People are just dying to get into this place!

Last Sunday, Damien and I took a guided historical tour of Recoleta Cemetery and Recoleta District. Recoleta is the most prestigious district of Buenos Aires (comparable to Knightsbridge in London, Mosman in Sydney and (I guess) the Upper East Side in New York City (I don’t know NYC that well). It’s full of grand old French-style mansions, most of which have now been converted into 5 Star hotels, Embassies or Flagship Stores for big brands such as Ralph Lauren.

Recoleta is also home to one of the most well-known Cemeteries in the world too – Recoleta Cemetery. BA’ers love to come to this Cemetery at the weekends to pay homage to their history and their heroes. The cemetery is huge and houses thousands of family tombs and mausoleums belonging to Buenos Aires’ rich and famous (including ex-presidents, political activists, national heroes). The most famous probably belongs to the Duarte Family where Eva Peron (finally) rests in peace.

Some of you may think a Cemetary is a weird place to head on your first weekend in a new place but a guided tour around this cemetery gave us a very intensive lesson on the history of Argentina, the lives of Argentinians and BA'ers over the past 200 years - and some info on housing (and mausoleum) prices in BA! A mausoleum here starts on average at around US$50,000 – the same as an average price of an average apartment in an average area in Buenos Aires – plus the living members of the family pay annual land taxes and maintenance fees. In the last few years, many families have decided to sell their mausoleums (and move their families’ coffins to cheaper ‘lodgings’ outside of the city) and buy apartments instead.

If you’re from BA and your family can afford a family mausoleum here then you’ve really made it!

This is the 'main drag' of the cemetery. Mausoleums cost more here!

Some of the more ornate mausoleums – they go many storeys below ground and some even have their own chapels housed within them. The most valuable mausoleum is valued at US$1 million!  

                                       Some of the huge French-style mansions of Recoleta

They say 'ciao' in Argentina!

So, we are finally in Buenos Aires after a hectic (and slightly traumatic) month of ‘leaving-do’s’ with wonderful friends in Beijing, a week in Canada visiting Damien’s younger brother Richard (who is a dogsledder in Whistler by the way. How totally cool is that?!?!?), followed by a night in South Beach, Miami (yeah baby) where I didn’t diet.

In a nutshell: Buenos Aires is fab.

And yes, they say ‘Ciao’, well actually it’s ‘Chau’ which is even more laid-back, sexy and cool than just plain, old Italian Ciao. They also call everyone Chico or Chica. Also very cool. Sigh. I'll explain more about the language in later posts.

They Porteños (the name for local BA’ers) have got it right in every way! They live in a city that looks like Paris, they dress like they’re from Milan and live the laid-back lifestyle of coastal Spaniards. To top-it-all-off the food is a combination of all three of those amazing places: fantastic red wines for just a few dollars a bottle, the most tender, tastiest, melt-in-your-mouth steaks I have ever eaten, decadently creamy, stinky cheeses (just how I like them), beautiful bread, wonderful italian-style ice-cream, totally naughty but gorgeously yummy pastries – both sweet and savoury (I will be blogging in a later post about the challenges of doing weightwatchers whilst living surrounded by all these calories) and much more.

Oh, and for those of you in Europe and the US reading this thinking ‘yeah, and?’, please remember that we have just spent the last two years living in Beijing where the western supermarkets are the size of a dry-cleaners and a packet of cornflakes costs US$20!

So, anyway…there you go…our first impressions of Buenos Aires and my first blog post ever. It’s not great but I have been wracking my brains for the past week trying to think of what to write about. (My friend Dalton has been nagging me a bit to post also so the pressure was definitely on). Hope you enjoyed it.

Chau for now Chicos!

The pic is of a street in the 'barrio' of San Telmo where we are living