Buenos Aires and Other Adventures - A Retrospective

Here I am in the Tango Backpackers hostel in Palermo in Buenos Aires. It's christmas eve. Strange. We've got no snow here. We've got rain instead. It's been really hot lately. So hot in fact that I couldn't sleep the other night because the AC was broken in my room. I haven't written anything in this blog for over a month. What happened? Well, the short story is that I took spanish and tango classes in Buenos Aires. Then, inspired by all the travelers in my hostel I decided to go backpacking. I ended up on the beautiful beach in Punta del Diablo in Uruguay, outside the hot town of Mendoza enjoying the vineyards and the mountains, and finally cooled down on the beach in Vina del Mar in Chile.

In the beginning of my trip I was firmly based in the Art Factory Hostel in San Telmo in Buenos Aires. I was there for over three weeks. Many of the evenings I could be found drinking Quilmes beer or read wine on their roof top terrace. That was nice and all and I enjoy the social aspect of hostels very much. It hadn't been much more than a week though until the hostel life and the pulsating city was taking a toll on me. I felt I needed to escape. What kept me hanging around was my ambition to learn spanish and tango. My first day of Spanish was at the Ibero school. I was disappointed with the school so on the second day I impatiently switched over to a school called Academia Buenos Aires. Academia turned out to have the same traditional teaching approach but in smaller classes (maximum of five students) and better organization and teaching material. It's debatable if those improvements could motivate the price difference from 100 to 200 USD though.

I got frustrated by the group classes pretty quickly. Going to class can be really boring. It's just like how going to school used to be. This is a problem for me regardless of whether it's an evening class in Sweden or an intense class in Buenos Aires. I very much preferred the private classes where I was able to pause the teacher and ask any questions I wanted and proceed at my own pace. I'm deeply fascinated by the pedagogy of Michel Thomas whose spanish classes I've been enjoying on my mp3 player. He has a gentle way of introducing vocabulary and grammar that makes you feel confident and gives you an illusion of simplicity. He also knows to introduce parts of the language in order of importance. In the spanish classes we had loads of untranslated vocabulary thrown at us and this was distracting us from the grammar which was supposed to be our focus. I think computers could have improved the classes with interactive exercises, faster dictionaries etc. I would like to have a fast dictionary on my computer that can recognize all words in the language, regardless of whether they are in their basic form or not. The dictionary would be triggered by clicking on or hovering over any word. This would allow me to better read and learn from articles and newspapers etc. Of course, Google Translate can serve this purpose pretty well too.

After two weeks of spanish classes I decided to quit and I spent the following week taking tango classes instead at the excellent DNI school. The DNI school is bubbling with positive energy. Their teachers are friendly and relaxed and yet highly professional. I've never really seen a dance school like it before. There is a schedule of group classes at different levels that run every week that you can drop in to. They have maybe 10 or more teachers that give private classes every day, many of them to tango dancers visiting from far away countries. They will give you a study plan where you take a private class with a senior teacher followed by one or more practice classes with junior teachers where you practice the theory that you learned. That system makes a lot of sense. I made some progress, I certainly did, but in the end I get a little frustrated by the difficult technique required in tango. That's what usually happens when I try to learn it. I intend to continue dancing tango in Stockholm though.

After my tango week I was finally able to escape the city. I took the ferry over to Colonia (Colonia Express, 50 minutes) and from there the bus to the famous beach resort Punta del Este (about five hours). Unfortunatly, and as expected, I didn't really like the place. It has a lot of bars and restaurants where rich people go to be seen. However, it was off season so it was just a bunch of closed restaurants and empty high rises. I did get a beautiful sunset there though and the beaches are good. Luckily through a tip from some american backpackers I ended up going to Punta del Diablo instead. I love Punta del Diablo! I'm not sure how to describe the place but it's like a small fishing village with nice colorful houses and great beaches. I found my peace and quiet there at the Diablo Tranquilo hostel. Highly recommended! The last night I went running on one of the beaches in the sunset. I was home.

My next destination was Mendoza. I took the Andesmar first class bus (cama suite) there which was great. Had the bed been just a little bit longer it would have been perfect... A comfortable leather seat, two bad Hollywood movies, bingo, a three course meal with good red wine and champagne. All of that can really make you relax. Mendoza reminded me of a more quiet version of Palermo in Buenos Aires. Less trafic and less people. Nice trees along every street. It doesn't have the architecture or culture of Buenos Aires of course but it's a great base for outdoor activities. I started with a wine bike tour. We visited three wineries and an olive oil manufacturer. The next day I went on the high Andes tour and saw the highest mountain in America. The Andes are amazing!

I took a night bus across the Andes to Vina del Mar in Chile. Taking the nightbus turned out to be a bad idea as we had to go through immigrations and I didn't get much sleep. Also, I woke up by ears hurting from the drop in altitude going down the slopes in Chile. The trip went well though and I arrived early morning in Vina del Mar. I checked in at the Che Lagarto hostel which is quite nice. They have the best beds of any hostels. Some beds down here seem to be designed for dwarves. They are maybe 190 cm long so they don't really allow me to stretch out. The climate in Vina del Mar is very interesting. Cold nights and mornings and hot and sunny afternoons. The peak of the day seems to be at like 5 in the afternoon when people are at the beach. Valparaiso is a picturesque city and the beaches in Vina are great. The waves of the pacific are gigantic but the water is cold.

I made my way back from Chile to Buenos Aires by bus and I arrived reasonably rested. Unfortunately it turned out that I couldn't get a bus to the Iguazu waterfalls since it was close to Christmas. I really hadn't anticipated that problem. That's what happens when you don't book your trips in advance I guess. Buenos Aires was really hot and I didn't feel like staying. I contemplated returning to Punta del Diablo but that would have meant two additional days of traveling and I was tired. I decided to stay in Buenos Aires and fly home early, on the 25:th of december. I tried to get home in time for Christmas. I could have made it to Stockholm but not all the way up to Umeå so it wasn't worth it.

An interesting anecdote is that I got about 1000 pesos worth of fake bills from an ATM here in Argentina. I talked to the bank (Santander Rio) about it and they didn't seem to care. At least not the two young girls that I tried to speak spanish to. They were not even going to report the problem. I've contacted SEB in Sweden now to see if there is something they can do.