Buenos Aires is often referred to, and with good reason I have to say, as the Paris of South Amercia. Not only does it have the grand boulevards to rival the Champs Elysees (controversial perhaps, Richard?) but it has gorgeous cobble-stoned barrios such as Palermo and San Telmo that remind me in parts of the…

Looking for a leather jacket on Calle Florida this morning we first stumbled upon a shop that had, on the face of it, just what Ants was looking for, and  for the unbelievable price of A$140 – ‘hand-made’ in their leather workshop (back of the shop, which we were hustled into and given a guided…

We’ve eased into life in BA and feel that we’ve become part of the local (San Telmo) furniture – seeing the same faces on the street every day, popping into the same stores and always receiving a friendly ‘hola, buen dia’. We love mooching around the Mercado late morning for some fresh fruit and veggies…

One of Buenos Aires’ most beautiful and unique buildings is the imposing and oh so over the top Palacio Barolo, a 22-storey office block completed in 1923. At the time it was BA’s tallest skyscraper and probably one of the most elaborately designed buildings in the world. It’s Neo-Gothic meets Art-Nouveau with a Neo-Romantic-gone-nuts twist…

  I’ve mentioned the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur in a previous post but it’s worth mentioning again as its history is both charming from an early 20th Century perspective but also rather murky from a 1970’s point of view… whilst today, this gorgeous ecological reserve, so close to the city, truly has ‘buen aire’ and a…

Since we were last here 8 years ago, there’s a marked lack of random graffiti tagging in the city, where city statues would be sprayed and not a single wall or standing space would be left untouched – in the same way that we found Chile earlier in the trip. It’s largely all gone, and…

Our local railway station hub is Constitución with 14 tracks above and 2 Subte lines below. It’s the only station for journeys south of BA and surprisingly has one of the largest railway concourses in the world, running the entire length of a city block, and then some. Completed in 1925, but looking very 19thCentury,…

Teatro Colón is considered one of the top five opera houses in the world. Its acoustics are so good that Pavarotti once said the only design flaw is the structure’s ability to reveal a singer’s every mistake. It occupies an entire city block, seating for 2,500, and was, until the Sydney Opera House opened in 1973,…

You’ll see long orderly queues for buses, cake shops, Western Union, newsagents, ATM’s and doctors, or anything really, so fall into line and behave yourself, because that’s how we do it here. Everything, unexpectedly, is very well ordered in BA (Suggestion of a British influence perhaps? – Ant). You’ll wait just a few minutes for…

We nipped over to Colonia del Sacramento with Claudia for her birthday and stayed at the wonderfully eclectic, verging on the eccentric (possibly bonkers) La Posadita de la Plaza, impeccably run by chatty, informative Brazilian-born Eduardo and his ever-vigilant attendant, Chiquiña, AKA Francisca de la Plaza. Chiquiña who, I might add is a street dog…