Tango at its best

The previous post in this series is here..

Not able to write the posts, one a day as planned as many other interesting things take precedence.. 

Our original plan was to be on an all evening tour of the city the day we landed. Given the weather, we moved to be a longer morning tour the following day and spent the early evening walking.

We still had the night and given Buenos Aires is 5 hours ahead of California, we were not going to sleep anytime soon. We did drop the little one at the hotel to sleep and myself, San and Jr. went to watch a Tango Show at the Placio Tango (Tango Palace). The original request from me was to take San to a Tango lesson. She passed on it and Jr. refused to be the backup. Guess I should have asked her first and maybe she would have signed up.. moot point now. 

We were going to see an amazing show. Tango is close to my heart. It was a favorite during my dancing days. No other dance brings out emotion the way Tango does.. the Rumba is a close second.  It was a 90 minute show that started late. The theater was amazing. We did not order food ( you can get tickets with drinks only.. if you don't drink alcohol you are paying a lot for lemonade and coke but the tables sell out fast!). It was a packed theater with no empty tables when the show started.

We did get a souvenir picture with some of the artists..

The performances were breathtaking. I was congratulated by both San and Jr. for picking a winner. However, we could not get a return Uber from the place to our hotel close to midnight and there were some unruly street urchins who were chasing us for money. Eventually we hailed a taxi and got to our hotel. The entire area near the theater district is beautiful. 

Enough with the words.. just watch the video!

strongly recommend this show for a late evening entertainment. When in Buenos Aires, don't miss watching an Argentine Tango show.. or if you are lucky, go take a lesson! 

Masks of Costa Rica

Throughout the Costa Rica trip, we kept seeing elaborate and amazing masks..

Finally we got some explanation for these at the airport just before reaching our gate. The masks cost around 100 to 150$ (list price).. we did not try to bargain. 

They were beautiful.. here are a few we saw.. I have touched up the masks and done some HDR work on them in Photoshop.. 

There was a room full of these masks on display and sale at the Super Compro store in the town in Monta Verde... the most beautiful ones had the Quetzal bird on them with snaky colorful tail. We missed seeing this bird on our walks. There are only 500 of them alive and it is critically endangered. It was not our luck. Our guide told us that they a group of five, just the previous week. The birds are considered a god in Costa Rica.. but the habitat loss has endangered the gods.. things we venerate as gods are almost extinct? why is that? 

The Quetzal is expected to be gone in 20 years or less. Maybe in this lifetime (mine or the Quetzal's, whichever comes earlier), will get to see the bird.

Loved this trip!

The wait was over

If there was one place that came to the top of the list on the Europe tour, it was Paris. The kids have been wanting to go see the Eiffel Tower and see Paris with dreamy eyes for at least a few years now. Many of their classmates have visited Paris over the years and they were itching to go.. 

It was surprising that they allowed us to start the Europe tour in a place other than Paris and waited till day 9 of the trip to go see the sights there.

The previous post on this series is here...

Day 9 came and we were on an all day tour of Paris which started with two hours at the Louvre. The tour covered three famous ladies including the Mona Lisa and three hallways and galleries.  The Louvre being huge, this was like a trailer for a movie.. a  two hour trailer! 

The Louvre was amazing. The entryways, the grand staircase below the glass pyramid, the hallways, the water fountains! (yes, they were a contrast to the Palace of Versailles where one could easily faint of dehydration), and the amazing art work were a treat. 

We also were fortunate to have a great tour guide for the day. This lady knew what she was talking about and paced things resaonably well.

We saw the Mona Lisa and took a selfie. There was a huge crowd just to get to take a selfie.. We did the "engaththu kaararum kutcherikku ponar" shot with the Mona Lisa.. I never realized the actual painting size was so small!! Once the guide told me that this was different from previous portrait styles in the day, I humbly bowed and moved on..

I was amazed by some of the art that I did not know about before.. the paintings were amazing as were the sculptures.. 

This one piece with the sunlight on the marble made the whole thing surreal.. how a person could sculpt something with marble like this is beyond me.. truly amazing.

The rest of the art looked vaguely repetitive because we had seen them at the Vatican or Uffizi or Vechchio museums or we had just seen the same stuff at the Versailles palace the previous day.

Here are slide shows from the Louvre Visit..

We were rushed to see as much as possible in two hours and were happy to be rushed. We absorbed what we could, told ourselves that someday we should just do a one week tour of the Louvre and walked out with the rest of the group.

It was time to go on a boat trip on the Sienne to see the Eiffel tower! 

The video that captured the entire days trip!

The video has the entire day 9.. will be breaking the other places we visited as separate posts..

It was a packed day!