Buenos Aires... cut short!

Surprise! I am writing from the UK (we're at Gary's parents Graeme and Joyce's house in Southend), we got back yesterday.

As I said in the previous entry, we arrived in Buenos Aires on Wednesday last week, to the lovely temperature of 28 °C. A nice change from freezing cold Ushuaia - no problem to adapt to the change! There was, however, an aspect of Porteño life we had to get used to (we're old and boring, you see): the nightlife. In Argentina in general, and in Buenos Aires in particular, going out does not happen anywhere near as early as it does in the UK. If you're off for a meal, turning up at a restaurant between 10 pm and midnight is the norm. As for drinks, well, bars are generally empty before 12 pm. Somehow we had a good go at adapting to the culture and did pretty well, but were totally knackered after 4 nights on 3 hours' sleep.

The thing is, we enjoyed the night life, but we also did plenty of stuff during the day, which left no time for afternoon naps! On Thursday and Friday we had a walk around the Centro area, going window-shopping along the Calle Florida and up to the Plaza de Mayo, at the end of which stands the Casa Rosada. My understanding is it is an equivalent of the White House in Argentina (although the president doesn't live there)... except it's pink. We heard several anecdotes about the colour, apparently pink was chosen back in the 1860s to defuse the tension between Argentina's two main parties, by mixing their respective colours (red and white). We were also told that when it was first painted, the red actually came from cow's blood. Lovely! Thankfully they now use real paint!

On Friday night, we met up with our Irish friend Mick (Pantanal, Rio, Bariloche, Buenos Aires... hopefully we'll see him next in Dublin!) We had a few drinks and he excitedly told us about a hurling match taking place the next day. Hurling is an Irish game I had never heard of before, but it looked like fun and we went along with Mick on Saturday afternoon.

Funnily enough, it took place in a neighbouhood of Buenos Aires called Hurlington (pure coincidence - just happens to be where the hurling club is based) and it was a match between Ireland's best players of 2008 and 2009. I guess it was a bit of a reward for the players (being taken on a jolly abroad for a few days, with the excuse of playing a match) and a way to promote hurling abroad.

We had a really lovely afternoon, sitting in the sun drinking wine/beer and chatting to Irish people or practising our Spanish with the many Argentinians of Irish decent who were there. Mick was like an overexcited child all afternoon! By the way, the reason our Flickr is full of pics of him with his favourite hurling players is that he'd forgotten his camera so we lent him ours, imagine being about to meet all your favourite players and finding out you can't take any pics!

After the hurling match on Saturday, we went to the football on Sunday (yes I know... how on earth did Gary make me agree to that?) We saw Boca Juniors vs. Banfield (both are teams from greater Buenos Aires) at the Bombonera stadium (home of the Boca Juniors).

The match was not exactly amazing but, it has to be said, the Boca supporters were. They call themselves "El Jugador N°12" (the 12th Player) and certainly know how to show their support. They sang throughout the match to the sound of heavy drums (their tunes were rather catchy, too) and at the start of the match they unrolled a couple of banners so huge that it covered the whole stand. The first one looked like this...

Then they unrolled the second banner underneath the first, and rolled the first back up to unveil the second one...

You can tell they're used to doing it every week!

On Monday, we had a quiet day to try and recover from a week end of watching sports (always a tiring activity) and going to bed at 4 o'clock in the morning five days in a row. It was on the same day that we found out British Airways had voted in favour of going on strike between 22nd December and 2nd January, which was very bad news for us since we were scheduled to fly back right in the middle of it, on 24th December.

That night, while out, we spent ages racking our brains to figure out how else to get back home. When we got back to the hostel, Gary went on the internet and saw that there were 3 stand by spaces that had just opened up on the BA flight to London the very next day. So at 1.30 in the morning, when we thought we'd still be in Buenos Aires for 10 days, we decided to change our ticket back to fly the next day. It left us only a few hours to pack, cancel out the hostel and make our way to the airport. It was a risk as there were no guarantees we would get on, but thankfully we made it! We were a bit tense as we feared we might be offloaded from our nice seats or from the plane altogether at some point, but when we took off again from the Saõ Paulo stopover and no one came up to tell us to leave, we relaxed and enjoyed a lovely flight back home.

It was so strange, though... one minute we were in Buenos Aires, planning to go shopping and see some tango the next day, and the next we were on a plane headed out for London! We arrived yesterday morning but I think neither of us has quite realised that the adventure is over. Pity it had to be cut short like this but we can't really complain. It would have been bad to be stuck out there until mid January because of the strike, not knowing when or how we'd get back - so we had a lucky escape, really!

Time to go for now, will be back soon for the very last entry............

C.