Here's more about Argentina.
My favorite grave at Recoleta was this one:
OK, enough of the cemetery. ;)
Argentina is the birthplace of the tango. Here are a few street performers demonstrating some moves on Florida, Buenos Aires's largest pedestrian street. This was a more touristy part of town. Their tango was OK, but it was nothing compared to the people dancing at this place:
Yep, Senor Tango, or Mister Tango in English. This place was built in an old warehouse or boat hanger or something, because it was freaking huge. They didn't allow you to take photos of the show, but they had a lot of tango dancing, twins that sang, some stereotypical Latin American male singer with a suit, a pencil-thin mustache and slicked back hair, and horses on stage. The show was good: at the beginning they had live horses on stage. They ended with a dance routine set to "Roxanne" from Moulin Rogue then a Spanish version of "Don't Cry for Me Argentina."
At one point, after pencil mustache man sang roughly a billion love songs in Spanish, they had a routine with all of the female dancers undulating around in bras, guarder belts, stockings and thongs. It looked nothing like tango dancing. A few of those dancers had to be teenagers, and Lucia leaned over and told me she thought all of the ass on display was unnecessary and unexpected. I agreed, but told her they probably had to do something to wake the audience up after pencil mustache man put everyone to sleep.
While we're on the subject, the typical Argentine man usually walked about with his shirt collar is open to show you his hairy chest, earbuds in so he can ignore you, and stupid little facial hair. Almost every dude I saw was either unshaven or had a carefully maintained soul patch.
Poverty seemed a lot higher in Buenos Aires than any other place I've been. This is a photo of a neighborhood called "Devilla," which really just translates to "type of neighborhood." The houses in Devilla are built from scraps by the people who live in them. They are all mostly unsafe, and the neighborhood itself is so rough that Lucia told me the police won't go in. Our bus drove by the place on our tour, so I took a picture of it. If you want better ideas of what the place is like, think of the neighborhood Edward Norton strolled around in during the first scenes of that new Hulk movie.
While in Buenos Aires, I saw more child beggars than I'd ever seen in my life. The first one came up to me and said something in Spanish. I didn't know what he said but I could tell from the tone of his voice and his posture that he was begging for something. Some were part of an entire family of beggars and a few were performance beggars. One kid, after hearing my table sing me Happy Birthday, grabbed her accordion, came up to the table and started playing Happy Birthday. She kept playing it until we gave her money to go away.
One of the most striking examples of poverty was the people who dug in the trash. All of the businesses put their trash on the curb at around 7 p.m., and there wasn't a single pile of garbage bags that didn't have at least three people digging in it with their bare hands. Once they finished digging in it, they arranged the garbage bags into a rough bed and slept in it. I've seen the occasional guy digging in the trash or sleeping in a doorway, but I'd never seen it to the extent or with such a lack of shame as I saw in Buenos Aires.