Trip Report 7- South Side

Tues. Apr. 12 Today I had figured to go back to a store in Microcenter I had passed on my 1st day in town to buy some soccer jerseys prior to the tour of "Hidden BA/The Other South" at 1400. I also wanted to stop by Teatro Colon to try to reserve a tour spot for Friday (call the day before was the answer).

--------------------------------On the walk over the jersey store I realized that I was right by the city's Holocaust Museum and stopped in to check it out. As with every other museum I had been to, the writing for the exhibits was only in Spanish. I was particularly impressed w/the museum because it also discussed and integrated Argentine Jewish history w/the events of WW II. There was also a display on the Nazis who escaped to Argentina after the war and their eventual fates.

---------------------------------------------------------- Important (and seemingly obvious in retrospect) note: Do not attempt to take any photographs of Jewish-related places. Photos inside are of course prohibited, but on walking out of the museum I took a picture of its display banner, which is out on a public street in plain view. Without going into details, doing so immediately attracted a lot of adverse attention and resulted in several moderately stressful minutes. This was compounded by the fact that the displeasure over my seemingly innocuous act was conveyed in rapidly spoken Spanish that I could not possibly hope to follow or adequately formulate a response. After this incident my desire to take pictures anywhere was quite curtailed, as my quasi-paranoid fears about taking pictures in a foreign country had somewhat come to light.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The other annoying thing to happen to me in a matter of an hour was the first attempted tourist rip-off (as it turned out, this was the only one my entire visit). After buying the soccer jerseys, I stopped in place nearby and ordered 3 empanadas to go. It should have cost about AR$ 3.60, and the guy tried to charge me AR$ 13 (which will buy you a dozen), so I simply left. While I was certaintly pissed that this had happened to me, I was even more pleased to have caught onto it, thereby avoiding a minor rip-off (but a rip-off nonetheless). I soon found a sit-down restaurant and had a slice of spinach torta (a pastry-based item similar to a slice of pie) and 2 very tasty empanadas before catching a cab back to the hotel to drop off some purchases prior to the afternoon tour. ---------------------------------------------------- For the most part, I am kind of an impatient person. If you can read about a heavily visited area and are capable of walking around by yourself or w/your group, a tour of such areas seems to be a bit of a redundancy. That is why I wanted to take the "Hidden BA" tour, b/c it went to neighborhoods that, while still interesting, a regular tourist would never go to otherwise. (www.eternautas.com).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The driver and guide met me right in front of the hotel, and off we went. I guess another good aspect of a tour is that you can kind of let your guard down a bit in that you are following the guide and don't have to be worried about your precise location at every moment. The guide was a social anthropologist, prob. about my age, who works as a guide part time (due to the $ problems here, I discovered that a lot of people have multiple jobs). He spoke good English and did a great job of explaining how the city's history has impacted the neighborhoods as they exist today (e.g. their architecture, a park built over a cemetery of latter 19-century yellow fever victims). The barrios we visited in the south part of town (Barracas, Boceo and Nueva Pompeya) are definitely a bit more run down and have a good deal more graffiti than the areas I had been frequenting up north. We got out of the car several times to check out various sites, and overall it was an awesome tour. I had never been on a small private tour w/just me and guide, and it was totally worth it.

--------------------------------------------------------- That evening I went to a tango show at the oldest cafe in the city (if not the country), Cafe Tortoni. While the show was good, I would have probably been better off reading a book for a few hours at the cafe; the interior just exudes character and history. The food was mediocre and b/c the performance area was closely packed it was difficult to see the dancers' feet, but the performance was very lively and the band (the violinist and bandoneon player, in particular) was great. Plus the show itself was only AR$ 20.