Tuesday February 11th, 2025 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Updated: Feb 18
For our second day in Buenos Aires we had planned to go into the city this morning via the free port and city shuttles – but events conspired against us. We woke a little later than usual given our late return to the ship last night, looking outside I could see dense cloud cover and it was raining quite heavily. In addition we are attending the shore-side gala event this afternoon – this is Cunard organized soiree for those doing the full voyage, either Southampton roundtrip or Ft. Lauderdale roundtrip; this is a group of around 1300 people so not exactly exclusive. We attended a similar event when we did the full world cruise in 2023, it was hosted in Dubai and was absolutely fabulous. The journey into the city would have taken about 45 minute each way and since we needed to be back by 2PM, at the latest, to attend the gala we decided to just have a leisurely morning on board ship. We may have felt differently if we hadn’t had such a full day yesterday, seeing a lot of the city.
Cunard has an unfortunate tradition of not informing passengers about the details of the shore-side gala until the voyage is well underway. Since the arrangements for events like these must be made many months in advance I’m lost to try and understand the communication policy, it makes absolutely no logical sense; we did not find out the details of the event until about a week ago. The gala today is a tango show with dinner, very similar to the one we attended last night – also organized by Cunard. By the time we realized the events were very similar it was too late to cancel the show we attended last night – I’m hoping that there’s no such thing as too much tango!
Arriving in the Queen’s Room a full hour before the scheduled time the place was already packed to the gunwales it was absolute chaos, everyone running around trying to figure out the process for boarding the busses which would take us to the event. We eventually realized that numbered tickets were being issued, and we fought our way to the desk to be duly anointed with our stickers – not very elegant. I should have realized that things were going to be a bit less formal when I found out the dress code did not call for a tux – somehow this took the shine off the evening.
Senor Tango was a converted theater and as we entered there was a full military brass band jammed into the lobby area blasting out marching music, the young cadet soldiers lined up in their red, white and blue Napoleonic era uniforms, with funny looking top hats – it was very impressive with the thump of the drums vibrating in my chest and the trumpets ringing in my ears as we shuffled past. Entering the theater area I could see there was a central circular stage surrounded by mostly large circular tables with three balconies above – there was no direction from the staff about where to sit, it was a free for all. Quickly realizing that it would be impossible to try and get seated with friends, we grabbed a couple of seats on an almost full 8 person table on a slightly raised platform – our seats were not facing the stage area. The seating arrangements were not good with very little distance between seats and the tables crammed very close together – skirmishes were breaking out as people jockeyed for position.
The show started with a speech by the captain and a presentation of a large white tuba as a gift to the military band. The entertainment followed a similar course to the one we saw last night. Starting with folkloric dancers doing various gymnastic moves while playing drums and there were even a couple of live horses; these troupes also do a strange dance involving swinging long ropes around with a small heavy weight on the end which they clang into the stage to add to the drumming. It reminded me of the arm-bruising short lived kids toy I used to have called The Clackers in the 1960’s. The sound of the music and the drumming was so loud it was distorting the speaker system; I found it unbearable and had to remove my hearing devices - I looked around for anything I could use to plug my ears, but nothing was at hand. I noticed a lady at the next table wearing ear defenders like you’d use if you were using power tools, obviously she knew what to expect and came well prepared. In addition I could not turn my seat towards the stage as I was really jammed in, so I had to twist my body to see the show, very painful – in the end I was watching most of the action on a screen where it was being projected.
Food started to roll out during the first part of the show; there was no menu and basically no choices – except for the vegetarian option and also selecting how you wanted your steak cooked, this discussion happening while the music was blaring and so I had severe doubts about my streak arriving well done. An awful salad preceded the steak which in fact did arrive cooked as requested. It was gigantic and served with fries, but not really something we wanted to wolf down at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon; we both ate a bit off the end of our steaks.
The tango dancing was top-notch with both small group arrangements and couples; it’s hard to image how the dancers do this show night after night and make it look so good. The singing was performed by Senor Tango himself, an older gent who apparently owns the show – of course it was all in Spanish. The finale involved a performance of Don’t Cry for me Argentina from the stage show Evita, with a huge Argentinian flag falling from the ceiling right at the end. Again this was performed in Spanish, but very well done – I did find it a bit odd that a song written for an English stage show had been adopted into this tango show in Argentina; I couldn’t imagine the opposite happening.
Much like the previous evening, I was hoping for the show to end about 30 minutes before it did – in fact it was made worse by the volume of the music and terrible seating arrangements. We didn’t wait for the obligatory dessert of flan, or the Cunard bus back to the ship – instead we left early and took an Uber, arriving back at the gin bar by about 7:30PM.
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