Buenos Aires June 15 - 17

We arrived in BA around 9.30am and headed for a hostel that we had once again been recommended. On arrival however, we were told that we could not check in until 2pm unless we paid for a nights stay! By this point it was 10am and it wasn't worth paying for the sake of a couple of hours. The receptionist kept saying that people are sleeping and we would disturb them but all we wanted to do was drop our bags and climb into bed! After some persuasion she let us check in and we headed to our room to find that no-one was asleep anyway!

BA is the capital of Argentina and also the third biggest city in Latin America after Sao Paulo and Mexico City. It has a lot to offer as it appears to have a little bit of everything if you visit different neighbour hoods and is also one of the main cultural centres of the continent. It has more theatres than NYC and is famous worldwide for its tango scene. Football is also a major passion as is the case for most places in South America.

After a couple of hours sleep we dragged our asses out of bed and decided to head to La Boca. This is a run down area of the city so you have to stick to certain streets but it is also very famous for La Bombonera Stadium, home to the Boca Juniors, one of the most successful football clubs in the world and also proud to say that Maradona and Carlos Tevez played for them. Unfortunately we were unable to do a tour of the stadium as Nike filming for the day, but just seeing the ground makes you realise how crazy it must be on match day. The terraces are really high and steep and many of the terraces are for standing supporters. It's crazy to think that they still have those in other parts of the world. We were talking to a local who said that if you go to see a football match in Argentina, the only place to go is the Boca Juniors as it has the best atmosphere and everyone is extremely passionate about the game. He said that when the stadium is full (49,000 people I think) you can feel the stands shaking in the standing areas!

La Boca is also known for its brightly coloured houses. When the area was first built around the port, it was very poor and full of humble dwellings made from zinc sheets leftover in the dockyards. To make their houses look a bit nicer they asked the ship owners for any left-over paint and as a result these houses are now painted in various colours. Painters, musicians, sculptors and bohemians have since been attracted to this area adding to the tourist experience you get there today. There are several artisan shops and tango restaurants but we just wandered around the streets to see the coloured houses. It is crazy to think that down the road is one of the poorest areas of the city, dull and dirty, yet these four blocks of the city are beautiful colours and full of graffiti dedicated to the footballers!

That evening we were still pretty tired from our bus journey and also low on money so had a quiet night in with a bottle of wine and actually cooked for once!

On Thursday morning we got up and headed out for a guided walking tour of the city with two of our roommates. It is a similar idea to ones I have done before, where it is officially free but you pay the guide a tip at the end. This usually means that you get a better quality tour as the guide wants to make as much money as possible! The tour starts at the Congress Plaza, showing where the government does their daily business and right next door is an amazing building that looks like a larger Moulin Rouge and in its heyday was a great restaurant, but is now derelict, in a state of disrepair and currently housing many homeless people illegally. The tour also takes in the 'widest avenue in the world' which in fact is no longer true but the locals like to believe it. We walked around various plazas, saw the cathedral, a world famous coffee shop where the waiters wear tuxedos, witnessed pickpockets attempting their daily business, stood outside the Pink House where various protests go on today and Eva Peron (and Madonna) did the famous balcony scene.

After the tour we headed to the Recoleta Cemetery, to get there we had to walk through a nice affluent area which was full of mansions, pent houses and designer stores! Recoleta Cemtery is famous as it is the resting place for Eva Peron (Evita) along with many famous South American Politicians and Military figures. It is an amazing yet eerie place, many families are held together here, some tombs holding around eight bodies and each is an individual design. Some are huge memorial tombs, others have pictures on the outside of the deceased and others are very simple plain designs. Unfortunately some have been left to ruin as I assume most of the family have passed away, but apparently donations go towards restoring these.

In the evening we decided to splash out for some Argentinean culture and headed for a night of tango! The night began with a one hour long lesson to learn the basic movements. It was a small class, with only three couples, Zara, the teacher and me! The teacher was pretty good at his job and not a pervert like most Argentine men and we picked up the basics and had a good laugh at ourselves whilst trying to do so. As there were more girls than men, we all had to swap partners regularly but as we were the ones without the men we got to dance with the instructor a lot which I guess was to our benefit (although embarrassing when I got the moves wrong). There was also a final move where you had to kind of wrap your leg around the man which is interesting when you don't know someone! A good time though and we even got a certificate so say that we can do the tango!

The second part of the evening was a three course meal with unlimited alcohol which was probably worth a lot of money and made us feel a bit better on making the splurge. We enjoyed some amazing food, the main course we chose had to be steak which was so so good! I wish I could bring a tonne of this steak home as it really is amazing. We managed to drink a couple of bottles of wine too which made the night even more enjoyable!

The third and final part of the evening was the tango show. There were several male and female dancers and I believe the show was also some kind of love story but it was difficult to tell when it was in Spanish! During the show they also grabbed audience members for a little dance and I got picked on twice, obviously a bottle of wine stopped me being as shy about it and apparently my moves were pretty good! Zara also got serenaded by the silver fox that was in the show so we both had a bit of interaction.

On our last day we had a little lay in and lounged about for a bit before heading to Calle Florida, the shopping street. Unfortunately all we could do was window shop but we had been told to wander around and just take in the different characters, of which there were many. After a couple of hours we felt sleepy so headed back to the hostel to relax before our night bus.

BA seems to a city that a lot of people aren't so keen on and have bad things to say about it, but during our short time there we managed to see quite a bit and had a good feel for the city, it was a cross between Madrid and Paris in my opinion and I could easily have spent more time there had we been able to.