Buenos Aires: 15 April - 1 May

Back to backpacking
Returning to backpacking has taken some getting used to. I was prepared for living in a dorm, ready for the slightly grimey communal bathrooms (flip-flops mandatory!), and up for meeting random people. But when I arrived in Argentina on Sunday in the wee hours of the morning, I was in a state of shock.

Having failed to failed to find a bed at the three other hostels nearby, Hostel Clan was my final attempt before giving up and heading for the Intercontinental down the road. I rang the doorbell. A buzzer sounded as if I were entering a prison, and I stumbled up to the steps in darkness to the front bed. I was in luck - they could fit me in. I was led me to a big room full of slightly smelly, snoring bodies. I groped for my bed, found it, and then scrabbled around in the dark to get into my bed sheet. Finally, I collapsed in a heap and drifted off.

The next day I found that I had entered the rank of middle schooler in the backpackers' pecking order: I was certainly an older and more experienced traveler than the many gap year students I met, but as I was straight off the plane and on a career break, I was completely unqualified to join the ranks of the quarter-life-crisis-wanderers, let alone the gnarled permanent drop-outs.

As ever, there are people here from all over the world - Brits, Yankees, Spanish, Japanese, Peruvians, Chileans, Israelis - reminding me of how small the world is and how much people now travel. I've enjoyed hearing their stories, and of course talking about politics! It's fascinating to see how everybody has a different take on the Iraq conflict and the wider Middle East. O-Ded, an Isreali with a huge mass of curly hair, told me that the Palestine-Israeli conflict would work itself out at it's own pace because both sides want peace, but that it would take many decades to marginalise the extremists in Israel and Palestine. I had a long debate with Carlos about whether Andorra really is a country (it is, I was wrong). And I've discussed the ins and outs of the latest steps in Northern Ireland with a hardcore Republican.

Survival skills
I decided to equip myself if some survival skills for South America, and have signed up for one week of intesive Spanish classes. It's a small class - just me an a really nice Aussie from Melbourne who is off to Insead to do an MBA - and Virba, my teacher, has been pushing us along at a heck of pace.

On an intial inspection, it looked pretty similar to French, but it's harded than it looks. Grappling with irregular verbs, imperatives, and a whole bunch of new vocabularly has been exhausting but great fun. I'm not convinced that I'm making progress despite the "moy bien" that Virba keeps bombarding me with. I wish I had more time to learn properly, but at least I'll have some basics by the time I leave.

BA: Thesis and antithesis
In many ways, Buenos Aires is not what I expected. I thought I'd find a genteel, European-type city, with leafy boulevards, cafe culture, and old colonial architecture. Instead, it's a curious mix of old world architecture from France and Italy and new concrete blocks more akin to China. It has wide leafy boulevards but the streets are full of buses and cars belching choking fumes. It's people are genteel and stylish, but also poor and (some of them) angry at the government (I've seen two demos since I've been here, one by teachers who are upset with their poor pay, and the other by some left-wing groups).

In fact, what I realised is that the city is all of the things I expected and their antithesis depending on what area you are in. Recolleta and Palmero are monied and trendy, full of nice clear streets, flash shops, and cool cafes. I wandered the streets in the warm early evening sun and felt like I was in Barcelona or Madrid. People sat outide in cafes chatting on their mobile phones, and shops sold expensive clothes. But then down in San Telmo or La Boca, and many other neighbourhoods you see a different city. These colourful latin suburbs have throbbing street cultures where you can see open-air tango shows, experience delicious smells as they waft from the restaurants, and feel the pulse of the city.

Buenos Aires has definitely grown on me as I have discovered new places, found the best coffee shops, learnt how to order my favourite factura, and just generally settled in. It has an inexplicable sort of charm: laid back yet interesting, bustling yet not over-powering.

Dinner is more like a midnight feast
Whilst I've been here the Bustelos, friends of mum and dad and BA residents, have very kindly hosted me a few times. Once at a fabulous restaurant (where the steak comes in slices a big as a brick!) and then again on Wednesday evening for "dinner". I say "dinner" because the invite was for 10pm and of course that meant we wouldn't eat until about 11pm.

Frederic and his sisters cooked up delicious crepes filled with ham, cheese and tomatos, and then bananas and dulce de leche (a kind of liquid caramel). I happily scoffed them whilst sipping on a nice malbec, chatting away in a mixture of French, Spanish, and English (okay, so no Espanol for me).

By the time I left at about 1.30am, my body was completely confused. Had I just eaten dinner? Or was that an inprompitu midnight feast? But I hadn't been asleep. I don't think I'll quite figure it out, so I'm just doing as the Romans do.