Boca


I ended up doing a walking tour to Boca with a friend I met in Sao Paulo who had ended up in the same hostel as me. I had my reservations, I don't like to be herded around like a tourist sheep, I like to be able to explore at my own pace and rhythm. It takes away a lot of the enjoyment for me and my imaginative mind when I'm just being shown the same old tourist trap sites as everyone else. Although, I have to admit that the added insight and info is most helpful. I also like to look around cities and find the one-off places, I don't want to go where everyone else is going simply because it's in a guide or on the map. I want to go to the little places that no one knows about, safe little havens where the business is more personal and it's not just about attracting hordes of people to make money. For example, there was a little art cafe serving freshly infused herbal teas I used to enjoy visiting when I lived in Mexico. It had cool artwork on the walls, I used to go and drink chai, read a book or magazine. They'd play good music and held poetry nights. These places always seem better than the all singing, all dancing, sparkly tourist attractions. I thought a walking tour to Boca would be an all singing, all dancing, sparkly tourist attraction where I would be stared at by locals as I stood listening to the guide's recited comments about certain historical buildings and so on, feeling like a vulnerable foreigner who had no idea what was really going on.


Boca was actually a pleasant surprise, the guide was good and it was certainly helpful to have her knowledge on immigration to Argentina and how Boca evolved. I still felt like a helpless tourist sheep when locals walked past and stared though. We were all sheep. We started at Boca Juniors stadium having got the bus to Boca itself.


On the street outside the stadium, the guide pointed out a nice house right next to a makeshift wooden one. Both run down. Boca was vacated by it's wealthier inhabitants during an outbreak of disease, until that point it had been home to a mixture of rich and poor alike. These days Boca is one of the most run down areas in Buenos Aires but boasts one of the best football teams - I know nothing about football and have very little interest for it unless there happens to be a good looking guy that I'm sort of interested in who happens to be a football fan.


Boca Juniors, in spite of my disinterest in the sport was a good thing to see given that football is so important in Argentina.

After the stadium, we went to a parilla for some lunch - I went vegetarian and everyone else gorged on meat. The courtyard restaurant near a train track was sun dappled and a guy was playing guitar and singing. It was all pretty nice, Argentinians do things in style, there is a definite aesthetic to how they operate and I love it. The singing, the tango, the wooden painted houses, the slightly antiquated feel in the architecture and decor of the restaurants, bars and shops. It gets my vote, I've been fantasising about how to move here...

After lunch we went to the shopping main drag (very very touristy, but very very cool). Painted buildings, shops selling all manner of Argentine tourist trinkets, most of which I really liked in spite of myself. They were selling some pretty 1920's illustrations advertising tango nights and so on.

Bull statues and couples dancing tango outside of restaurants to entice in passers by as well as a Diego Maradona look a like were all corwded into this one very colourful street. It was a pretty cool experience actually, I was surprised. When we left the guide said that Boca has little else other than this main street with all the pained houses, shops and restaurants, the area itself is still very dangerous so if we go back alone we should stick to the streets she took us along. Fair enough, the bus ride back passing through the rest of Boca seemed to enforce what she had said, the rest if it seemed pretty run down and not nearly so colourtful and tourist enticingly full of cafes and shops.