[12th - 18th February 2007]

This roundup post is late, as usual, so no messing around this week folks… let’s just get straight into the Buenos Aires, Argentina linky goodness from last week…

Buenos Aires Argentina Blog Posts of the Week

• Matt Bites, who appears to be thoroughly enjoying a holiday in Buenos Aires and the general Rio de la Plata area, penned a mouthwatering review of the La Cabrera parrilla in Palermo Viejo, one of the best places to eat meat in BA. Although… drinking Torrontes instead of Malbec wine as an accompaniment to steak… don’t they kill for such crimes against Argentine sensibilities round these parts?
• Matt Chesterton, editor of the Time Out guides to Buenos Aires, has been writing a fantastic series about hotels in Buenos Aires… my runaway favorite has to be his post on classic hotels in BA, mainly for his wedding night anecdote from the Hotel Castelar.. seriously, a must read!
• I couldn’t find a third Matthew to make this a ‘Mattrick’ of top blog posts (were there any other Matts writing about BA this week?)… so we’ll have to make do with the closest I could find…a Marc. He recently announced on Asado Argentina that he has launched a new photo blog of southern Argentina. OK, so it’s not Buenos Aires… but from time to time we city dwellers need to be reminded that real life does exist outside of the metropolis, and his first few pictures provide some beautiful examples of that fact

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[29th January - 4th February 2007]

Sorry I’m late with the Buenos Aires blog roundup this week guys… I have been busy as usual, and at the weekend wrote what would have been one of my best blog posts of all time (seriously!), only for my PC to crash just before I clicked publish, losing the whole thing! I was so annoyed that I couldn’t bring myself to try posting something again until now… that will learn me for not updating to the new version of Wordpress (my blogging software), which apparently has an auto-save feature. Silly me.

Anyway, onto the blog roundup, which this week inaugurates a new feature… a section for my most favorite posts of the week!

Buenos Aires Blog Posts of the Week

• I just loved Ken’s description of the dog walkers in Buenos Aires and the accompanying picture, though not quite as much as I love to see the dog walkers with their huge packs of mutts each morning as I walk to catch the bus to work
• I always like a good post about the prevalence of mullets in Buenos Aires. And Isabelle Lagarde’s blog entry in this field certainly doesn’t disappoint
• OK, so Buenos Aires isn’t Paris. But it does have some lovely Parisian-esque domes, which came into Robert’s ‘Line of Sight’ this week. I hope he didn’t get a crick in his neck…

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Humberto 1º 340 (between Defensa & Balcarce), San Telmo

[Open Monday - Saturday, 8:30am to Midday and 4pm to 7pm. Sundays, 1pm to 6pm.]

I like churches.

Born and raised a good Catholic boy, I was.

…but that has nothing to do with why I like churches. I’m an agnostic, and instead like them because God generally gets some of the best architecture around. And in Buenos Aires it’s no different. So, this is the start of an attempted series on churches in BA, which may well be spread out over several years, cunningly hiding it’s series-ness from view.

The San Pedro Gonzalez Telmo church (try saying that after a few pints), is also known as the Nuestra Señora de Belén (Our Lady of Belen) church. A good church can never have too many names in my book.

A Little Church History

Some Jesuits named Blanqui, Bautista, Primoli and Schmidt designed the original and kicked off the building in 1734. That makes it one of the oldest churches in the city. But not the oldest, which I’ll cover at some point soon I guess. The church’s architecture was then added to and restored a fair few times up to the present, which accounts for it’s lovely eclectic style. Apparently it is ‘neo-colonial’. I prefer to call it ‘fancy iced wedding cake’:

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