Said he saw the balcony, but "she didn't sing at that one, but at one on the other side". I really hope he was talking about Madonna, not Eva Peron. I'll never know.
Back to highlights:
We made the obligatory stop at the Cathedral in the city. Alex showed us, at a side chapel, a display honoring (not sure if that's the right term) their Jewish community. The display contained bits of books removed from Auschwitz, Treblinka (Nazi concentration camps), and from the two synagogues here that were bombed. BA has one of the largest Jewish populations in the world.
We went to the neighborhood of La Boca, which is one of the poorer neighborhoods - it's famous for it's brightly painted buildings.
There was a street fair going on, with tango demonstrations and opportunities to have your picture taken with Tango dancers.
We also drove by the stadium of their famous football (soccer) team. The colors are blue and yellow, the color of the Swedish flag. Turns out that when the team was trying to come up with a color scheme they decided to use the flag of the next boat to come into the port (La Boca means the mouth - in this case of the river), and you guessed it - it was Swedish.
We also stopped at the most famous cafe in BA, the Cafe Tortino, for a snack.
And no visit to BA would be complete without a visit to the historic cemetery in Rocolleta to see the Duarte family mausoleum. Eva Duarte (later known as Eva Peron - Evita to Andrew Lloyd Webber fans is buried there. The building is covered with flowers. Because of the rain we don't have a picture of that.
During the time at the cemetery, it started pouring. Oh well.
The original plan was that we'd be dropped off at the San Telmo flea market, but when we go there it was raining hard, so we went back to the hotel instead.
We decided we needed some lunch, so went down to the hotel restaurant. It was somewhat pricey, so we asked the concierge for a suggestion. She recommended a local pub, so we went there. I had a burger. The tomato was good, the burger not so much. We think it had a much higher fat content than we're used to.
We did some relaxing in the hotel after that as it didn't stop raining in time to go to the flea market.
We had dinner plans with a couple of our cruise mates so we picked them up at their hotel and then went to Cabana Las Lillas, one of the best (and considered most expensive) steak houses in BA. We split a ribeye that was extraordinary. With sides, dessert, wine, coffee and the cover charge (that covered bread, an antipasto plate, a little dessert sampler and a sample of two drinks, grappo and lemonciello, it was was about 80.00 for us - I don't think we could get that quality of a meal for any less. I'd go back.
The company was good, and it turns out that Rich went to the Claremont Colleges, but slightly before us.
A nice day, as it turned out the last nice one in BA.
No comments:
Post a Comment