Buenos Aires, part 2: I'll sleep when I'm dead

They say that New York is the city that never sleeps, which may or may not be true. If that's the case though, Buenos Aires is the city that never blinks. While Montevideo was fun, and a lot faster pace than Chile, Buenos Aires blew it out of the water. Friday night we stopped into a sandwich place for a quick dinner at 9, and had to wait an hour for them to open. Saturday, we ate at a nice steakhouse at 10:45, finished dinner at 12:30, and had to kill an hour and a half before we went out. You also stay out 'til about 6 or so--not just college aged guys either; I saw some men and women in their sixties walking out of a tango club at 6:15 a.m. 

We were really lucky in finding a hostel so easily--we got into a cab by the ferry terminal and asked him to take us to a place in the Palermo SoHo neighborhood. Pretty easy, but our market research might have been lacking. In just two full days and nights we somehow managed to hit all of the highlights:

We stayed in the Palermo SoHo neighborhood, which is the cool part of the city. All of the cobblestone streets have a sort of old Spanish and French feel to them, and are covered in trees. It's the neighborhood where Che Guevara and Jorge Luis Borges lived. This is the part of the city with the new cool restaurants, local designers and artists, record and bookstores, and a really young population. It was a really neat feel--our hostel was across the street from an art gallery and an oxygen bar, and next door to a bookstore and a tea house. I also walked into a record store and met an Argentine guy planning a road trip from Chicago to New Orleans by way of Nashville to listen to music and follow music history. Since I was with a guy that grew up in Chicago and goes to school in Louisiana, and a guy from Nashville, we planned out his trip for him. He'd even planned on stopping in Clarksdale and Oxford, so that made me pretty happy. Pretty cool neighborhood.

The Recoleta cemetery is one of the more famous parts of the city. It's a two hundred year old, above ground cemetery in the heart of the city. It's about twenty square blocks and packed shoulder to shoulder with 30 foot tall, incredibly elaborate marble and stone mausoleums. Pretty much every dead famous Argentine is buried here--Eva Perón, most of their presidents, writers, Nobel Prize winners, etc. It's a really strange and cool place. 

Typical mausoleum in the cemetery

Evita's grave. People come by every day to put flowers and cards around it

We were also lucky enough to be in BsAs on a Sunday, when the weekly San Telmo market is held. The San Telmo neighborhood is one of the older ones in the city, and it's known for being the birthplace of tango. Every Sunday, they hold a market that stretches down Calle Defensa for over a mile. I went expecting to see a lot of the same stuff--pseudo-indigenous junk, "My parents went to Buenos Aires and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" kind of stuff. There was some of that, but it was mostly all artisans making things out of leather or pottery or painting. The street itself is supposedly the best place for antiques in North and South America. I didn't have the desire or the possibility of buying anything from the stores, though. It reminded me a lot of Royal Street in New Orleans, but about twice as long and twice as cool. 

This was taken from the middle of the street. It goes on as far as you can see in the picture, and then just as far the other direction. This next picture is just a typical street shot from a side street--I just wanted y'all to see how cool it looks.

We had some free time to kill after that and went to check out the president's house. It's called the Casa Rosada (pink house), and not just because Argentina has a female president. It's made of pink stone and at night it's lit up and glows: 

We also hit up the port area, just to walk around and look. This is one of those things that a twelve hour window between check-out and your boat leaving will do to you--but, we got to see this:

Those are a few of the (daytime) highlights. Stay tuned--I'm talking about food next.