La Boca to Palermo... Still in Buenos Aires.

Today Owen, Sam, Ness, Sarah, and myself headed into La Boca. It's a crazy little suburb in BA all the houses are painted in bright contrasting colours. To get there we had to catch a bus, the first one during this trip. We found the bus stop and our bus came within a matter of minutes, but we were promptly refused fares because we didn't have correct change. It then took us twenty minutes to work out what that change was, and find somewhere that could give us that change, many places could not change 10 pesos (roughly $5 AUS), which is pretty bizarre, but gives you an idea of how impoverished some areas are. Money has been slightly problematic because we only withdraw money occassionally and when we do it's usually a couple of hundred pesos (we don't carry all of it with us at once, that would be silly!). Problem is the ATM only gives us 100 peso notes, and hardly anyone can change them! Anywho after finally getting the correct bus fare (roughly 30cents AUS), we were soon on our way. Drivers in BA are crazy, our bus driver clearly hated his job, which was quite understandable, but he drove like I drive in video games... recklessly. He almost killed a couple of pedestrians on the way, like actually slamming on the brakes at the last second and then swerving violently to miss them. Then once the bus had stopped, the driver screamed at the people he had almost hit out the window. It was quite something to be a part of. We arrived at La Boca and had a look around, it was very pretty, but very touristy, so we decided to venture out a little beyond the touristy area only to find we were in a slum of sorts. There was a suspiciously strong police presence, so we meandered back to the main area and sat down for a break, pulled out our lonely planet to read up on La Boca only to find strong tourist warnings about sticking to the main streets. We'll research things a little better in future. We got back on the bus, grabbed some lunch, and then parted ways with Owen and Sam. Ness, Sarah, and I decided to jump on to the subway and head to Palermo, which is a lot like North Adelaide at home, but prettier. Leafy boulevards, charming boutiques, and other noncy crap. I bought this wicked t/shirt of a hotdog high fiving a mustard bottle. It rocks! On the way back Ness walked through a small childs freshly excreted urine, but we all managed to successfully navigate through the mountains of dog crap. There are so many dogs and cats everywhere, seemingly unowned, but all relatively well mannered (opening doors for ladies and that kind of thing). We jumped back on the subway, and have arrived safely back to our hostel. This is our second hostel, I liked the first one better, there are too many people here... Any who the cerveza is calling, and we have to organize the next few days.

Catch ya on the flip side homecows!

Dylan

Photos are of La Boca and a $4 steak!