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While the hotel has no restaurant, it does have a small breakfast buffet, nothing like the Belmond. However, satiated we head off with Sofie to discover the southern part of the city. This is the older part of Buenos Aires and we started with the central square, in front of the Pink House (Government House), so named because originally it was painted with a mixture of cow fat, cow blood and lime, in order to preserve the walls from the humidity. They have since moved onto more modern methods. There is a statue to San Martin here, who helped in their war of independence which started in 1810 and went on for six years. Around the statue the people have painted white bandannas. During the dictator period of Argentina a number of dissidents ‘disappeared’ and the babies were given away to officer families as illegal adoption. The grandparents of these children come to the square every Thursday and stand in a circle hoping for anyone who thinks they might have been one of these adopted children might connect with them. Around 60 already have, leaving approximately 300 to go. In the same square, just in front of the Pink House, people have swamped a different statue with stones with names and dates on them representing the people who died in the pandemic. 220,000 people died in Argentina, despite having almost 2 years of lockdown. The locals have a drink called mate (maTAY) which is a form of tea, drunk via a shared straw; nice for community spirit, not ideal during COVID.
From here we visited a local market, selling a huge variety of fruit and meat as well as antiques. However the walk was good and the surrounding buildings were nice to look at. We also visited the Caminito region, which was set up for the immigrants arriving in Argentina since the 1929s. These ramshackle old houses were originally black and brown, reflecting the materials used, but as it is located right alongside the port, the locals would go and get whatever paint was left over from painting the ships and paint a wall red, the next yellow and so on as the paint ran out, creating a very eclectic house.
This is next to La Boca, home if the famous soccer team of both Maradona and Messi, so of course we had to get a photo of the home ground.
The afternoon was spent dealing with our laundry as the hotel, which does have a laundry service, explained that it was all done by an outside agency and extremely expensive. In the morning, when I heard this, I had taken mine back upstairs and thrown the form in the bin, Fran had placed the form on top of her bag and a very nice cleaning maid had taken it downstairs and it had been sent off. As such we had managed to get the job cancelled, but had to wait for them to be returned.
We had dinner and a tango show booked for the night, and we were picked up at 7:30 from our hotel. The show (and food) were amazing and ran until after 11:30 which meant a late return to our hotel.