Colegiales

Our last day in Buenos Aires before catching an overnight bus to Mendoza.

The people who own the airbnb apartment that we have been staying in kindly let us stay until the evening so that we didn't have to carry our bags around with us all day. This was great and meant that we gained an extra day of sightseeing.

We packed our bags in the morning and despite neither of us having very much stuff it's amazing how much we had managed to spread around the entire apartment!

We then went to visit a beautiful Bookshop called La Ateneo that is inside a former theatre. It has been voted one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world and I can certainly vouch for that.

In the afternoon we joined another free walking tour of the Retiro district of the city. Here we saw the congress building, the presidential pink house, the obelisk and many more examples of the city's mixed architecture. We also learnt about Eva Peron, a former First Lady who died of cancer at the age of 33. Despite dying so young she achieved a lot, including championing women's suffrage. The famous song Don't Cry for me Argentina is written about her and the speech she gave to the city before she died. Her grave is also in the Recoleta cemetery which we fortunately managed to stumble across during our visit. At the end of our tour which finished outside of the pink house, our tour guide Fernando said that if we liked military ceremony's we should stick around as at 6pm every day they take down the Argentinian flag which flys outside the presidential palace. As it was only 10 minutes away we decided to wait. Now being British and having seen the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace I was expecting something exciting. What we got instead was a guy in militarily uniform who causally walked across to the flag pole and attempted to lower the flag. He couldn't get it to work so he wondered back to the palace and returned 5 minutes later with his mate. The two of them tugged on the ropes a bit and hit the side of the pole but with no success gave up and left. We also decided to give up at this point and caught the subte (the subway) back to our apartment.

One thing I would also like to comment on about our stay in Buenos Aires is the Mosquitos. The Mosquitos here are on steroids! The were all over the news as Buenos Aires has had an invasion of the evil critters (that still bite you through your clothes) from Patagonia as the city is still unusually warm for this time of year. We will definitely be leaving with more than our fair share of bites!Read more