In and around Buenos Aires

Surprise, I´m not actually in Buenos Aires anymore. But I was, and it´s a great place.

The city feels completely different from home, right from the start. The streets are either very narrow alleys that look like they are transported from some city in Europe, complete with hanging lights overhead and cobblestone beneath, or they are enormous deserts of roadway that you wouldn´t dare cross without the confidence of other pedestrians. Giant trees line most avenues, and important boulevards intersect each other at grandiose plazas. The buildings are never more than 12 stories high, and everyone has a balcony, which on the muggy, hot days of last week must be a blessing. And the women are spellbinding! It all has the air of a city you´d want to live in, if only I could share through pictures.

I wandered into this random pink building where other tourists were entering, and joined a mandatory tour. Might have understood about 5 words. But it was a cool building, a very grande feel to it. Turned out to be the Casa Rosada, the equivalent of Argentina´s White House.

In the plaza out front there are big hand-painted banners on the light-blue and white colours of Argentina, with big slogans written about the Falkland Islands. During a tour a few days later, our guide told the accompanying Brits ¨we´re all Canadians right now¨ to avoid any trouble. It´s manned everyday by veterans of the war, which was a bad deal for Argentina and resulted in the death of 600 Argentinians. There´s a stand with all the newspaper articles from the crisis on display. It was all quite moving, since the people are still very angry about the event, but to us it´s just a point on a map and a memory from a distant wikipedia article.

We watched the Oscars with Spanish dubbing. Why they dubbed it is beyond me, most movies have subtitles here. And when Hugh Jackman started singing I think the dubbing guys just shook their heads in failure and said ¨to hell with it¨.

We went to this awesome event with the hostel called Bomba del Tiempo, best twenty pesos of the trip so far. Arriving at this sort of open-air warehouse venue, we walked past a messy line of several hundred that encircled the building on three sides. Since we already had tickets we approached the entrance and its fearsome hoard of people. I watched my fellow hostelers slip away as other groups squeezed by with locked arms. But once inside, we watched this awesome, high energy drum show, put on with maybe a dozen amplified bongo drums and a few other percussion. It was incredible. It happens every week and is basically a big pre-drink to the bar/club scene, but what a great pre-drink it was.

After the drum show we met up with the second planned part of the evening, the local pub crawl. Slightly less authentic, there must have been a unwritten requirement that you had to be an English speaker to attend. Basically it was like a pub crawl back home, or in England or Australia I would imagine. It was nice to have a taste of home and not have to try to speak in Spanish. I did of course try my Spanish since alcohol seems to greatly improve it: mi casa es su casa! Turns out the pub crawl is run by some foreigners, they do it 4 times a week as a business. And then you realize that even as a hosteler you´re part of the giant wheels of tourism.

I went to lunch with a nice American couple I met on the plane, they are vacationing here for a month and also getting their dental-work done. Sounds like a plan. They weren´t optimistic about the political state of the country, which boasts over 20 years of tenuous democracy after some real bad times in the 70s. All public statues stand behind sharp fences to prevent political graffitti, and walking by it makes you wonder if Argentina can survive the coming crisis...

To soak up all the beer with a bit of culture (hint: beer here is usually sold in litre bottles) I checked out the Ricoleta Cemetary and the Museum of Fine Arts. Damn I wish I had my camera, the cemetary was this maze-like village of marble and granite sanctuaries, no grass in sight. I made the requisite stop to see Eva Perron, but I was also struck by the tombs of many other famous Argentinians, especially some of the generals who really screwed up the nation. I thought about filming a US Marshals-style showdown in the cemetary....maybe next time.

And in keeping with using travel as a means of accumulating exotic wall ornamentation for my future home, I made note of Xul Solar, a Buenos Aires artist of the 20th Century:

Generalizations: they say that people from Buenos Aires love their ice cream. Absolutely true. They sell it everywhere, at dedicated shops, corner stores, ice cream stands. I was walking home during rush hour and saw this man in a suit absolutely loving this ice cream cone. Another generalization: the stupid nightlife. Instead of going to the bar like civilized people from 10 till 2 or something, they sleep and rest until 1 am and then go out to the bar till 5. Oh that makes sense. We´ll take a cab home at 4am and there are still people on restaurant patios. Do they party harder? Not really, they´re out for the same amount of time. But they are a very tired bunch of people. What a bunch of idiots.

Last generalization is the ridiculous hair. I asked to look more Argentinian when I got my hair cut, and my only observation is that they left it pretty long in the back...