School again this morning. Learnt a lot around pronunciation and personal information. So much to think about.

After school I rushed home, grabbed some lunch and then met Monique at her apartment – it’s about half an hour walk from mine. We then walked for another 30-40 minutes to La Boca which is one of the areas of BA.

La Boca means ‘the mouth’ and it’s named that way because it’s at the mouth of the river and it was the place where immigrants landed when they first came to Argentina.

It’s a beautiful and colourful place with lots of history – but it’s also a poorer part of the city. It was initially quite a prosperous area but with the financial crash, investors pulled out, and this had a negative effect on the area. But because it is a cheaper area to live a lot of artists and immigrants live here.

In La Boca thete are three main passions – football, tango and politics, in particular huge support for Peron and the reforms he and Evita put into place. The stadium in Boca was built in 1940 and is one of the most famous stadiums in the world.

One artist – Quinquela – painted huge artworks in bright colours and worked with other artists to create mosaics which can be seen all over the area. He also started painting the houses the bright colours.

The street art is also amazing – a lot of it is political or symbolizing things that might need to be changed, such as womens place in society. There was also some footprints on the pavement that showed the basic steps of tango.

It was a really interesting place to visit and the walking tour guide was brilliant and even gave us some recommendations on where to go to see some authentic tango.

Even the local dogs were dressed up:

I was very tired after all that walking so just had a quite night in and sorted out some treks in Patagonia which is where I will be headed next.