Yesterday we walked through the main districts of Buenos Aires in boiling heat, and I finished it in the cauldron of a football Derby between two big BA clubs.We left our local San Telmo district, where we've spent a lot of time hanging around the nice shops, bars and antique stores. It's a quite run-down area with broken paving stones, graffiti and charming roughness, but this is only one aspect of the city.
Taking the long walk through to the more fashionable Recoleta area gives a sense of the change
in the city. For the first time, we see boutique shops, nail-polish parlours and more stylish eateries. The streets are smartly paved, the area is cleaner, more people are more smartly dressed (though suits are a rarity) and prices are definitely higher. Recoleta is the place where the cemetery housing Juan and Eva Peron is based and it's an altogether posher location. As we walked on, we found the embassies, and co
mparing San Telmo and Recoleta it was like comparing London's Lambeth and Notting Hill. An ambassador's life is clearly comfortable in leafy streets with plenty of security.On to Old Palermo, which seems to be the mid-market – things are just nice, ordinary shops, standard restaurants and carefully kept cobbled streets. These three districts of Buenos Aires are so different and we realised we had walked around this city as much as we had ever taken such walks through London. Amazing how the desire to experience a city's gradations of difference is bigger when it's not your own.
One strange thing is to be in a hot city with sunshine and blue sky, with shops covered in Christmas decorations. The brain gets confused - our idea of a Christmas scene is of course cold, snow and indoor cosiness. When you see "Feliz Novidad" (happy christmas) while sweating away in the streets of a hot city, your mind does a constant double-take.
Once again, we have had mixed experiences with accommodation here. To be fair, it is incredibly cheap - we paid almost the same for 6 nights in this hostel as we did for a night in New York. But we are staying on the 6th floor in a tiny room with an OK bed, a window that doesn't close and an air-conditioning unit that infrequently chucks out cold air and a noise that makes you feel you are sleeping inside a fridge. At 6 am, the buses in the street start screeching around, and despite being so high up it sounds as if they are in the next room. So sleeping any length is a challenge, but it's amazing how a tired body can rise to such a challenge!Next we decided to head over the water to Uruguay and see Montevideo, the capital, as well as the beach at Punte Del Este - and stay in a nicer place! A new country after a great time in Buenos Aires.
