Argentines - very, very friendly

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum…

Travelling through Argentina is a breeze, each day a new and invariably exciting city, each night the world’s most comfortable sleeper buses…What gets me is how incredibly nice and informal the locals can be.

I say nice as I was in the beautiful river beach city of Rosario, heading across the world’s most opulent monument to a national flag, which consisted of a hundred metres of stairs, a large forum and a marble tower, which competed with skycrapers for cloud space, when I asked an extremely pretty girl to take a photo for me. What ensued was a rather intense, one-sided love affair, and ended with me being molested like an Alsatian with a steak…

After escaping the clutches of the very pretty girl, that turned into a crazy tongue fest and several indecent proposals, I soon realised the reasoning for many Argentinians to walk with an air of aloofness…obviously being openly nice is an invitation for breeding practice. So I jumped in a cab to get my breath back and said what I’d been hanging to say for months…”Vamoos a la Playa”. Unless you’re up with quintessential South Americanisms, you’ll be going…umm, Dave what are you getting at? Well, it was a catchy song from the 60s that means “let’s go to the beach”.

What followed was my second dose of Argentinian friendliness. It seemed my Spanish was not of a high conversational standard, but me and the friendly cabbie hit it off and he spent the next hour showing me the sights of his 500-year-old city, including the sandy beaches on the Parana River, which is far wider than Sydney Harbour, as well as enjoying countless stories of his adventures hunting in the Andes for deer and wolves. A mere 40 pesos later, and several invitations to go home and have a local feast with his wife and kids, I was dropped at the bus station to recount my crazy adventure to my travel buddy Jay… who had come across a not too dissimilar day…

Tags: ARGENTINA, Rosario

Deluded, arrogant or just plain jingoistic Ilas Malvinas SIENPRE Argentinas…

It’s everywhere…street signs, countless memorials, posters in hotels and restaurants, sides of street food carts…and on most Argentines’ lips.

What we know as the Falkland Islands…inhabited by about 2000-odd sheep farmers of British extraction…and they have been there for well over 100 years.

The Argentines have disputed the British government’s administration of the islands for about 150 years and this culminated in the military regime’s pathetic attempt at a takeover in the early eighties, which most Westerners will associate with the resulting extreme support then given to the beleagered Margaret Thatcher, which then allowed her to go on to change Western government economics and welfare structures, which still resonates today.

On the Argentine side, the military lost public support and a dictatorship-free Argentina paved the way towards democracy and capitalist freedom. Though most Argentines still reckon the island should be theirs, which I find absolutely bizarre as the islands have no Argentines even living there, partly due to a law which prohibits their entry. Fair enough, I said to one travel agent who protested this fact. After all, the last time a boatload of Argentines did, they shot the place up…

Not a bad impact for a little group of Antarctic windswept islands.

Tags: ARGENTINA, Rosario