Don't cry for me Argentina

The courtyard

Yesterday we took a tour of the Casa Rosada.  It is a free tour, and we didn't have to wait long, but I gather the queues can be fairly long in the summer.  It says that the tours are in Spanish, English and possibly other languages, but ours was only in Spanish. Thankfully our Spanish lessons have had some effect as we understood most of it.

ceremonial guard

The Casa Rosada is the office of the President and other ministers, so you can only tour it at weekends, but even that is quite surprising really. They only allow you through some parts in single file so that they can keep quite a careful eye on you.

The White Room

The tour focused on the architecture and artwork in the building but it showed us the room where the legislation is passed and you do pass through the President's office.

The President's Room

I wasn't entirely sure that her statuette of the Three Wise Monkeys (the 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' ones) was quite right though.

Of course the most famous part of the Casa Rosada is the balcony from which Juan and Eva Peron used to speak to the crowds gathered in the Plaza de Mayo. The Pope apparently blessed the Argentinians from here during the Falklands war, and the national football team have appeared here too.

View from That Balcony

So we got to go out on to the balcony (which is apparently not a proper balcony because it doesn't stand out further than the front of the building) and pretend to be important too.  And of course some things just have to be done, so I did give a short chorus of 'Don't cry for me Argentina' albeit very, very quietly!

Cathedral

We also had a look around the Cathedral.  From the outside it looks more like a grand old office building than a cathedral; inside it is much better but somehow it still didn't seem very impressive.  It is here that the body of General San Martin is buried and there were guards at the doorway o his tomb.

Jesus

There were quite a few individual shrines, some of which had doll like effigies of Mary, dressed quite oddly in very regal looking clothes.  What I thought was the strangest though, was the full size model of Jesus standing in front of himself, looking like he is ready to have a quick chat with you!