Buenos Aires 1

Well here I was, in the capital of tango, Buenos Aires. At the start of the bus journey, the country in the provinces of Corrientes and Entre Ríos was flat. Approaching Baires (a common abridgement), its outskirts could be mistaken for Belgium. And the city itself was the most European in South America, since porteños strove to reproduce European architecture and culture in this southern land. At right is the Teatro Colón.

Casa Rosada (Pink House), the office of the president

I had breakfast in the gigantic bus terminal since I had to wait until 0900 for Amex near Plaza San Martín to open. Clinton was in town; policemen were guarding the US flag, were they worried about anti-US sentiment? Apparently he wasn't liked in Brazil. But I got my traveller's checks cashed without drama and headed for the Hotel Americano (pure coincidence), which wasn't flash but affordable and reasonable.

After settling down, I went to a nearby store of the Supermercado Coto chain for lunch. Besides selling groceries Cotos also have cafeterias. I had a milanesa, which is widespread in Argentina due to Italian immigration. It was tender enough to cut with the plastic knife and quite cheap, but the beverage was expensive. I also made a note to myself to pick an off-peak hour next time; it was full of office workers over lunchtime.

Baires is a busy city. Drivers honked without restraint so streets were a cacophony of horns. Drivers and pedestrians disrespected each other. I could see that I would have to be careful crossing roads. At right is the Obelisk, which is at the intersection of Av. 9 de julio and Av. Corrientes. The former is impressive because it is super-wide; it has 7 lanes in each direction, and is flanked by streets of two lanes each. It's the width of a city block.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo convened every Thursday afternoon in the plaza which is near the Casa Rosada. Since 1977 these mothers have been seeking their children who were disappeared during the Argentine Dirty War. Some of them wore photographs. They were already old at the time of my visit, and I'm sure that time has carried off a number of them since. However their tenacity in calling to account the perpetrators of this shameful period of Argentine history is impressive.

Their emblem is a white shawl, painted on the ground. You can see from the banner in the background that there were also protests over the external debt burden of Argentina. Two years after my visit, in 1999, the catastrophe arrived and Argentina had to default on its foreign debt.

I didn't realise it at the time, but my concerns about who was paying for the beautiful goods in the Galerías Pacífico were prescient and well-founded. At that time, the peso was pegged at parity with the US dollar and one effect was to allow Argentinians to spend beyond their means (sound familiar today, in the 2012 Euro crisis?) I felt like a bumpkin wandering amongst the well-dressed porteños in the long shopping street of Calle Florida.

The nearby Av. Corrientes is the entertainment district and there was a long queue outside one production. There were many bookshops, both new and used, music stores, cafes and eateries. I was experiencing sensory overload after having been outside metropolitan areas for most of the last week. I could see that I would have no problems amusing myself in Baires.