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Argentina - Buenos Aires

September, 2006

We arrived in Buenos Aires (via airplane) on Thursday, September 7th, a week before Rankin's Texas XXX's Vintage Rugby Festival. We had heard a great deal about this city and wanted to spend some extra time getting to know it. We were told that Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America and we found that to be no exaggeration. What can I say ... we loved everything about Buenos Aires.

It's the third largest city in Latin America and is famous for its tango, football (soccer) and European-style architecture. Fortunately, we were able to experience two out of the three things for which Buenos Aires is famous; tango and architecture ... not to mention the shopping. We took five tango lessons with our instructors, Mia and Ricardo, and learned about eight tango steps. Tango is a very sensual and provocative dance. The man has the most difficult role. He's the leader in this dance and must communicate what moves he wants the woman to perform by subtitle body gestures. The woman must be able to read these subtle gestures, and she must also be submissive to the man's direction, which is not necessarily an easy role (at least for me). Sometimes, our instructors would have us

Tango lessons help you understand the complexity and difficulty of the dance which makes you appreciate the tango shows that much more. We went to two tango shows, one in a small intimate setting and the second an elaborate production with many dancers. Our first tango show was at the Four Seasons Hotel with only four dancers (two couples) who did an excellent job performing a variety of tango dances. We thoroughly enjoyed the performances and the elegant, intimate environment. It was a lovely experience sipping on after dinner drinks (Rankin even smoked a cigar indoors) while watching these excellent dancers perform.

The second tango show, El Querandi Tango Show, was a much larger production with costumes, singers, and a band. This tango show told the history of tango through the performance. History of tango began in the middle of the nineteenth century when the British arrived to develop the railway network across Argentina. This opened up the practically deserted country and made accessible its potentially huge wealth. It made possible the transportation of agricultural produce for export and also the exploitation of mineral resources. The only thing missing was the workers necessary to make the landowners rich.

The Argentine government decided to advertise in Europe for workers. They offered accommodation for a man's first week in Argentina with very generous rations and sometimes subsidized passage. Immediately, an avalanche of immigration began. Unlike the immigration to much of the New World, which might include families or whole communities hoping to start a new life in a new land, much of the immigration into Argentina was economic - people hoping to work for a few years, make some decent money, and then go back home to their families. So the overwhelming majority of the immigrants were men. By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the overwhelming majority of people in Buenos Aires were immigrants. This meant that there was an enormous lack of women.

There were really only two practical ways for a man to get close to a woman under these circumstances. One was to visit a prostitute and the other was to dance. With so much competition from other men on the dance floor, if a man wanted a woman to dance with him, it was necessary for him to be a good dancer, and being a good dancer only meant one thing. He needed to practice. This meant that it was necessary for the men to practice together in order to be good enough to dance with the women. The only kind of music was live music, and there would have been very little of it. So if a group of men heard music playing they would jump at the chance to dance to it. In the brothels there would be live music and other men waiting. So it seems clients of the brothels danced together while they waited, making the most of the opportunity to practice, because they wanted to be able to dance well when they got the opportunity to dance with a woman. It was with the potential wives and sweethearts that lived in the tenement blocks - conventillos (tenements) - that the men were hoping for a chance to dance. To win a sweetheart in the real world took something more, and being a good dancer helped a lot.

The music and dance became a common language that united people from many different cultures. It was here that the different music and dance styles brought by immigrants from different countries, and by the people already in Argentina, blended together, and what emerged slowly became Tango.

One of the first things we did upon our arrival in Buenos Aires, besides signing up for tango classes, was to schedule a tour with LiveBA (phone number 4777-9029). Our tour included information and stops in several of the barrios -- Retiro, San Telmo, La Boca and finally Recoleta.

We began our tour at Plaza de Mayo where most of Buenos Aires' historical moments and monuments lie around this plaza. This is still the site of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo's weekly demonstration. The demonstration began in 1976 when mothers banded together and met weekly in the Plaza de Mayo to support each other and embarrass the regime into providing answers for those who went missing during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. The wearing of the white headscarf (seen below), often bearing a picture of their missing child, emerged as a means to identify each other. This demonstration as well as others still occur today in this well known plaza.

On the eastern end of the square lies the pink governmental palace called Casa Rosada. From the balcony of this pink building, Evita, Maradona, Galtieri and Peron all addressed the crowds. The practice of painting buildings pink was common during the nineteenth century. The Casa Rosada's shade was achieved with the use of ox blood, for both decorative and practical reasons -- the blood acted as a fixative to the whitewash to which it was added. In 1999, the front was repainted in its current striking shade, however the sides and back remain pastel pink.

At the center of Plaza de Mayo stands the Piramide de Mayo, erected in 1811 to mark the first anniversary of May 25 Revolution, when a junta overthrew the Spanish viceroy and declared Buenos Aires' independence from Spain. On the opposite side of the pink governmental palace stands the Catedral Metropolitana. The twelve columns which front the entrance represent the twelve apostles. The most significant feature of the interior is the solemnly guarded mausoleum of Independence hero, General San Martin.

La Boca is a unique barrio in which its inhabitants seem to flaunt their idiosyncrasies. It's a working-class neighborhood located on the southeastern corner of the capital and is most famous for their brightly colored wooden and corrugated-iron houses. The district was the favored destination for many Italian immigrants who arrive in Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the colors of the houses derive from the Genoese custom of painting their houses with the paint left over from their boats. The barrios most famous street is Caminito with the most pristine examples of La Boca's colored houses. Since this area of town is a bit risky and we had limited time to explore, we only strolled down Caminito with its brightly colored buildings, unusual artwork and artists/performers.

We ended our LiveBA Tour in Recoleta. You can't go to Buenos Aires and not visit the La Recoleta Cemetery. The world famous cemetery where Evita is buried (under the name Maria Eva Duarte de Peron) was created in 1822 in the gardens of the Franciscan monastery. The necropolis features great monuments of dark granite, while marble and gleaming bronze, decorated with countless stone angels and statues of the Virgin Mary. A haven of peace and quiet within its high walls, it's a great place to wander, exploring its narrow streets and wide avenues of yews and cypress trees. Below are a few photographs of these magnificent necropolis.

The LiveBA tour was excellent and we would recommend it to anyone who's visiting Buenos Aires. Our friend, Mercedez (in the picture above), is a knowledgeable and professional tour guide, and we thoroughly enjoyed this experience.

San Telmo, where our tango classes were held, is one of Buenos Aires' most atmospheric neighborhoods. It's impossible not to be seduced by the crumbling decorative facades and cobbled streets of San Telmo. On Sunday, the Plaza Dorrego, San Telmo's main square, becomes the setting for the city's long-running antique market, the Feria de San Pedro Telmo. Almost theatrically set up and overflowing with antique mates, jewel-colored soda syphons, watches, old ticket machines, and silver tea settings, the stalls offered us fascinating browsing and we were entertained by a free but dazzling display of tango, music and other performances.

One of our last tours before the Buenos Aires Vintage Rugby games began was the Teatro Colon. The handsome theatre has a grand but restrained French Renaissance exterior painted a muted beige. It's considered Argentina's most prestigious cultural institution, and if you can get tickets, we found it to be a very interesting tour. The theatre tour not only guides you through the beautiful interior of this historic building but also passes through the departments where the costumes (clothing, shoes, and accessories) and props are made. It is an informative and excellent tour that we would recommend for everyone.

There are many, many more sights to see in Buenos Aires ... not to mention more tango lessons. Hopefully we'll be returning to this interesting and beautiful city soon. In the meantime, it's time for us to focus on the Buenos Aires (BA) Vintage Rugby games where we'll see many of our friends from Texas and Florida and have other unique experiences in this exciting city ... Buenos Aires. Take a look at Argentina - BA Texas XXX's Vintage Rugby to see what's next or you can catch up on the latest travels by selecting What's Happening. Don't forget ... keep coming back.