Day 41

Sunday 12^th December 2010

We woke up late after our night out and headed to the English pub, Gibraltar, for full English breakfast and football (Tottenham vs Chelsea). The breakfast wasn’t the best but the result went in our favour with a 1-1 draw, much to the disappointment of the landlord who was a Chelsea fan from County Durham (if you can work that out?!).

San Telmo was heaving with tourists as Sunday is the day of the antique markets at the central square, Plaza Dorrego. This has been taking place here every week since 1970.

We had a wander down the packed street and admired the street performers and artists.

However, the market wasn’t really our scene and it was a bit cold so we decided to head back to the hostel.

It’s been a lazy day really. We had a late lunch / early tea and Franky had a sleep (do I need to report this on a daily basis or is it a given?). I did some blogging and realised quite how much we’ve got done over the past couple of days.

We had been hoping to go to a Tango show tonight but when we discovered they were in excess of £50 each we rethought that plan and opted to check out some local bars we’d discovered on Friday instead.

Buenos Aires struck again though – on Friday the street had been heaving with drinkers sat out on the pavements having a drink. Tonight the same bars were all shut – with the exception of one!!! We really don’t seem to be able to pitch this right no matter how hard we try. Trying to maintain good spirits we found a table outside and ordered a litre of Heineken – it worked! We soon cheered up. The beer was cold, crisp and refreshing. We were still incredulous at the number of people arriving to eat at this place at 12.30am! At 1.00am there was suddenly a loud commotion in the sky as a huge firework display was let off in the centre of town. The bar had a TV on that showed thousands of revellers on the Plaza de Mayo with a stage and light show. We watched the firework display on the TV – it would rival Sydney at New Year. It seemed we’d got it wrong yet again. The reason these bars were closed was because they expected everyone to be in the centre of town. We don’t know exactly what we had missed but we had definitely missed some big event. Although we are still unsure how the hell you are supposed to know what is going on!

Feeling a bit disgruntled for the second night in a row we decided to head back to Gibraltar. We couldn’t pitch BA right at all so we were going to concede defeat and seek solace in the safety of the English pub.

When we arrived at 2am it was heaving and they were still serving food! A jacket potato with chilli and cheese and a cold pint of Quilmes was in order. The pool room was packed with Mike (Franky’s nemesis from Wednesday night) holding his position on the table. It’s winner stays on with a blackboard that you enter your name on for a game. Franky chalked himself up but the pub closed at 4am before we got around to his game so the grudge match was never played.

We headed home to bed still quite bemused that after 5 days here we understand BA less than we did when we arrived. We’re flying down South to El Calafate to check out Patagonia tomorrow so hopefully we’ll fare better down there.