Saturday we walked ALL OVER Buenos Aires. Since the taxi's are so cheap, we had the hotel call one of those and we asked him to take us to the tourist attraction with all the different colored houses. We all forgot the name of the place (La Boca) so we just described it to him. Well the idiot took us to the wrong place and we were like, well now you know what we're talking about, since we explained it again, can you take us to La Boca? And he's like, nope, sorry! And took off.
Well he left us in a pretty sweet place, there was a feria artesania going on (art fair) and there were stands set up by tons of people selling handmade things. I was happy to know they were legit and not stuff shipped over from India. It was a little expensive for me, but the girls bought some stuff and it was fun to walk around and get to know people. After that we thought we could walk to La Boca but since its the poorest barrio in Buenos Aires, people advised we take a taxi.
La Boca was pretty sweet, its solely a tourist attraction though. There were more artesanías and people trying to take our money as usual.
There is a free museum in Buenos called "Museo de Bellas Artes" so we checked that out. It was sweet, I saw a lot of famous paintings like "the reading boy" and works by Picasso, Monet, etc. Then we hit up this café that we were supposed to get discounts for through our travel agent but the idiot gave us expired vouchers. The food was still good though and it was our first meal without wine haha.
We returned to the famous cathedral by la casa rosada so that Hayley and Cheryl could take more pictures of it. Alison and I waited outside and found a celebration accross the street. Cheryl and Hayley re-joined us and we found out it was "Buenos Aires celebra a Chile." It was basically Buenos Aires celebrating Chile! We felt at home again, haha.
Well we get back to the hotel and haul Hayley's computer to the lobby so that we can look up more information about the pub crawl that night. Hayley is pulling the glass table closer to the chair so that she can put her computer on it but she didn't realize it wasn't attached! It shattered and the poor girl was just having a bad time already! La pobrecita, everything bad was happening to her :(
After getting dressed up and pretty we head over to the bar where the pub crawl starts, "Nacional." We were pretty early but we paid and got our wrist bands and started off with some classy wine. Soon people started to show up and we met some pretty great friends. Two of the girls we met there were actually studying in Santiago and happened to be in Buenos the same weekend we were. Their names were Caitlyn and Laura. Caitlyn was from Colorado but Laura happened to be from Brookfield, Wisconsin, about a 10 minute drive from my house there! Incredible coincidence. They both go to a private school in Missouri, if I remember correctly. The rest of the people were mostly from the states, the organizers of the crawl themselves were from Georgia.
In summary, we went to three bars and then took a bus to one of the most popular discotheques in Buenos Aires called Crobar. Ah-mayz-ing. I had crazy deja-vu when we were there, I swear I had dreamed about it before. We got to skip this huge line AND get in for free with the crawl, so that was fantastic. We stayed there till SEVEN IN THE MORNING. I finally sucessfully partied like they do in South America, WOOT!
CONTINUING....
Sunday we forced ourselves to wake up at 12 so we wouldn't waste the day and we dragged our crabby asses to the world's most famous cemetery: La Recoleta de Buenos Aires. Very fittingly, it was raining that day. I saw tons of graves of famous latinamerican writers, poets, presidents, ex-presidents, and figures there. The most famous buried there is Eva Perón who is a huuuge figure in Argentine history who really helped out the poor. Theres a musical about her called "Evita" if anyone is interested.
We treated ourselves to a nearby café for a late lunch where we found out two of Hayley's 100 peso bills were fake (about 40 american dollars she could've lost). The waiter touched them for about 2 seconds and said he couldn't accept them. That day we found out that counterfeit cash is a HUGE problem in Argentina. Something we probably should've researched before coming. The worst part about that was she got them at an ATM in front of a bank. If we had known they were fake we could've brought them in and asked for help but we had no idea, they were so well done. (I took a picture, I think its on facebook.) After that we found another very legitimate artesanía fair where we all bought handmade things for very cheap. Hayley kept trying to use her fake bills, but everyone knew they were fake and we kept getting lectured about how tourists have to be very careful. At that fair I bought a sweet bracelet, a knitted shirt, and a necklace for my mom made of the official stone of Argentina, the rodocrosita.
Walked back to hotel, shopped on Florida for the last time. We bought Hayley a map she wanted since all the bad luck happened to her, and then took her to a tango show. Cheryl, Alison, and I shared some wine and enjoyed the night.
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