“It’s Buenos Aires! Let’s just grab booze and hang out in the dog park,” I suggest to my date. Welcome to my initiation as a temporary Porteña: a Buenos Aires local.
The bar we’re at offers tiny cocktails for inflated prices. It seems to be a swanky lounge that got distracted and plastered flat screens on every wall.
“Let’s go to a Chino,” I say.
“Wait, how do you know that?” Little did my Porteño date know, I’d been schooled in Buenos Aires living.
Grocers run by Chinese immigrants are called Chinos. Despite their insensitive name, they have decent liquor selections for the cheapest prices.
We wander through the streets and stop into the first one.
“Beer or wine?” I ask. We grab a litre of Palermo, a cheap, mostly drinkable Argentinian beer.
“Vaso?” Cup? The cashier asks.
“Please,” I say. You only get one cup to share.
Whether it’s beer or wine, you pass around the cup and fill it for friends. It’s part of the social ritual here, similar to drinking Mate.
We stroll through the hip Palermo district, drinking our Palermo (yes, our beer selection was largely due to our location), and stumble upon one of the city’s many parks.
As we sit on a bench and pour another glass my date tenses.
“There are police coming…”
They walk by with a head nod and “Buenas noches” good night in our direction.
I’m not sure if drinking in public is entirely legal, but it doesn’t seem to be completely illegal either. Argentine laws appear a bit blurry, even before a few drinks.
“Salud,” cheers, I say. I love it here.
Buenos Aires is a picnic paradise
I’d been living with a phenomenal local photographer and her spastic, lovably clownish pup.
We’d been laughing together for days over coffees, wine tastings, and finding the best media lunas croissants in town.
She was a friend of a friend and graciously invited me to stay.
She opened with: “Let’s meet at the dog park with wine.”
Meet a fellow artist with dogs, wine, and the element of drinking in public? It was friendship at first text.
As puppies bounced into our laps, we balanced Argentina’s iconic Malbec wine in hand and laughed as the dogs rolled around us.
I’m incredibly lucky. She leads one of the top reviewed Buenos Aires photo tours, and for good reason. She lives and breathes Buenos Aires (which translates to “good air”) daily.
The best storytellers, whatever their medium, become part of the fabric of a place.
Essentially, I was drinking wine with a connoisseur of the Buenos Aire’s world famous art scene.
Where art and life mingle
I tried to soak it all up on each dog walk. She always uncovered new places, including demolished buildings. Some still had faucets and tile walls exposed and clinging to neighbouring spaces.
Buenos Aires is an artists’ paradise.
I quickly devoured whatever food and art she recommends. In Museo de Bellas Artes, you’ll find Rembrants and Picasos. For the macabre, you can explore the immaculate tombs of Recoleta cemetery.
And, if you just wander around Palermo hunting delicious coffee, you can cafe hop while checking out their world famous street art scene.
I even take in an unforgettable photography exhibit at the FoLa Fototeca Latinoamerica. It was for her favourite photographer, an enigma, a lady whose film negatives were only discovered after her death.
I spent five minutes with each photo, each story, of New York street photography in the early 1900s.
Black and white space for black and white photography.
That night she fired up a parilla: a slow cooked traditional BBQ party. Turns out she’s an epic asadora grill queen as well. She is pure Buenos Aires.
Argentina and Canada have a mutual love of BBQ. So, can drop the reciprocity fee at the border and cook up some ribs?
Thus, I’d been dubbed an honorary local in the most Porteño way: by a BBQ queen and artist with bottles of Malbec in a park.
