An Introduction to Dancing Tango in Buenos Aires

Dancing Tango in the Confiteria Ideal, Buenos Aires [Photo credit: Gerrysan]

Note from Alan – We are lucky enough to welcome a seasoned Buenos Aires tango and milonga expert to the Buenos Aires Argentina Guide, in the form of Cherie Magnus, from the Tango Cherie blog (see the end of this post for more info on Cherie). Her first offering is an excellent guide to the types of tango salon in Buenos Aires, for those interested in the real world of social tango dancing in the city. So, over to you Cherie…

If you want to dance tango in Buenos Aires, where do you go?

Actually it depends on many things: your age, what style you dance, what day or night of the week you want to go out, if you go with or without a partner, and so on…

Dancing social tango in Buenos Aires has nothing to do with the Tango Show Dancing on the streets of San Telmo, La Boca, calle Florida, or Recoleta, or the many Tango Cena-Shows with an orchestra, stage dancers and dinner. The first thing to know about tango is that what you’ll see in those places is a different dance – Tango for Export. And that is another post entirely!

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s snow joke…

Yes, another play on words. Deal with it (for those unaware, it just snowed in the city of Buenos Aires for the first time in 89 years).

What is the carnival of cities?

First up, blog carnivals are where someone finds a load of blog posts on a specific topic, and then puts all those posts together in one roundup blog post called a “carnival”. I guess, back in the day when I did the weekly Buenos Aires blog roundups, I was really posting up carnivals. To be honest, it felt more like a circus.

The carnival of cities does exactly what it says on the tin. It includes blog posts submitted from cities around the world, about any aspect of each city – local news, opinions, travel advice, general musings, reports of public lynchings, philosophical treatises on city trash disposal policy, organization of hobo-baiting activities, and the like. Well, maybe some of those are made up. But not all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Firstly, sincere apologies for the rubbish play on words in the title, on the almost certainly terrible (haven’t read it) but fairly famous novel by Miranda France: Bad Times in Buenos Aires.

So, moving swiftly on, it is thanks to Arjewtino (top blog, by the way) that I found a fun little tool that gives a film rating for your blog, depending on the number and variation of ‘bad’ words found on it. Although, as you’ll soon see, it does throw up some pretty off-the-mark results.

Buenos Aires Argentina Guide: Pure as Snow

Along with many other respectable colleagues in the Buenos Aires and Argentina travel-related blogosphere, such as Argentina’s Travel Guide, Goodairs, and Asado Argentina, I can happily say that I am pure as snow. We’re all goody-two-shoes Rated G blogs:

In fact, the tool even says that no bad words at all were found on my site. It’s amazing how different people are in blogging compared to real life…

Anyway, surely there must be some bad boys (and girls) out there in the Buenos Aires blogging world, and my job is to first track ‘em down, run them through the rating tool, and then name and shame ‘em. So, read on for a list of some extremely naughty Buenos Aires bloggers…

[Clearly I'm doing this for the good of all you parents out there worried about what your young children are reading on the internet ]

Read the rest of this entry »

Guatemala 5415 (& Av. Juan B Justo), Palermo Hollywood

Out of the very few strict life rules that I subscribe to, the most important happens to be: “when in Buenos Aires, if a man gives you some delicious cookies for free, you must write about them on your blog”. My dear old grandmother used to say this when I was a child sat on her knee back in the mid-1980s. A magnificent woman, and clearly a technological visionary to boot. However, hard as she tried, she was unable to knock out of me this annoying tendency I have for making ridiculous things up.

And so, this post. Read on for more cookies and assorted photo silliness.

Read the rest of this entry »

Buenos Aires in the blogosphere…

Being the internet geek that I am, I was messing around with Technorati and happened across the following interesting statistic – the number of mentions of the words “Buenos Aires” per day throughout the blogosphere, and how this internet trend has changed over the past year or so.

Around 1000 mentions of Buenos Aires per day is pretty impressive by itself, but when you look at the chart below you can see that the increase on a year ago is simply massive, and even in the last 6 months the number of times Buenos Aires is mentioned in blogs per day has approximately doubled!

Here’s the chart:

[Posts that contain Buenos Aires per day, over the last 360 days]

Read the rest of this entry »