Category Archives: Spanish

Another grand cafe, then one of the best tango nights of my life!

Every day is a school day in Argentina. Today I learned: trust Terry on milongas, but never on cafes! He’d seen our visit to Cafe Tortini, which was beautiful but had mediocre food at tourist prices, and told us we should instead have gone to Cafe de Los Angelitos. So we did, with him. It was beautiful, but had rubbish food at tourist prices.

Service was so slow it took 45 minutes to get our glasses of water. We wanted coffee, but didn’t dare order it – we’d have been there for another hour or more. When presenting the bill, the waiter pointedly told us that the total didn’t include service. I pointedly left the appropriate tip for the standard of service …

Continue reading Another grand cafe, then one of the best tango nights of my life!

Accidentally achieving one of my goals by going to the wrong milonga

I slept for about nine hours, though still felt that was about ten hours short of the required quota. However, we did nothing in the morning, so a bit of lazing was the perfect start to the day.

This was helped considerably by my foresight. I’d decided that a one-month stay was more like short-term living than long-term holidaying, so had brought with me some key home comforts – including my favourite tea, infusers, and pint mug …

Continue reading Accidentally achieving one of my goals by going to the wrong milonga

Milonga 1: Sans Souci at La Nacional, with Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos Aires

I’m again numbering the milongas to help me keep track of them, but don’t expect anything like my previous crazy pace! One reason for staying here a month is to take things easy – an absolute maximum of one milonga per day. Yes, really. Honestly. You’ll see.

Knowing my love of live orchestras, Terry had pointed me to Sans Souci. We’d first been treated to a live performance of Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos Aires at La Viruta on our previous visit, and I loved them! Terry kindly made reservations for us, as well as him and Rita …

Continue reading Milonga 1: Sans Souci at La Nacional, with Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos Aires

Being astonished at the effectiveness of my pidgin Spanish

I recently wrote on my (very occasional) general blog about my past experiences with trying to learn languages.

I’m generally a fast learner, and have picked up a fair number of skills in my life, but language learning has been one area where I appear to have pretty much zero ability to learn […] A concerted multi-year attempt at German, with very limited results, persuaded me that languages really weren’t my thing …

Continue reading Being astonished at the effectiveness of my pidgin Spanish