Five Days in Buenos Aires.
And the Best New Year's Eve of Our Lives.

Picture this: it's 9 p.m. on December 31st in Buenos Aires, you're walking out of your hotel dressed to the nines with two bottles of champagne in a backpack, and the streets are completely, suspiciously, eerily empty. Are you panicking? A little. Are you committing? Absolutely.

This is the story of how a "let's just walk down to the pier and see what happens" plan turned into one of the best New Year's Eves of our lives — with a side of Argentine asado, a tango show that wasn't quite what I expected, and a January 1st tour that taught us all a very important lesson about booking excursions on national holidays.

What's coming: our 4/5 star Buenos Aires adventure — and why I'll never complain about Edmonton winters in quite the same way again.

A Group, a Hotel, and a Wall of Heat

Our crew was a small army: me and Irena, our 18- and 16-year-old kids, our friend Sylvia and her 18-year-old twins, and our friend Meagan with her 17-year-old, her 16-year-old rugby player, and her 10-year-old. Three families, all on the same floor of the Almarena Madero Urbano (Affiliated by Meliá) — which turned out to be a great call. The rooms were big, clean, the breakfast was a real breakfast (not the sad continental kind), and the floor-to-ceiling window overlooked the pool deck below.

The first night was our welcome to Buenos Aires: a sweltering hotel room and a remote control that we couldn't figure out for love or money.

Outside the hotel was a different story. Buenos Aires in late December was sitting in the high 30s Celsius. Now — I want to be clear — I left Edmonton in a deep freeze where it drops to -20 at night, so I have absolutely no right to complain about heat. But I'm going to anyway. It was hot. The kind of hot where you walk three blocks and start questioning every life decision.

Which brings us to the pool.

The Pool, the Kids, and Monkey in the Middle

Anyone who knows me knows I love a scalding hot tub. The hotter, the better. Cold pools and I are not friends. So for the first two days I watched everyone else cool off in the pool below our window while I sweated through my shirts like a champ.

Day three I caved. I got in. I yelled at some kids who splashed me (sorry, kids). And then we proceeded to play roughly four hours of monkey-in-the-middle and chicken fights — two-on-two on shoulders — until the adults were more exhausted than the teenagers. It turned out the pool was the great equalizer. After that, the evening pool ritual became the best part of the day.

The Tango Show I Was Looking Forward To For Years

Tango is my music. The slow burn, the drama, the dance — I'd been waiting for this. Our first night in Buenos Aires we Ubered out to a famous tango dinner show. The neighborhood was a little sketchy, the venue was lit up in big neon, and inside it was three stories of tables wrapped around a central stage, dimly lit, very theatrical. So far so good.

And then the show started.

There were aerialists flying through the air. There were opera singers. There were full bands. There was a lot going on. And somewhere in there, yes, there was tango — but not the slow, sensual, two-people-and-a-spotlight tango I'd been daydreaming about for years. It was more of a Las Vegas variety show with tango as one ingredient in a bigger cocktail.

The food I could have skipped entirely. If you're a die-hard tango purist like me, find a smaller milonga instead. If you want spectacle, you'll love it.

Hop On, Hop Off (Two Days of It)

Buenos Aires is huge. Like, huge huge. We'd booked a hop-on hop-off bus for two days and I'd recommend the same to anyone — you get the history through the headphones, you see the architecture (which is genuinely beautiful in places, very European), and then you pick the spots that grabbed you and go back on your own. Two days was the right amount. One wouldn't have been enough.

What surprised me about Buenos Aires: it's green. Lots of parks, lots of trees lining the boulevards. It's also dirty and chaotic in the way every great big city is dirty and chaotic. Both things are true at once.

Pizzeria Guerrin (Or, The Best Surprise of the Trip)

I'll be honest — the food in Argentina wasn't what I'd built it up to be in my head. I expected to be blown away at every meal and mostly I wasn't. With one shining exception:

Pizzeria Guerrin.

Ten out of ten. No notes. If you go to Buenos Aires and don't eat here, I will personally feel sad on your behalf. Go in hungry.

The New Year's Eve That Almost Wasn't

The Puente de la Mujer — yes, the bridge designed to look like a tango dancer. By midnight on December 31st, this whole area was loud, hot, packed, and full of people in white outfits.

Okay. Here's the main event.

Irena had spent weeks researching Buenos Aires for New Year's, asking everyone in our group what they wanted, getting nothing back, and finally — as the trip planner always has to — making the call herself. The plan: walk down to the pier area, see what we see, find a restaurant if we're hungry, soak up the city. Loose, casual, no $300-a-head reserved table nonsense.

(Spoiler: we all agreed it was the right call. Both during the night and very loudly the morning after.)

So at 9 p.m. on December 31st, we walked out of the hotel looking like a million bucks. Maybe more like 450,000 bucks for me, on account of a footwear situation I'm not going to get into here — that is its own story for another post about lost luggage and credit card insurance. Stay tuned.

We hit the streets with two bottles of champagne in a backpack, because outside celebration was the assumed plan, and I am not the kind of man who shows up to a midnight kiss without bubbles.

The first few blocks were dead. Like, post-apocalypse dead. Eerily quiet. Did we start to wonder if this was a terrible idea? Of course we did. Did anyone whine about it? (At least as I remember it... no.) We kept walking.

Then, slowly, the hum started. A few more people. Then a few more. By the time we approached the bridge designed to look like a tango dancer — yes, that's a real thing, the Puente de la Mujer — it was loud, hot, packed, and full of people in white outfits.

Hungry teenagers and a 10-year-old made food the priority. We found a restaurant whose patio was half-empty but was selling food and drinks to passers-by, and we got in line. It was not fast.

About an hour later, having watched the crowds outside swell from "lots of people" to "every human in Buenos Aires is here right now," we realized we needed somewhere to actually be. And — lucky us — I remembered that half-empty restaurant from earlier.

One sad moment before the climax: security checked us at the door, and the backpack with the two bottles of champagne was very much not allowed in. Fair, honestly — you can't smuggle outside booze into a restaurant. So we did the next best thing: we donated the bottles to a group having a picnic on the grass just outside. They were thrilled. Champagne karma.

The half-empty restaurant did not stay half-empty.

We split into two groups to manage the chaos: a staging crew to claim a spot, and a drinks crew to brave the bar. The lines for the bar were like conga lines — actual snake-like queues winding around tables, stools, and entire human beings. Remember that detail. It comes back.

By the time the second drinks run was in motion, the lines were insane. Fireworks were already going off. We were trying to find the rest of the group in the spot they'd claimed an hour earlier — and they weren't there. They'd moved to the middle of the restaurant because it was better, and they'd been dancing without us for the last hour while we'd been queuing for cocktails. Tactical error on our part.

But we found them. We made it onto the dance floor as a group right around midnight, kissed, hugged, wished each other every good thing for the year ahead, and then we just... kept going.

And here's where the night turned into something none of us expected.

The music was pumping but earlier in the night nobody was dancing. After midnight? Everyone. From everywhere. We met people from all over the world and the common language was the dance floor. Remember those snake-like drink lines I told you about? They became actual conga lines weaving through the whole restaurant. Someone brought out a stick for limbo. How low can you go. The kids broke out trendy TikTok moves. The adults broke out Ukrainian dance moves — and let me tell you, when Ukrainians start dancing at a party, it's a moment. Huge hit with the crowd.

We dragged ourselves out at 4:30 a.m.

Best New Year's Eve of our lives. Hands down.

The January 1st Tour (Or, A Lesson Learned)

So. About that tour.

We drove past the presidential residence (where el presidente lives, very nice), out to a beach, and then to a river area, in a town called Tigre, where people have built houses on the water and the only way to get around is by boat. The morning was overcast — like nature itself was hungover, which felt about right. The sun peeked through a few times during the boat tour and saved the day a little.

The boat tour was the highlight. The rest of the day was a long, hungover lesson in why nothing is open on January 1st in Buenos Aires. None of us would do it again.

The Honest Take

Buenos Aires has a lot going for it and a few things working against it. The architecture is gorgeous in places and the city is surprisingly green. The people were warm. The pizza at Guerrin is a religious experience. The New Year's celebration was unreal. And the Almarena Madero Urbano is a clean, comfortable home base that won't break the bank.

On the flip side: the food (outside of Guerrin) didn't live up to the hype I'd built in my head. The tango show wasn't the show I wanted it to be. The heat was punishing. And January 1st is not a tour day. Lesson permanently learned.

Highlights

• New Year's Eve at the pier — the best one of our lives, full stop.
• Pizzeria Guerrin — 10/10, do not skip.
• Hop-on hop-off, two days — the right way to do a city this big.
• The boat tour past the river houses — the one thing that saved January 1st.
• Pool wrestling matches with the kids — after the splash war ceasefire.
• Strangers becoming friends on a dance floor — the universal language.

Coming up soon: Behind The Shades: How the Airline Lost Our Luggage and What the Credit Card Insurance Actually Did About It. Yes, this is the footwear story I promised you. It's a doozy.