Strictly Buenos Aires.

In our world, Argentina is tucked away in the bottom left hand corner of the map. So we tend to think of the country as being quite small. Not so. I am told that the land mass of the province of Buenos Aires alone is bigger than the whole of Spain and Portugal put together. Surprising! That’s not the only thing that’s big in Argentina. Inflation is currently running at around 40% per annum. Yes, 40%!! The knock on effect of this is, of course, that public services suffer as the councils clearly have ‘limited resources’ which probably means no money at all). As a result, there’s a lot of rubbish on the streets – even in a supposedly chic area like Palermo.

And even though the roads are in reasonably good condition, the pavements are death traps, not helped by the roots of all the lovely trees.

If you add this to the less than adequate street lighting you will understand that it’s easy to trip over – as I did last night. No, it wasn’t the amount of alcohol. I just tripped and fell over (NB Kirsty; I fell over. I didn’t ‘have a fall’!) so I’m hobbling today.

Before this happened, I visited the craft beer place that looked so inviting yesterday. But it proved not to be the case. OK if you want to sip 8.5% + Belgium type stuff but not if you’re a glugger like me. So, just down the road I came across ‘The Dubliner’ which looked promising. So in I went. The polished bar itself looked suitably authentic with lots of polished beer taps, polished optics and Guiness signs etc plus even polished hooks under the bar for hanging the Tesco shopping. But that was as far as it went. Not a single Irish beer or even English beer in sight (not even Guiness, despite the signs) and certainly no Irish staff. Being too lazy/tired to move on I asked for the food menu expecting to at least find some bangers and mash, cottage pie or Irish stew. Not a bit of it. 3 uninspiring tapas dishes, some sandwiches and the ubiquitous burger. Tonight, I will go native, for sure.

Like so many other places, Buenos Aires makes a slow start on a Sunday morning. Thus the streets were fairly deserted when I limped off. There were a few people dog walking, one or two taking breakfast home

a couple perhaps saying goodbyebut not much else.

There were just a few more people in the Mercado de las Pulgas (literally: Flea Market), a covered area with more than 100 stalls selling loads of tatty bric a brac,

lighting

and vast quantities of furniture.

I guess that if you were wanting to furnish your home with all this retro stuff then this would be the place to visit. There are tons of it.

and surely these would be the last things you’d want (pun intended!).

as would this …..David!

Whereas the Palermo area is supposed to be trendy Buenos Aires, the Recoleta district is definitely upscale BA! The area which has a very distinctive French feel was designed way back in the late 19th century with wide streets and huge open spaces specifically to reduce the spread of the various fevers that were decimating other parts of the city at that time. The sizeable parks are put to good use on Sundays with one of the better open air markets I have seen

because every stall holder has to prove their products are locally made. So, no imported tat here.

One stallholder, though, was more interested in his music than selling things

but he had some stiff competition as close by there was a man belting out such opera classics as ‘Just One Cornetto’ etc with a voice that would have made Pavarotti proud.

Meanwhile, Bob Dylan would have been pleasantly surprised by this guy.

Across the road, there was a free concert where a fair few of the audience were moving their aged limbs to the rhythms of popular South American sounds.

Music, music, everywhere.