“Great Taste” to feature Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA

Deerfield Beach, FL (PRWEB) September 25, 2004

Platinum Television Group is pleased to announce the selection of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and its tourism board, Sub Secretaria de Turismo Gobierno de Buenos Aires, for its innovative, educational television series, Great Taste. The city will be featured as a “Unique Travel Destination.”

This complex, energetic, and seductive port city, which stretches south-to-north along the Rio de la Plata, has been the gateway to Argentina for centuries. Portenos, as the multinational people of Buenos Aires are known, possess an elaborate and rich cultural identity. Portenos are intensely involved in the life and culture of their city, and they value their European heritage highly–Italian and Spanish are primary influences, and the lifestyle and architecture reflect the mixed heritage.

Buenos Aires’ physical structure is a mosaic as varied and diverse as its culture. The exciting city is composed of many small places, intimate details, and tiny events and interactions, each with a slightly different shade, shape, and character. Glass-sheathed skyscrapers cast their slender shadows on 19th century Victorian houses; tango bars hazed with the piquant tang of cigar smoke face dusty, treasure-filled antique shops across the way. The city’s neighborhoods are small and highly individualized, each with its own characteristic colors and forms. For example, in the San Telmo district, the city’s multinational heritage is varied and cosmopolitan architecture reflects this: Spanish Colonial design couples with Italian detailing and graceful French Classicism. La Boca’s pressed tin houses are painted a rainbow of colors, and muralists have turned the district’s side streets into avenues of color.

For all its diversity, the elusive spirit of Argentina is present everywhere in Buenos Aires. The national dance, the tango, is perhaps the best expression of that spirit–practiced in dance halls, parks, open plazas, and ballrooms, it is a dance of intimate separation and common rhythm, combining both an elegant reserve and an exuberant passion. Nightlife is popular here, with the city first awakening with dinner at 9 p.m., followed by evenings of dancing, nightclubbing, and socializing, sometimes till dawn.

A great excursion from the city is a visit to one of the many Estancias (Argentine ranches). Here one can get a sense of the traditional life of the gauchos. Many Estancias offer accommodations, traditional food, live folk music and dancing, and exhibitions of gaucho horseback skills.

When it comes to shopping, from its grand boulevards to the winding streets of Arroyo, the city offers an endless variety of boutiques, galleries, and antique shops as well as shopping centers. The Sunday Flea Market in San Telmo provides excellent, leisurely people-watching and shopping, and there is a very good Sunday Antiques Fair at the Plaza Dorrego.

At the Museo Historico Nacional, Argentina’s turbulent history is reviewed, from the 16th century to the present. The Iglesia Rusa Ortodoxa, with its soaring and majestic onion domes, is one of the city’s many fine architectural ornaments. Curiously enough, it is still owned by Russia.

For a magnificent vacation that encompasses very different experiences, visit Buenos Aires. For more information, see http://www.bue.gov.ar.

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“Great Taste” to feature Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA