All stories about "Buenos Aires"

Smoke has been pouring into Buenos Aires as a result of fires started by farmers. While the government has blamed the fires on farmers clearing their pastures, the farmers in question claim that the fires were "designed to distract attention from a row over tax rises on farm exports." Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has called the acts "irresponsible." [BBC]

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The 2008 Beijing Olympics are still four months away, but they've already started with a bang. Activists who oppose China's occupation of Tibet have been holding huge protests as the Olympic torch makes its customary pre-games lap around the globe. In the past week, the torch toured Paris and London with an entourage of local policemen and Chinese security personnel. In spite of all the guards, protesters forced the torch to be extinguished for the first time in modern Olympic history. If you want to get in on all of the "Free Tibet" fun, the Olympic torch will be stopping in fourteen more cities between tomorrow and April 29th. The good people at Google have made a map showing all of the remaining cities along the torch's route. The tour includes such exciting destinations as San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and the hometown of everyone's favorite despot -- Pyongyang!

There's still plenty of time to plan a trip to go protest the torch in any one of these great urban oases. Protesters get to meet other cute politically involved types and rub elbows with the world-class athletes who carry the torch, all while enjoying the fun of screaming and flinging yourself at angry law enforcement personnel. So why not fly around the world following the Olympic torch and going apeshit? It's all for a good cause. It's kind of like the civil rights movement, with sightseeing instead of big dogs and high-powered hoses.

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A farmers' strike that has plagued Argentina for more than 2 weeks may be coming to an end. The strike started March 11 as a protest to a 44% export tax that had been implemented by the government on commodities like soy and sunflower seeds (Argentina is the world's 3rd largest exporter of the former). Farmers have since lifted roadblocks that "caused traffic jams and depleted grocery shelves across the country." Representatives of the Argentine Rural Society met with Argentinean government officials Friday in the first of talks hoping to bring the strike to an end. [CNN]

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Gridskipper pal Ian Mount has an article in the weekend New York Times about Boedo, the up and coming neighborhood in Buenos Aires. He even notes Klub Killer, an establishment first mentioned in these pages by Ian's lovely better half, Cintra Scott. [NYT]

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Yesterday, we posted about the riots at Argentina's Ezeiza Airport, where passengers ransacked the place after days of flight delays and cancellations. This video shows a portion of the destruction, as the angry mob throws phones at computers, pumps their fists, and knocks over anything not cemented to the ground while chanting "Hijo de Puta!"

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Two days of severe flight delays and cancellations resulted in an eruption of violence and destruction at Argentina's Ezeiza Airport (a.k.a. Ministro Pistarini International Airport) outside Buenos Aires over the weekend, finally ending with police intervention. From Thursday until Sunday, almost all flights were grounded at the airport, leaving thousands of passengers stranded for days with no announcements from the airlines or airport. On Saturday, travelers decided to take matters into their own hands and began destroying ticket counters, knocking over computers, throwing objects at personnel (!) and wrestling with airport workers. Once the melee began, many ticket counter workers up and left.

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It sometimes takes the fresh eyes of first-time visitors to make locals see what's good about their dining scene. In a piece written after a recent trip to Buenos Aires, San Francisco Chronicle food writer Michael Bauer annotes some local dining habits that rightly deserve praise: the tiny table-side Service Table, so you can get some shit off your main table; big ass napkins; chilled red wine; and, yes, the personal ice bucket. And over at NPR.org, correspondent Julie McCarthy (no, not Lingerie Bowl star Jenny McCarthy) reminds us that there is more than steak down here in Buenos Aires. Dominga, for example, cuts raw fish into some nice sushi. "Sushi chef Gabriel Ilepiane is an artist whose creations brim with whimsy. On a recent visit, he presents me with a plate loaded with sushi arranged around curlicues of green wasabi and red ginger, and I think: 'If Christmas were a sushi platter, this would be it,'" McCarthy writes. "For a fraction of the price ($25), the dinner was every bit as good as anything I ate when I lived and worked in Tokyo."

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The Gray Lady is all atwitter about Buenos Aires. The New York Times has named BA "cheap" and/or "gay" in four separate items in the first half of December alone! First, on December 2, T Magazine ran a "Style Map" titled "Cheap and Cheerful." "A still-kicking dollar" and "great shopping" richly reward travelers, says T. (Incidentally, the one place to eat mentioned in this roundup of Palermo Hollywood is Casa Felix -- a meat-free underground spot profiled here on Gridskipper when it opened back in February 2007.)

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Buenos Aires blogger Jeff Barry has been compiling impressions, recommendations, and history at Buenos Aires, City of Faded Elegance since his March 2005 arrival from Miami. He's now done what all prolific bloggers should do and winnowed his posts into a free 57-page e-book and guide to Buenos Aires.

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The first-time visitor to Buenos Aires is faced with piles of steak, pretty people, 11 p.m. dinnertimes, dog-poop-mined sidewalks -- and a Spanish that's not the language you learned in class with the teacher who wasn't, let's be honest, exactly fluent herself. Rioplatense, as they call it, bolts Spanish words to unique verbal forms and varnishes it all with an Italian rhythm and a unique slang known as lunfardo. Luckily, former Dow Jones Buenos Aires correspondent Taos Turner has ginned up Scooping Argentina, a website of videos untangling Argentine politics, scandals, and language. In a series of short videos, Laura Rajchman -- Argentina's answer to the St. Pauli Girl -- demystifies such key Argentine concepts as afanar, zafar, and most importantly, quilombo (something between a whorehouse and a big friggin' mess). The videos are also on iTunes, under "Scooping Argentina."

Scooping Argentina Official site]

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Recently, Buenos Aires municipal blog Pasa en Buenos Aires pointed to an article put out by the city's tourism board listing the BA's top 10 bars. Now, leaving aside the question of who could have paid who to get on a city-published top 10 list, it's a good roundup. These are not the top bars to get plastered at, not the best places to meet a member of the opposite (or same) sex. They are, instead, the best of the classics -- from the uberfamous but still beautiful Café Tortoni to the billiard salon Los 36 Billares to the underground cool of Bar 12 de Octubre. So what makes a Buenos Aires cafe unique?

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Last year we brought you the story of Pablo Tamburini, a Buenos Aires tango dancer who offered his services as a for-pay tango partner -- as a taxi dancer -- for $10-$15/hour to women, usually foreign, in the Argentine capital. Oh, Pablo, you had a good idea but you dreamt too small! The Observer brings us the tale of the more entrepreneurial Eduardo Amarillo, another Buenos Aires tango dancer who pimps a team of 25 tango dancers for $20-$30/hour in what he claims is the first formal taxi dancer agency in Buenos Aires. TangoTaxiDancers sports a website in four languages, price list and multi-dance discounts.

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Recoleta Cemetery, the final resting place of Evita and other boldfaced names of Buenos Aires society, now has its own blog. AfterLife is a new creation by map-maker, tour guide, travel writer and photographer Robert Wright (mentioned in this space before). Why do BA's dead need their own blog? Well, the cemetery is huge, fascinating and there aren't many reliable fonts of information for English-speaking tourists once you're there. (The old ladies feeding the stray cats may give you an earful, but even the master of Argentine Spanish could find their stories hard to follow.)

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Everybody wants to be David Brooks of the Bobos in Paradise era and coin some serious terminology. Released Monday, the 2007 version of the World Travel Market Global Trends Report, produced by Euromonitor International, is a festival of term-coining, from the awkward ("Diaspora Tourism," or visiting granny's eastern European homeland) to the awkwarder ("Halal Tourism," or Islamic religious tourism) to the Big Concept ("Debaucherism," or traveling to blow tons of cash, ingest pharmacologically inadvisable substances, and have sex with people whose last and first names are unknown to you (a.k.a. "Tara Reiding"). This is apparently a new trend to the folks at Euromonitor, who write a bit in the style of, shall we say, older gents who haven't had a "peak experience" at Burning Man.

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In the Odd Curatorial Issues Department, the Argentine state water utility has opened a museum replete with a historical collection of vitrified clay toilets and bidets, fired iron faucets, and elaborate grates. Your obsession with toilets aside, the real reason to go is to check out the wildly ornamented building (covered with Royal Doulton ceramics) that houses the museum and water authority -- the Palacio de Aguas Corrientes. Yes, that's right: the Palace of Running Water. The museum's open Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (guided tours, in Spanish, at 11 a.m.) and located at Riobamba 750.

AySA (Argentine Water Authority) museum [via Line of Sight]

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The Axel Hotel Buenos Aires, a companion to a similar "heterofriendly" gay hotel in Barcelona, finally opened yesterday. For some reason, the AFP photog followed one inaugural guest around who was identified repeatedly as "Spaniard David Molina." Above we see SDM lounging by the Axel's glass-bottom pool, which is actually set into the top floor -- allowing ventral aquatic views for those in the hotel lobby below.

Buenos Aires gets 5-star gay hotel [AP]

[Photo: Getty]

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Last Friday, the much-praised Home Hotel (named 2006's Hotel of The Year and Savior of Western Civilization or some such thing by Wallpaper) launched its party season with its weekly DJ'd drinks/expat fest night in its not-at-all-ugly pool garden. Named Mono Tennis ("Monkey Tennis" in English) after co-owner/DJ/music producer Tom Rixton's multinational party, the 8 p.m.-midnight "cocktails" runs through March (when the weather starts to suck) and features Rixton and two other DJs. And plenty of vodka. Which is nice.

Mono Tennis [WhatsUpBuenosAires]

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Unlike other temperate cities that keep going year round, Buenos Aires hides its collective head in the ground during the rainy season. Porteños, after all, are famed for their sunbathing on any available plot of lawn. But with the spring, life returns -- as does music. On November 16, Cansei de Ser Sexy kicks off the season, which really leaps into high gear December 7-8 at Personal Fest, when Snoop Dog, Cypress Hill, Calle 13, Happy Mondays, Chris Cornell, The Dandy Warhols, Fischerspooner, Gotan Project, and, well, everybody else plays. And yes, there will be plenty of tanning.

Festival Season a Comin [WhatsUpBuenosAires]

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After living in New York for more than a decade, I thought brand new subway lines were just the stuff of urban legends -- like crocodiles down in our sewers. But one actually debuted last week in Buenos Aires. Welcome línea H, The first new subway line here in 63 years! For 70 centavos (about $0.22), tourists and locals alike can ride líneas A, B, C, D, E, and as of October 18, H under the city streets. With only 5 of the eventual 13 stops completed, H currently unites the neighborhoods of Once (think synagogues and the movie Lost Embrace) withParque Patricios (off the typical tourist map, with its old slaughterhouses and hospitals).

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Hoping to master the art of living in the present like the Porteños, writer Marina Palmer took a trip to Buenos Aires. She fell hard for the city, and the vacation turned into a permanent move. Her experiences there ultimately inspired her memoir, Kiss & Tango: Looking for Love in Buenos Aires . Palmer still lives and loves in Buenos Aires, and she's happy to share.

We're going to imprison you in the city of your choice for the rest of your natural life. You can do anything you want there, but you must stay in that city forever. Where would you choose?
Buenos Aires.

Why would you live in this city forever and not somewhere else?
Because it is the most seductive city in the world; its inhabitants are gorgeous and ooze charm. Porteños are warm, vivacious, sophisticated, creative, deeply neurotic, and maddeningly unpredictable. The atmosphere is vibrant, the streets noisy and chaotic. Life here is completely dysfunctional. You won't get bored for a second.

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There are a million meat joints in the naked city--or at least in Buenos Aires--and you could spend several lifetimes arguing, heatedly, about which is the best. But what is a given is that first-timing tourists are herded--like the cattle they're about to nosh--into Cabaña Las Lilas, ostensibly the Peter Luger of Buenos Aires but really, with its silly high prices and tourist-only clientèle, more of a Tavern on the Green. Outside of this, visitors inevitably find themselves to El Desnivel, or La Brigada, or La Cabrera, all worthy places but well set on the Gringo Trail (here's a good, fiery discussion of Buenos Aires steakhouses on eGullet). To this I respectfully add Don Julio. It is certainly not "unknown" to locals or expats, but there's a reason for this: it exhibits the qualities of the best Buenos Aires parrillas. The owner and waiters are incredibly friendly and--shocking for Buenos Aires--offer fast service; the wine list is actually large so you can drop $10 or $200, depending on your mood; the meat is great and not priced only for tourists. And did I mention the leather tablecloths?

Don Julio [Guía Oleo]

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Perhaps eager to resurrect the glamour myth of Buenos Aires's Faena Hotel + Universe that was deflated by Matt Chesterton earlier this year (i.e. pool customer profile: "paunchy Miami software tycoon with matted chest hair who looked like Ron Jeremy after a long day's shoot"), the Times UK breaks out every imaginable Buenos Aires cliché to describe the Faena's spa. The locals are "beautiful and stylish", "immaculately turned out and scarily skinny," and "spend all their time dieting to fit into the ludicrously tight drain pipes." Happily, on a literary level, the Times correspondent allows some of the exotic weirdness of the Philippe Starck-designed spa to seep through.

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Of the 3,000+ pizzerias in Buenos Aires, 39 have been deemed "of patrimonial valor" in a new 240-page book published by the city's Ministry of Culture called "Pizzerías de valor patrimonial de Buenos Aires." (Some civil servants have fun jobs, huh?). You can pick up a copy at la Casa de la Cultura (Avenida de Mayo 565). To save Buenos Aires tourists from lugging the entire tome around, here are a few recommended highlights.

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Next month marks the one-year anniversary of Hollywood in Cambodia, a Buenos Aires street art gallery in the city's truly, madly, deeply popular Palermo Viejo nabe. While it may be known for tango, steak, and boob jobs, Buenos Aires is home to a booming street art scene, and at the gallery artists like Dani Dan and Pum Pum head up a strong slate. As an added bonus, the gallery with a name cribbed from a Dead Kennedys song sits upstairs from a graffitti-decorated bar whose name and typeface is cribbed from a New York tabloid (i.e. the Post).

Hollywood in Cambodia [via BA Spotting]

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Even since Michael Keaton's character in the 1982 movie Night Shift came up with feeding mayonnaise to live tuna in order to cut down tuna fish prep time, I've been a sucker for semi-whacked ideas. In this mode, let us celebrate Iron Wine, a Buenos Aires boozery that's selling the "world's first canned wine" -- a malbec/cabernet blend and a chenin blanc wines in 8.5 and 12 ounce cans. The Argentine vintners are apparently only selling in Latin America, Spain, Monte Carlo (huh?), and South Africa, but they say the US will come soon, thus allowing meatheads everywhere to look like sensitive oenophiles while crushing cans against their domes.

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There's nothing quite as simultaneously luxurious and louche as touring Buenos Aires' tranny hooker district, especially when that district is centered in the city's main park around a lovely rose garden and popular nighttime running track. Or, as Bloomberg News writes:

By day, the Rosedal, or rose garden, is a favorite destination for parents taking their children to amble around a lake, buy popcorn and rent rowboats. At dusk, transvestites wearing tank tops, knee-high boots and shorts saunter in, waving and winking at drivers in passing cars.

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Just in time for the Gay Soccer World Cup, there's a new, gay discount card for Buenos Aires tourists. Dubbed the "Friendly Card," this piece of plastic is good for up to 30 days on the city's gay-friendly circuit -- for a cost. According to the site, the cards go for $50 (silver), $100 (gold,) or $200 (platinum) and include level-appropriate "welcome gifts," plus discounts at restaurants, discos, spas, and other services. The creators of the card are four gay, wine-related businesses, so offerings may favor tipplers. Just a guess. (Note that I resisted the urge to make a "Do you know how I know you're gay?" joke.)

Friendly Card [via Los Tiempos]

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Some hotels are famed for their Scandinavian design or Dionysian luxury; Buenos Aires's Hotel Bauen is known for being taken over by its workers -- and for its groovy-ass late 1970s basement disco lounge. Built in 1978, the disco-era joint went under in 2001 during Argentina's economic crisis. In 2003, the workers took it over, refurbed it in full disco style, and reopened it as the perfect place for those with lefty politics and/or very wide lapels. Now, though, it's in danger of being shut again, as The Man (okay, a judge) has issued an eviction notice because the hotel has been sold to a hotel group.

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