Day 3: La Boca

Today the teams went out and started accomplishing their tasks from the Buenos Aires city game. My team spent a lot of time in the neighborhood of La Boca which is a colorful market of shops and dining experiences. Art covers the walls and we saw people dancing together in the street to music. We went into a small shop and met a woman working from Venezuela. She spoke great English and was eager to practice speaking it with us. She explained to us the ingredients in the famous tea of Argentina, yerba mate, and gave us all a sample of it. It was quite bitter and tasted a bit like green tea. She explained that many people will add sugar to sweeten it because alone it is too strong of a flavor. They drink this for its caffeine and also is detoxifying and immune building properties. While the majority of our visit was spent talking with her we also walked through the other shops on the street and took lots of pictures. 

Much of the artwork that we saw was either graffiti on the walls or it was hanging in displays like this. It didn't always specify who the artist was and it didn't appear to be on sale either. People just left their art for others to see. We really liked this because in the U.S. we don't often see public art with such a display. It is usually in the form of graffiti which is sometimes wanted there and other times the owner of the building does not want it there. It seemed that here they all embraced the graffiti and the art and wanted to show it off to others. 

We never actually got to see them dance but they were taking pictures with people as they walked by. Sofia (our guide for this trip) warned us before we went to La Boca that everything has a price there. We noticed that around certain things like the big pictures of tango dancers with the faces cut out you'd have to pay to take a picture. We watched someone that didn't speak Spanish take a picture with the dancers and then the man demanded that they pay him 30 pesos. We found it odd that sometimes you would just take a picture and have no idea you were paying for it until a large man comes over and demands money. At that point as a tourist they don't know what to do and they just pay him. We were not sure if the tango dancers were actually going to dance at some point or were only there to take pictures.