Two weeks in BuenosAires.

We have now been in Buenos Aires for over two weeks and although we are free from work and other schedules we have somehow still developed the beginning of a routine.

Three mornings a week I have been going to a gym which is a block away from our apartment. The first day I paid my membership money and waited for plastic card , pages of agreements and waivers that I would have got in Melbourne but they simply wrote my name in the book. No fancy card, no turnstyles to pass through.

Bikes in Buenos Aires

We have breakfast at home and then cycle to Academia Buenos Aires, the school where we are learning Spanish in the centre of town. We have two bikes that we bought from a cycle tour company. They are bikes that would have otherwise been sent to the bike slaughter house as they are too old and tired to take tourist around the city anymore.

Cycling in Buenos Aires has given us a speedy introduction to the city. We have been to so many more places than we could have done by foot. There are quite a lot of cyclists here and a network of cycle paths.

The traffic into the centre of town in the morning is very slow, we weave between carbon coughing cars and buses and are quicker than all of them.

Spanish Lessons

Lessons start at 930. We are in seperate classes as Sylvie speaks much better than me. The first 30 minutes is spent in conversation before we attack grammar. It’s been a long time since I used my brain to learn a language. By the end of the first week my brain was fried and spent much of my first week’s afternoons having very long siestas.

Pertuti café

At 1130 we have ‘la Pausa’ when most people go up to the terrace where everyone chats in Spanish and English. I normally take this 30 minutes to go to a café across the road. Not only do they serve the best expresso I have had in BA so far, but it is a good spot for people watching. It’s on the edge of la plaza de Mayo, the central square where Eva and Juan Perón delivered their speeches and where a few revolutions have come to heads. The waiters are in their black and whites and the customers are business people, well to dos and tourists. I sip on an expresso and try to look local.

After another 90 minutes of Spanish we are free for the afternoon.

La Boca

The school organise tours in various suburbs of BA. The first week we visited La Boca which is on the old port. It’s an area where all the immigrants arrived. The buildings are all painted different colours. It’s very touristic. Whilst I tried to look cool and aloof Sylvie entered into the spirit of the place.

People in Buenos Aires go out late. Dinner starts from 9 pm and it seems anytime until midnight. We tried to assimilate this and the first week we would eat out late. This invariably lead to me feeling very tired the next afternoon.

Some nights we stay at home , Sylvie studies Spanish and Argentinian history while I watch bad Netflix shows in Spanish – on a good night!