Pretty Women Shopping Safari Palermo, Rat´s Tail
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
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83
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Trip End
Ongoing
Buenos Aires, Palermo,
Argentina
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
First,we wandered past an urban art graffiti exhibition that i was keen to see and next door to it was a hair salon. I came out with what i like to call a reverse mullet, long at the front (for partying) and short at the back for business. The stylist did a good job and wasnīt shy, rather gutsy actually with the razor scissors, just the way i like it
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. The cut cost about $15 for a wash, cut and blowdry in the most exclusive salon in the city. A good deal. Oh! and i also have a fashionable ratīs tail at the back but i donīt know how long that will stay.We had lunch and lattes doble con leche (double with milk) with the designer sunglass crowd before pounding the pavement and as many stores as we could fit into our day. There were designers selling hats, bags, shoes, accessories and of course loads of awesome wearable threads. We bought one-off pieces for what you would pay for mid-range items in Australia. Now i understand the group of Australian women i encountered at international shipping who were stuffing their purchases into 10kg boxes to send home. The designs are extraordinarily unique. The experience was too. Most of the stores were locked up with sales assistants inside and you had to ring a doorbell to be invited to enter. The area can be a little snooty and the sales assistants lived up to that perception by looking us and our backpacker clothes up and down like we were a couple of Julia Roberts shopping on Rodeo Drive before Richard Gere takes her shopping. We bought beads, a necklace made from buttons, hair clips, a leopard belt and quite alot of clothes, well, more than alot. I even bought two evening gowns for a steal. We looked at many boutiques with awesome decor and bought items from the stores called Vietnam, Alma Fodorra, Cercle France Indumentaria Urbana, Amoro, Pygmees, Mercer, Gomes Con Esa and my favourite Soldba that had a make up bar, drinks bar and DJ instore. The DJ played me some tracks as i tried on evening gowns (a defining BA moment) and I bought some of the electronic Tango music from him that i have come to adore in the last week. We had a ball and did a photo shoot with all our shopping bags, hilarious. We shopped so hard that we nearly missed our bus to Puerto Madryn and had to ride the taxi driver to get us to the bus station on time
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. Later we found out that we could have asked for refund receipts and claimed back the 25% taxes we paid on the items. Still, good shopping and a really fun day out.
I have started a series of photographs of blue and white urban art in the city. Graffiti and stenciling is classed as a proper art form here and is therefore kept tasteful and of high quality, i am not talking about punks tagging trains. The blue and white colours seem to be used throughout BA in the graffiti and are the same hues of the Argentinian flag. Another of my favourite Palermo shots is of the arse end of a fast moving above-ground train at night time. A motorbike rider pulled up just in time and i snapped him in front of the train at a railway crossing as the last of the train passed, lucky shot.
Just as we were checking out of the hostel, i noticed two uni-cycling joker playing cards on top of a deck of cards on the counter so i did my new favourite card trick, picked up the pack, shuffled it and swiped the jesters from the pack. Theyīre hot items in my joker collection. Most people will give you the jokers if asked and i donīt normally steal them but they were ripe for the taking and no-one will miss them.
Buenos Aires, our favourite city so far, even beats Rio. I think we really got a good taste for the people and the culture here over the week trying a bit of everything BA and exploring the most interesting neighbourhoods. A cobblestone alleyway that isnīt on the map, a colourful tango mural that wasnīt there yesterday, a group of transvestites bumming a cigarette from a heavily armed policeman on the corner, litter tumbling in the flower-scented breeze down a poop strewn side street and so on.
