Palermo

As we mentioned earlier, we started out this vacation with a week visiting our good friends Dave and Jim at the lovely house they'd rented in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. We had great fun and many interesting experiences during our stay with them – but we haven't had the time to write about it yet. Our slothfulness has been rewarded – our friends have put together a great write-up of our time there, and of what it's like to live in Palermo. The following is a blatantly plagiarized copy of their web posting.

You can read all their logs at their website.

Jim & Dave write:

"Today marks the end of our fourth week in Buenos Aires and we continue to be fascinated by this complex city. We are now really beginning to get our heads around the language, culture and history of Argentina, and are doing well at adopting the lifestyle of the Porteños, as the locals call themselves.

We have explored more areas of the city, making good use of our guide Germán. During this time our two friends, Kathy Hornbach and Scott Blessley visited us for a week and we did some great urban hikes with them. On one day, Germán took the four of us first to the Plaza de Mayo, famous for the Casa Rosada where el presidente lives and where Eva Perón made her appeals to the crowds. It was indeed pepto-bismol pink, but out guide Germán pointed out that this was only on the front. The rest of it was a very dull vaguely pink color. He said that was because they repainted it when Madonna filmed her Evita film, but only the part that would show up on camera!

After this we walked into San Telmo, one of the oldest parts of the city and the birthplace of the tango. Here the streets are very narrow and there are very old restaurants, bars and antique shops, which Germán said are full of the memories of the people who had to sell anything of value during the economic crisis. One night we went back there and ate at a fine restaurant (El Repecho) that had been in that spot since 1807. Everywhere we looked there were beautiful buildings adorned with carvings and lovely wooden doors. Here and in other parts of the city there are beautiful murals painted on walls. There's Dave posing beside one in San Telmo (below, center). This part of town is not chic and is known as bohemian, as most people live here on a shoestring. Still, it was safe and had the feel of real people enjoying life.

The center of San Telmo is a square where there are always people drinking and eating and usually there are musicians or dancers. Here we are enjoying a cold beer and resting our sore feet there on what was a rather hot (about 90 degrees F) day.

La Boca ("the mouth")

After this, we took a taxi to La Boca, a nearby also very old part of town that today is famous for its futbol (soccer) team that recently won two very big championships. Every kid plays futbol here all the time it seems! It is a very poor part of town and is not for tourists, except for one small area (El Caminito) which was made famous by an artist who inspired the locals to paint all the buildings these vibrant colors. Here you see some kids playing ball with the colorful buildings in the background. Germán then got us on a bus which wove through the poorest part of La Boca, which resembled the slums of any big US city. The bus