Our Tigre Trip

After spending a couple weeks around Buenos Aires, we decided to get out of the city and explore. First trip... Tigre. We were told of this cute town about an hour north of BA that we needed to check out. It is right on a delta and has a great outdoor shoping market, good restaurants and close enough to make a day trip out of it. After one of my Spanish classes we met up and took off. The train to get there was about an hour and went through all the suburbs of Buenos Aires, including past where the president lives. We ran into a guy on the train whom we went out with on the first night in town and he reiterated how nice Tigre was and also told us of a new art museum to check out. We were pumped. Shopping, good food and a great museum? Perfect day!

We arrived and headed straight to the Puerto de Frutos. Not just a fruit port, it has hundreds of stalls of things to buy. Supposedly, that is. When we arrived there was nothing. It was like a ghost town. A few people had their stalls open but most of it seemed tacky or useless junk. Confused, we asked around and found out that the market is really only hopping on the weekends. We went on a Tuesday.

Disappointed, we decided to head to the art museum. The town was small but was on a number of rivers. It also didn´t have many bridges so we did a lot of walking. We came across a tourist information booth and asked what the best way to get to the art museum was. She told us we could take a collectivo (bus) but that the museum was closed on Tuesdays. Good to know. She did say there was a Naval museum up the river and there were plenty of restaurants nearby. We decided that was our best bet and started walking. The town really was beautiful. We followed the river bank which was lined with trees and lovely old houses. Being so close to Buenos Aires it is a major destination in the summer for people getting out of the heat and it also is a huge spot for rowing. About 10 huge mansions owned by different rowing clubs lined the banks.


We arrived at the Naval Museum and was told that it was closed! Just kidding, it was open but just for an hour, and we were told it wasn´t enough time to see everything. We smiled and said that it was fine, we´d be ok. And we were. We spent about 45 minutes looking at old ships, models of old ships, flags, weapons and everything involving the Argentine Armada. I thought the most interesting was the collection of artifacts from the exploration to Antartica in the early 1900s. I couldn´t imagine going 100 years ago without today´s tecnology and fancy warm clothes North Face makes!

After the museum we had a great din at a restaurant on the river. We were the only ones there! (quite common for us) but it was early after all, Argentines eat late, like 10pm; we sat down at 530p. After yummy fish and delicious wine we headed back to the train station. We wanted to make it back in time for our yoga class. We did, but were so full (and a bit tipsy) this class was not our best one.