Last week in Buenos Aires

This week we´ve been taking spanish lessons with a local Argentine girl Cecelia Martinez.
She runs the classes from her apartment and thankfully has endless patience when Paul and I end up using french words instead of spanish. Thankfully her apartment is two blocks away and she doesn´t mind when wére late for class after the night before. By the end of the week she could tell when the spanish wasn´t going to flow so easy and would produce a mate gourd and kick things off with a bit of caffeine.

By sheer coincidence she had met 3 english guys who were doing a similar bike trip to us while on holidays in Mendoza and put us in touch with them. Some of their advie on routes and distances between towns has been invaluable as sometimes a marked place on a map down here just means the crossroads with tumbleweed blowing though it has a name and not that there is a shop or anything like a village.
Spanish classes were great craic, with Cecelia teaching us everything from the words for each part of our bike to how to ask permission to camp in a farmers field. Not the standard spanish lessons by any stretch of the imagination. By the end of the week we´d made great progress and were well able to get by.

We´ve had a few great nights out thanks to meeting some Paddies abroad, Patrick "el architecto" and the genial Eoghan were great craic to meet for a few pints and showed us some good spots in town. On our last saturday night in town we were determined to stick the pace of a Buenos Aires night out, clubs don´t open till 3 and close at 6 so we had some adjusting to do to our Irish drinking schedule, but thanks to the lads we had a mighty night.
When we met Paddy and Eoghan at the bar their friend seemed a bit familiar. Looked like someone I knew from rowing at home a few years back. Couldn´t be I thought but it was indeed Anthony, a well travelled frenchman. I should have know it was him as he was chatting up the ladies from the hostel straight off! He´s lived in a fair few cities, Madrid, Dublin, Paris, the list goes on, but seems to really like Buenos Aires so there´s definitely something there. Good to meet an old rowing buddy and next time the tequilas are on me.
Our friends from the hostel Tamara, Katy and John were out with us too and had a great night as well. We moved to a hostel in a better area after the first week and meet some really sound people there and have had a few great nights out with them.
One night we went to see the obligatory tango show. Normally I´m averse to being dressed up as a tourist and roasted on a spit to see the local equvalent of dancing midgets, but I have to say I was well impressed by the show we went to. Cecelia was advising us on good things in the locality and definitely hit the nail on the head with the show. There was a live band with a double bass, baby grand and violin and the band leader on accordion. The accordiaon player had the facial expression of a gravedigger but was giving the old squeeze box welly. At one stage he´d expanded it so far I though he´d do damage. Singing and dancing were alternated and along with the obligatory tango, which is a bit serious but very skilled, the dancers did some traditional local dances as well. At the end of the show some of the audience were invited to dance with the dancers and I ended up dancing with one of the tango ladies. The odd bit of swing dancing I´d done in Galway kicked in and while it was far from a tango, thankfully I didn´t ruin the girl´s career with my size 14´s.