People
It was the people and not the place that made my stay in Buenos Aires a great experience. I stayed with five couchsurfing hosts during my time in Buenos Aires. Firstly, I landed in Recoleta with Blas Chiaretta and his Swedish flatmate. It was a high energy environment but I couldn’t participate because I...
Read MoreBureaucracy: Buens Aires – Bloody Awful
Reading about other peoples’ woes can be strangely satisfying, so read on… Buenos Aires suffers under a cloud of its own bureaucracy and it played an unpleasingly large role in my stay. It was the dog-shit on my shoe. Thousands are employed to stuff each other around long enough to be deemed full time...
Read MoreFamily Cony presents: Verdadero Asado Argentino
Argentina is a carnivorous country. With lots of land, a comparatively small population concentrated in Buenos Aires and other regional centres, there are vast tracts of sparsely populated land in the interior for cattle farming and the meat culture is very strong. Argentinean beef is of high quality and it would rival Australia for...
Read MoreMoney in Argentina
Argentina has had a turbulent and unpredictable economic past and in 2001 it defaulted on a $132,000,000,000 loan, which plunged it into financial chaos once again. This boom-bust cycle (which seems to happen everywhere under capitalism) is particularly acute in Argentina and the people are scarred by the memory. Here the only true currency...
Read MoreMate
In this post, I want to elaborate on a charming Argentinean (and Uruguayan) custom – that of ‘tomando mate’. Mate (pronounced ‘mah-teh’) is a herbal tea, served in a ‘Mate’, a cup traditionally made from dried out pumpkin but can be found in all shapes and sized from such materials as pumpkin, leather, glass,...
Read MoreSan Telmo
My favourite part of Buenos Aires. Old cobbled streets lined with trees and lamp posts overlooked by Parisian style buildings. This is the old Buenos Aires and has largely maintained its historic charm. Here there are less of the awful concrete soul traps that rise above the old skyline. Some of the streets even...
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