Day 4

Our last tourist day in Baires was spent in El Boca, a formerly working class ghetto of Italian immigrant back at the beginning of the 20th century but nowadays full of street performers and tourists. It's like when you hear about favellas in Brazil and they take you there on a tour, and they turn out to be the nicest areas of the city with brightly coloured old world buildings and everyone raking in tourist dollars - the type of accommodation that would be considered edgy and bohemian in a city like New York and would fetch rent of $2.5k.

Next up was Buenos Aires' very own Pere LaChaise Cemetery - Recoleta, where Eva Peron is buried, amongst other famous Argentinians. It was full of ornate crypts with fancy decorative gates and stained glass. A lot of them had a tiny spiral flight of steps leading down so that the coffins would be below ground and presumably protected from the weather. Even so, since most of them were really old, a lot were in major disrepair, with dust and dead flowers littering the inside, and broken glass. Some hadn't had a coffin added in 50 years and I reckoned all the surviving relatives were dead or no longer interested. A sad end. Oddly, all four of us forgot to actually look for Eva's tomb, and we only thought of it after.

We finished with a nearby art museum. Argentinians are big into comic strips, so there was lots of that, and a weird installation where a guy had made sculptures of a cartoon dog with a variation on the theme each time, like one was made of wool, another of toilet paper, and so on. There was a particularly weird room where there was a white couch with a man and woman projected onto it.

I was most interested in the free wine reception at the end though, and we quaffed reds while Vincente told us about his girlfriend. Whenever he did anything crazy, she would just go, "OK, OK, just do whatever you want." It could be a successful life philosophy.