Buenos Aires - January 31st

Today we decide to stay local.  Our suburb of Recoleta is home to many sights, so we decide to take them in.  First of all we walk north a few blocks to find some nice parks and then we go onto the Museo Nacional de Belle Artes, which is the main art gallery in town.   This actually has a very good collection, with a lot of major artists represented, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Rubens and a lot of Rodin sculptures.  Most of these works were acquired in the early part of the last century showing how much money must have been here in those days.

That’s not to say that Argentina is poor now.  From what we have seen in the provincial towns as well as BA this is a country on the verge of being what used to be called first world.  As evidence of this we leave the museum and go into a local shopping centre for lunch.  This is a high class shopping centre with a lot of very expensive looking home furnishings for the local houses.  Having said that although the area we are walking through is one of the most expensive in BA, you can still pick up a decent sized apartment for about 100,000 USD. 

We walk around the area a bit more, including having a quick look inside Recoleta cemetery (and finding out the guided tours are on Thursdays so we will revisit it then), and a look at the local cinema multiplex to see what is on.  But the cinema is not for tonight, because this evening we are going to see a dance show based on the life of Eva Peron.

We begin our Evita evening by visiting the museum dedicated to her life.  It is only a short walk away from our flat, and is very interesting.  After we get the subway into town, and walk around the San Telmo area of town.  This is supposed to be some sort of cool local bohemian type of place, but like Temple Bar it seems a bit overhyped to me and it is tiring walking on the cobblestones.  But it is the location of a good local restaurant that had been recommended to me by a London recruitment consultant who coincidentally had phoned me a few days earlier.  It was very good.  Then it was off to the theatre for the show.  The show was a bit expensive, but when we get there we find out why, there are only 20 people in the audience, and there are 15 on the stage.  It’s a good show, lots of tango to keep Dorota happy, and an audio visual show on the back of the stage, with English translations on one side and Portuguese on the other (and the audience appropriately segregated).  It starts at 22:00 and we finish at 23:30 when we get a group transfer home.  As usual this involves a long tour of the city as we drop people off at various hotels before we get to our apartment.