The Honeymoon Is Over

Steph and Johnny have just left for the airport, heading back home to enjoy a lifetime of marital bliss.  Before they left, we cranked the touristing up a notch and bought tickets to a tango show.  Bar Sur is situated on a picturesque corner in San Telmo, and the interior reeks of romantic charm.  It is a small room with tiny candlelit tables hemming the performers in on three sides, leaving about 100 square feet of performance space.  We had the option of paying only for the show, or we could also prepay for dinner, which turned out to be a huge mistake.  It's not nearly as cheap to eat in Argentina as it was five or six years ago, but you can still have a nice steak dinner for two with a good bottle of wine for around twenty dollars, if you know where to look.  The dinner at Bar Sur was 120 pesos each (about 30 bucks Canadian), and drinks were four times as expensive as anywhere else I've been.  The first course was the worst empanada in Buenos Aires, a sub-Hot Pocket of slimy beef.  The main course was ravioli that had been overcooked into porridge and salted so much that it was almost crunchy.  For dessert, ice cream that may have once been vanilla, but had long since graduated to triple freezer-burned.  It was breathtaking, really, the kind of meal that takes careful planning to pull off.

The show itself was excellent.  It wasn't exactly authentic, especially the dancing, which had been tarted up for foreign consumption.  Tango originated as a dance between men who were waiting in line at brothels.  Those guys would probably be rolling over in their syphilis riddled graves if they saw the Bar Sur show.  It was a Ringling Brothers version of tango, with enough kicks, spins, and near misses to populate a new Matrix sequel.  Very athletic, and quite entertaining.  The musical performers changed throughout the night, but the first ones were my favourite: sunburned Rick Mercer on The Loudest Accordion Ever, and Alfred Hitchcock's dad on piano.  At the end of the show, the dancers selected random victims from the crowd to go up and dance with them.  I managed to fake an old football injury the first time I was asked, but the second dancer didn't fall for it.  I'm looking at MY FEET!