Buenos dias Buenos Aires

Interestingly our journey actually started with a lot of goodbyes… this adventure is bitter sweet for us in that it meant saying “ta-ta” to our home and friends for the past seven and a half years, in London. It is sweet in that, hopefully I (Lisa) have badgered enough of them to either 1) think about coming home or 2) come and visit us at some point in NZ!

It is surreal after the past frantic three months of planning, packing, admin that we have arrived in Buenos Aires (BA). Nothing too remarkable about the journey, apart from fact that Alitalia are probably one of the worst long haul flights we have ever had (it was cheap, but you have been warned). We arrived to BA after leaving a crisp sunny London, to a heaving thunder / lightening / rainy BA! Luckily that all cleared by the afternoon and temperature quickly climbed to a muggier state. We have an apartment for the next month (sourced via AirBnB) and our lovely host arranged for his father to let us in. So far so good. Its in a great location in the Palermo area of BA, in one of the many high tower blocks. We are on the 5th floor overlooking the close polo club (sure there will be a post on this at a later date once we get ourselves to a match). The apartment itself is small, but thats no bother for us. However, we discovered after the first night that it is pretty noisy (due to the fact the local porteños – people of BA like to eat late – 11pm onwards) and we are close to a lot of restaurants and bars. Will just have to make sure we are out eating, and dancing late ourselves!

Will keep this one short, but initial observations:

BA is unlike any other city we have ever been to. It is really hard to describe, although its comparison as “the Paris of the south” resonates on some levels. We have both also noted qualities that we have observed elsewhere – Paris (huge monuments to national heros, grimier parts with graffiti and dog poop! Dogs everywhere), London (some of the older buildings, and big green spaces), New York (particularly Brooklyn with the restaurants and cool little shops everywhere, and grid road / block form), Cairo (high rise apartments and satellite dishes on all buildings, sketchy building techniques) – and we’re sure we will find many more!
To our delight, avocados are as cheap as we had hoped. Expect these will be a main sustenance being very budget friendly coming in at around 59p each.
Currency exchange is interesting / confusing. Due to the fact the economy here is in such a bad way, they have resorted to using USD wherever possible. This means that before coming here we exchanged GBP for USD. And now that we are here, we give our money to our hosts father, who then uses the “blue market” to exchange the USD to Pesos at a better rate. Officially from the bank you’ll get 8.5 peso to USD, but via this other market we got nearly 13 yesterday. He will however not exchange our US 20, 10 or 5 notes as apparently these smaller notes are “drug money”. This has been quite an education. *Traveller tip – when leaving UK pre purchase your money online here, we did really well out of the rate for GBP to USD and was great as you pre book at good rate (if it gets better, you also get the better rate) but don’t have to pay until collection.