Buenos Aires. An unexpectedly cool, colorful City!!

We didn't know what to expect arriving in this large city, as it was the first time either of us have been in South America. The main purpose of our trip to Argentina was to visit the Patagonia region for some of the best hiking in the world, but Joslyn came up with a brilliant idea to also visit Ushuaia, the small city at the end of the world. More on that later.I had not hear a lot about Buenos Aires, so I didn't have preconceived ideas, which ended up allowing us to have fun exploring the city. It also gave us a bit of time to get to know the wonderful culture, practice some Spanish, and to try to figure out the currency & banking system.

We ended up renting a really nice, little, loft apartment in Palermo, which we discovered was a very hip, vibrant neighborhood with great coffee, food, and shopping. Many colorful murals and painted buildings, and hige trees lining the streets. One interesting thing we noticed when walking up and down the streets: there were only women lingerie and men’s clothing stores. -? There was also, of course, amazing food and it was so incredibly affordable. We would have several cocktails, some wine, fish, veggies, and the whole bill would be less than $30 US.The people in the city were so nice and helpful, even as we tried to learn and speak their language. As an example, we went into a cell phone store and, even though they did not have a hotspot like we were looking for, we ended up talking with an incredibly nice employee, who went on to tell us all about the city — and about Ushuaia when we told him that was our next stop.

We ended spending a good amount of time hanging around the Palermo neighborhood and spent a fair amount of time relaxing in our AirBNB. There was even a little upstairs pool, but I don't even remember if we took a dip or not. [Jos: we did not.

]Ok, let's talk about the banking system in Argentina. We quickly learned from trial and error, that you can only withdraw 4K pesos at a time, which worked out to about $60 US. Even though things were fairly inexpensive, we would run through that much in a day or less. We also found out that many times over the weekend, the ATMs and banks would run out of pesos. And some banks didn’t accept foreign cards at all. Unfortunately, the banking industry is corrupt and has extremely high fees. The fee to take out 4K pesos was around $6-8 US. Fortunately, we both carry debit cards that reimburse us for all ATM fees. Good choice us.

We took a nice tour bus through the city to see all the major tourist destinations, including the very old, and colorful part of the city called Caminito. This is where the tango was born! Unfortunately, it is also one of the poorer parts of the city, and the tour guide advised not to go there at night, but we weren’t sure if she was exaggerating.

That night we hit the #3 bar on the Top 50 bars in the world, Floreria Atlantico. Unfortunately, it should have been ranked #300. It was a pretty nice place in a basement - a speakeasy under a flower shop, with a cool guy from the States who helped us out ordering and had some great information about the place. But it definitely should not have been on the top 50 list. We understand that for some it is a great food place, but the new bartenders just could not make good drinks. We tried 4 different cocktails and all were bad! Maybe it is better on the weekend?? We guessed that whoever voted for it had not actually been there in the past year.Anyway, we loved walking the city in the summertime and the giant bookstore, and jacaranda trees, tiled sidewalks, and colorful buildings. Buenos Aires is a wonderful city and one that everyone should have on their list if they are heading to Argentina and/or South America. We would both love to go back some day, but now off to the end of the world.....Ushuaia.