Buenos Aires in Conde Nast Traveler

Okay, okay, THIS is the last post. :)

But I had to mention that since my return, every time I turn around, I see an article in a major publication about how Buenos Aires is the place to be. Are they trying to rub it in? Here's another huge feature article about the city's revival from the February 2007 issue of Conde Nast Traveler magazine.

"Buenos Aires in Bloom"
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/detail?articleId=10586

The excerpt that perhaps best sums up the momentum you feel in BA:

The city that used to promote itself as the Paris of South America, with its wide boulevards, café culture, and opera house to rival the Palais Garnier, has at last shed its stubborn European envy and become—first grimly and then exuberantly—a wholly different and distinct place, going from derivative to innovative almost overnight. But it took a tragedy—Argentina's devastating 2001 economic meltdown, one of the biggest financial collapses anywhere, ever—to shake this city of three million (fifteen million if you count the entire metropolitan area) out of its creative deep sleep and into its current fizzy era of entrepreneurship and invention. The Porteños (as Buenos Aires residents call themselves) I met on my most recent trip—leading designers, artists, gallery owners, chefs, and hoteliers—have unleashed an unprecedented amount of energy into their city, making for what must be the most colorful financial recovery in history, not to mention one of the world's most profound, and thrilling, makeovers.

Such energy is, it seems, contagious. For who isn't talking about Buenos Aires these days—its food, its galleries, its bars and boutiques? And there are other reasons too: Despite the city's size (it is divided into forty-eight barrios, and you can spend forty minutes in a cab just getting across town) and distance from the United States (an eleven-hour flight from the East Coast, but with a time difference of only an hour or two), it is both accessible and, still, affordable. There is also the irresistible feeling as you walk through here that you are witnessing that rarest of occasions—the very moment of transition, a city in its adolescence, transforming itself from what it was into something different and new, redrawing its boundaries and rethinking its identity, the public face it presents to the rest of the world.