Saturday, March 2
Hotel Ex Own Madera was very nice, just renovated 2 years ago. We were on the 2nd floor. Get off the elevator and there is a landing with 3 doors. Our room faced the road, so we found the traffic a bit loud. When we woke up, we found out the window had been open. No wonder!
They obviously got their water pressure from Iguassu Falls! Got the shampoo rinsed out in 10 seconds flat.
Breakfast was awesome. We went down fairly early, 7:30 am, so we had all the attention of the 2 girls working there. They showed Frankie each and every item that was gluten free, and kept bringing more. They made up an omelet for her, and brought her gf toast and a plate full of biscuits that we brought along for the day.
Our cruise did not depart until 6:45 pm today (our check-in slot was 4 pm), so we thought we would take a part of the day to actually see more of Buenos Aires than just the airport!
At 9:15 am we were picked up for a 3 hour highlights tour of the city, tour guide Veronica. There were 10 of us on the tour.
It began at the Plaza de Mayo (May Square), where lots of historical events happened. Madonna filmed some scenes of Evita at the government building. This is where the president usually works from, but the current president has decided that he would rather work from home.
This painted nappie is a symbol of the 30,000 people that went missing during the last dictatorship of 1974.
Buenos Aires has 48 neighbourhoods. We drove through some of them, bright and colourful.
They make a big deal of soccer ("football") here, especially after they won the World Cup. For one day, the population of Buenos Aires increased from 3.5 million to 7 million.
The stadium is painted bright blue and gold (NEVER call it yellow!). Apparently nobody could agree what colour to paint it, so they decided that they would choose the colours of the first ship that came into port. The first ship happened to come from Sweden.
We had a quick rain shower, and of course everyone left their raincoats in the van.
The tour ended at Recoleta Cemetary. It was hot and sunny here. It's quite famous because Evita is buried here. It is a maze of huge family mausoleums, some as old as 200 years. There are 4,691 vaults over 14 acres. The mausoleums are passed down through family members, and multiple family members are buried there. When there are no longer family members, the mausoleums are put up for sale, starting at $50,000.
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The most historical mausoleum in the cemetery belongs to the Duarte family (#21 on the map). You may not recognize the name Duarte, but you WILL recognize the name Evita! Duarte was her maiden name.
Her story in brief (sorry, as brief as I can make it!). Skip the starred section if you're not interested, as it doesn't relate directly to us (you can resume our trip after the starred section LOL).
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Eva was born in 1919 in a small Argentinian town. In 1945 she was married to Juan Domingo Perón, who became president of Argentina. She was extremely charismatic and helped his government to become very popular through her work for the poor, but she was not so well-liked by wealthy Argentinians. She was stirring up the masses!
After the lobotomy, Eva stopped eating and grew weaker. Shortly before her death, the Argentine Congress gave her the title of "Spiritual Leader of the Nation". She was nicknamed "Evita" which means "living one".
On her death bed, she supposedly ordered 5000 automatic pistols and 1500 machine guns to arm workers of the trade unions. She died on July 26, 1952, at the age of 33. For 13 days, millions of people gathered to view her embalmed body. After 8 people were crushed to death and over 2000 people were hospitalized due to injuries, the public viewing was withdrawn.
But the story doesn't end there! Three years after she died, her body disappeared. It was stolen by the new military dictatorship after Juan Peron was deposed. She was still so popular that the leadership made it illegal to possess her picture or even say her name.
Her body went "missing" for the next 16 years. It was eventually located in Milan in 1971.
There were signs of trauma and injury to her body. Juan Peron had the body flown to Spain, where he displayed her on his dining room table and his third wife Isabella tended to her. After Juan Peron (who was once again in office) died in 1974, Isabella returned Eva to Argentina and placed her in the Duarte family tomb. Her coffin lies beneath 2 compartments with trapdoors.
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After our visit to this fascinating cemetery, we called an Uber to go back to our hotel to get our luggage, then make our way to the cruise ship. Our (NON-REFUNDABLE) hotel was conveniently located right by the cruise terminal, BUT on December 17, there was a huge storm in Buenos Aires which damaged the embarkation terminal. So basically, we had to travel 20 minutes south to our hotel to pick up our luggage, THEN 20 minutes north to the meeting location, THEN be shuttled 20 minutes south again to the cruise ship!!! Argh!!! 😕 We looked at it as a way of getting to know the city LOL.
The poor uber driver kept thinking we wanted to go to the airport. When we finally got to the new location, they took our luggage and gave us a bus number. We waited about half an hour for our bus. Then when we got to our terminal, another lineup to check in, immigration, passport control, then another bus to somewhere else, more checking in (we lost track). We arrived at 2:30 and finally walked onto the boat at 4 pm. At which point we promptly found the buffet!
After the buffet we toured the ship from top to bottom. We found a small pickleball court and played an impromptu game with Mark and Amy (they were much better than us).
At dinner we got serviced to the hilt. We were going to go back to the room to unpack, but our steward was making up our room, so we thought we would check out the show that we were going to skip. We ended up staying for the whole show because it was an Argentinian instrumentalist who was very good.
Unpacking after the show. There are only 5 small drawers in the room??? We were pretty much finished when Anton discovered a huge space right above the bed LOL.
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