My Cousin Visits (pt. I—Buenos Aires)

My cousin Maddie currently lives in North Carolina. Upon hearing that Tyler and I were moving to Buenos Aires, she reached out to see if we would be open to having her visit.

Our answer: OF COURSE

Once she decided on the length of time she would be visiting (one week), and we began to plan all that we would do.

On her first day…

Maddie arrived on a Sunday. Despite the fact she had an extremely long flight w/ a layover, she arrived with way more energy than I expected. This was good because even though it was Day 1, we had a lot planned.

Since Maddie loves coffee, we first we took her to a local, highly beloved cafe: All Saints Cafe

You can find our other BA haunts on the google maps link I created.

We then headed to our favorite Sunday afternoon excursion: The San Telmo Market.

Here we each magically made a single purchase that we each loved! I bought a purse (I have been needing a new one badly for a while now), Tyler bought himself a shirt, and Maddie joined Tyler and I by buying herself a fanny pack.

We ate empanadas at the famous El Hornero (I HIGHLY recommend their carne empanada). We also stopped by La Aldea de San Telmo, a parilla Tyler and I have come to love for their live music and blended smoothies on hot Argentine summer days.

River Plate

After the market we headed directly to the meetup point for the River Plate fútbol match we had reserved. Let me clarify, we reserved the fútbol match through a tourism company. Why? you may ask, did we use a tourism company to go to a fútbol match?

Let me try and explain it to the best of my understanding:

• Ticket sales are limited to registered fans of the home team
  • Fútbol games here in Buenos Aires are not like in other parts of the world. Years ago, the two sides of fans would get so heated that fights were common. Futbol matches were also prime territory for low level crime to occur regularly. To stop this, now, no away fans are allowed at games anymore. This works because in Argentina you have to register with your home club. So for any given match, if you are registered as a fan of the “away” team, you will be flagged and blocked from purchasing tickets to a game.
  • Even if the two teams are both local to the same neighborhood and have stadiums located right next to each other (as is the case with Independiente and Racing, both located in the city of Avellaneda), if Team A is the “home” team, then the city can only show colors and flags for the home team. This is further reinforced at each game by a specialized police unit that sets up multiple barriers to entry in order to check guests IDs and what they are bringing into the game.
  • Outside of “away” team fans, each team has its own rules about who it does and does not sell tickets to Boca Juniors  for example, only sells to its members and no one else, whereas Racing will only sell to non-members the tickets leftover after all members have had a chance to purchase, and only 24hrs before the start of the game.
• Buying tickets is especially hard if you are foreign
  • Fútbol tickets are registered with Argentine DNI’s (similar to their social security number). As foreigners, we have to resister our tickets with our passports. Yet the devices used at the gates of the games to scan Argentine DNI’s struggles to read international passports, making it hard to enter as a forienger.
• To help with this, tourism companies offer packages to foreigners where they buy tickets for you and bring you into the game
  • Purchasing tickets this way is much more expensive than if you bought tickets directly from the club, but once the company buys your tickets, you know you are good to go, rather than trying to wade through buying a ticket on your own.

The fútbol team River Plate is one of the two most popular teams in Buenos Aires. Thus, in order to ensure we would be able to get in, we chose the safe route and booked the River Plate game through a tourist company: LandingPadBA.

Even though I knew the prices we paid were likely triple what those who did not go through a tourism company paid, I will say they made up for it in their services. All those who signed up for the game were picked up in an air-conditioned (important) van and driven to a restaurant where we were given unlimited pizza, empanadas, and drinks. To top it off, the pizza was GOOD (in the future I would ask locals what they thought of the restaurant we ate at (El Cuartito) and it was widely agreed that it was one of the top pizzarias in the city).

Afterwards we were taken to the game where we had a very smooth time getting into the game.

We were even given nifty plastic cards as our entrance tickets which we were told were registered under our name and passport.

And once we were in, the energy of the fans was palpable.

River Plate won the game that night. Over the course of the match, we stood the entire game, sung the loudest we could to the best of our ability (I was not always sure what was being chanted but I did my best), and tried not to lose our voices or get pushed over by the rushing crown whenever River Plate scored.

I did not fully know what La Bomba de Tiempo was when I convinced Maddie and Tyler we should buy tickets and go to the show. All I knew was it was supposed to be a live drum show (I imagined like the Blue Man Group?), that I love live music, and that I had heard good things about it.

Turns out, to this day it is still one of my favorite live events that I have been to in the city.

It is a live drumming show which plays at Buenos Aires’ Ciudad Cultural Konex every Monday night.

It is a mixture of pure percussion, vocals, and other instruments that just make you want to start dancing and jumping around. I cannot recommend this enough to anyone else who will be in the city over a Monday. We danced so much we made friends with those dancing around us, and surprisingly we somehow ran into Jake for the tour again!

and Everything Else…

There are many other small adventures that took place throughout the week Maddie visited and I can’t write about all of them otherwise I will lose you (my wonderful readers). However, I will mention a few highlights…

Shopping!

I am not a huge shopper on my own. Luckily, I have people in my life who will see cute clothes through a window on the street and spontaneously pull us both into the store, leading to a fun shopping adventure where we try on fun outfits (and yes, some of the items in these pictures were purchased)

…CUTTING OUR HAIR!!!

This happened because on day one I happened to mention that I wanted to get my hair cut. Funny enough, so too did Maddie. In a spur of the moment decision, we looked up a local place with good reviews, and walked in to chop off our locks!

It was a great last thing to do before we jumped on a plan to go to Iguazú falls–our mid-week planned adventure. However, Iguazu deserves an entire post to itself, so expect that next!

La Boca, the Crystal Bar and Norte

We returned from Iguazú oh so elated that we had gone, and oh so tired from the trip. So, on our last day we took things a bit slower… sike!

We still had a few more things we wanted to check off our final thing to-do in BA:

La Boca

First, visit the famous neighborhood of La Boca:

La Boca is known for its colorful buildings and for its fútbol team, the Boca Juniors .

Now, I will say, I had already visited La Boca once, and found that in general there is one main, super colorful, street, that is filled with vendors selling and tourists walking up and down it taking photos. These super touristy places are not really my vibe, nor are they Maddie’s, but we still felt we should at least check off the box since it was her last day.

A beautiful thing happened when we went to La Boca. While it was still the overly touristy place with overpriced vendors and restaurants all trying to get you to eat their food, we wandered into the cutest art store owned by an older Argentine porteño women, Marta Grosso. The shop is called Color and Art (Color y Arte) and all the paintings inside were painted by her. They are all super bright and colorful, and we found them to actually be reasonably priced, unlike all the mass produced pieces you would find on the street outside.

The address on her advertisement is Magallanes 861 however this only gets you close to her shop. It will not actually bring you to it. I believe searching Escultura La Raza is a better way to get to her shop. To get there, go along Magallanes St and enter the Centro Cultural de Los Artistas. At the end, turn right and go up the colorful stairs. Stop at the first platform, turn right, and enter Color y Arte!

We loved this place so much we even made this video to show how to get to the shop (if the video does not work for you, message me directly to send it to you–it does a good job showing how to get to the shop):

After La Boca, we were determined to check off two more restaurants before we bid Maddie adieu… two restaraunts one night? you ask. Why yes. yes we did.

Crystal Bar – Our Fancy experience

Crystal Bar is a rooftop bar at the very top of the nice Alvear Icon hotel in Puerto Madero, located here.

This was our fancy send off for Maddie.

As a rooftop bar, the views from our seats allowed us to look out over the entire city, or turn around and see past Rio de la Plata (the river), and see Uruguay. We made it to the bar just in time to grab a few drinks and watch the sunset.

Don Niceto

Next up was Don Niceto, a Parilla recommended to Tyler and I by a local friend. According to him, this place is not nice at all, or what we Americans call “a hole in the wall”, but it is absolutely delicious.

Perfect.

If Crystal Bar was our fancy send off to Maddie, then Don Niceto was our authentic send off.

While we waited for our uber to pick us up, we took fun photos to commemorate our last night (we were running out of time before Maddie’s flight, and yes, uber is a thing in Buenos Aires although its not widely advertised, see my ways to get around Buenos Aires here)

We made it to Don Niceto and it was exactly as our friend described. A small niche in the wall with a grill in the front with one man cutting up and cooking the meat, one waiter managing all the tables full of locals sitting at the (debatably) janky tables, huddled together and sharing multiple deliciously smelling plates of food.

We ordered the chorizo (in Argentina this is basically a fat sausage), provoleta (a grilled cut of provolone cheese with herbs and gahhh its to DIE for), and the entraña (it was good but Maddie and I agreed the entraña at Norte was actually better).