23 posts tagged “buenos aires”

so our days in argentina are coming to an end. i can't believe these months have gone by so quickly! we fly back to montreal tomorrow, back to winter, back to real life. we may come back. but probably not (though ask me in eight weeks when there is a foot of snow and the wind chill is minus 50). things i'll miss about this city:

• racing around the streets at night in a taxi.
• cheap beef!
• tango music floating out of the most random locations.
• dorrego square on sundays.
• crazy florida street on a weekday afternoon.
• beautiful doorways and arches on every street.
• dulce de leche on just about anything one can eat.
• good cheap wine.
• small cafes and agua con gas with coffee served on little trays.
• fantastic and hip cool restaurants with great music and excellent food.

but: we miss too many things about home, not the least of which is our friends. but it's too loud here. it's too hard to cook with much variety (we won't eat pasta for a month probably once we're back home) and we eat stir fry twice a week just so that our overly-carnivored diet can include some vegetables. otherwise it'd be beef and tomato sauce for every meal!

it's too hard to get books here and the mail service is corrupt and dishonest unreliable. masa's brother spent $150 sending some japanese books from tokyo here and they never made it, just vanished somewhere. others, too, have told us not to have anything mailed (or even fed exed!) here because things have a way of never making it...(what a bunch of postal workers in argentina need with 15 detective novels in japanese is beyond me). and books in the shops are crap for the most part, forget about getting anything specific unless you're prepared to wait 4 months and pay through the nose (a USED paperback marquez novel at walrus books: $25US! same book i can buy at the word in montreal for $4.)

nightlife here is hard to manage: no one goes out until 1 or 2 at the earliest. that's fine now and then, but it's this way every night! i do like the eating dinner at 10 or 11 bit and we often stay up until 3 or 4 normally. but i prefer going out at 9, having dinner a few drinks and being at home by midnight or 1. staying out until 6 or 7 is something i did enough of when i was 25. too old for that shit now (though it's not an age thing here, everyone in this country seems to live like a rock star -- only without the money).

one thing i find amazing about this country (this spanish guy we met the other night was complaining about this, actually, but he was a real ass) is the intellectual tradition that is such a part of daily life. people KNOW their writers here, parks are named after poets (the alfonsina storni children's park in colonia), literature sells, people on the buses read poetry. i love that. in north america if you even mention the word poetry people's eyes glaze over "ooohhhh poetry is, like, so hard and stuff! is that paris hilton on the cover of 'us weekly'?" it's been written about before, but the "dumbing down" of society is truly appalling and i am consistently shocked at how little people (in north america) know of anything outside their little urban worlds. i'll be in a room and people can talk for 45 minutes about their new iPhone or some stupid piece of technology (or, as i intimated before, celebrity gossip) but mention a writer or a political movement and everyone shuts down like you're speaking some archaic form of swahili. (i'm speaking generally, of course.)

but intellectual tradition is alive and well in this country. culture and creativity are in every part of this city, in the local designers' boutiques on cordoba, in the tango dancers on defensa on the weekends, in the young woman reading lorca on subte line B, in the samba singer on estados unidos on saturdays, in the necklace-makers selling their wares from blankets along calle florida...

we sure are gonna miss this place! some last minute pics:

  

 

 

 

on wednesday, a beautiful clear early summer day. especially lovely since it's now thursday and it's been pouring down rain all day. not many of these walk and shoot days left....(one day i will write a post about buenos aires: the ultimate walking city):

1) parque lezama and a monument to one of those spanish conquistadors. oh, yeah, and some native woman suffering behind him. i don't really get the "focus" of this monument: was the statue added back in the day when people still thought the europeans brought civilization here, then the relief statue added later (80s?) when people realized the spaniards weren't such nice guys...? both add dimension to the other, yet also detract from one another. an odd combination of monument and political statement...

2) statue of mother theresa. at least i assume it's mother theresa, i couldn't find a plaque or anything anywhere. looks like her, i guess...not a very good statue, actually. kind of creepy. in parque lezama...

3) a russian orthodox church. lovely painted blue onion domes. didn't go inside...

4) cool old skyscraper from c1940(?). looks like the building where clark kent and louis lane worked....

5) a dragonfly!

rupe left today. sad, and we all got a bit teary as we put him in a taxi to the airport. it sucks that he lives so far away from us and it'll be a year until we can see him again; this, after spending nearly every day and evening with him for a month!

great to have such a good friend in my life. and he and masa get along so well...

wow, i've known rupert going on 20 years! damn, that is a long time...

next year we're thinking about france or possibly australia, but we'll see....

today: la boca. not much there: very touristy and a cop stopped us once we wandered away from the tourist area and said "no no go this way. is veeeeerrrry dangeroos!" so we turned around and walked the other day. mmmm. this kind of irks me.

i suppose he knows what he's talking about and, no doubt, it's not the best part of town. still. seemed a bit...i don't know...paranoid. but glad he was there to warn us, i guess.

anyway, we made it home in one piece...just in time to see rupert off.

wow, it's going to be quiet for the next two weeks!

 

 

ah. so rupe goes back home tomorrow. hard to believe that a month has passed so quickly and we've fallen into a rhythm so that it feels like we've all lived here forever.

but part of the charm of a place is the knowledge that life here is temporary.

so today we spent the last full day in a relatively normal way (though i didn't WORK today which was not normal lately):

sipping, shopping, napping, eating, walking, gawking, touristing, taxi-ing.

now it's 12.11am and i've got my usual monday late night shift. quiet here now. masa upstairs sleeping; rupe at his place probably still eating....hahahaha

damn, it's going to be strange the next two weeks without him living just two blocks away!

buenos aires so far: havanna (dulce de leche alfajores), tandoor (tikka masala mmmm), photographing everything and sundry, bolivar y brasil, el hipopatamo, pride cafe, flux, viamonte, green bamboo, lugar b&b, dorrego square, and so much more....

m & i have two more weeks here...don't wanna leave.

pics from today....

 

 

i love how dinner can be simply an evening's entertainment in and of itself here. in the US (and in canada), dinner is part of the evening, never THE evening. but here, dinner is all there needs to be.

and that is a fantastic thing!

no one rushing you! no one pressuring you to eat up and get out. we drank our bottle of wine with ease, didn't even order our appetizers until 30 minutes after sitting. our meals arrived 90 minutes later. we sat for another hour after that, then ordered dessert and coffees. no one standing around looking shifty, no one pressuring us to eat up and get out, no one even coming by: we were just left to do our own thing and get involved in the things that dinner should be about: conversation, laughing, the food, the past, the future. we arrived at 8pm, we left at midnight: FOUR hours of DINNER. and, the thing is: most of the people around us arrived just after we did and were still there when we left.

i love this country! 

i don't love how it's nearly 1am and kids are playing soccer in the middle of our street, just steps from our front window, screaming, hollering like they can sleep until 3pm tomorrow. yeah, it's friday night (or, to be precise, saturday morning), but it's almost ONE O'CLOCK!! go someplace else, you little assholes! shouting at them at the front door does no good ("que? que pasa, chico?").

even after a good dinner (despite what oscar wilde believes), i can't forgive hooligans annoying the entire neighborhood. how do you say "go to hell" in spanish?

 

we are running out of time here! only three more weeks and we head back to montreal...

part of me wants to stay. i LOVE this city. it has things i don't like (just as everywhere does), but it's exciting, fun, beautiful. socially it seems easy. i love the intellectual tradition that seems a part of so much of this and its history and people (though it's ALL in spanish!). and it's pretty cheap, too. the other night we went to this tango dance class at "la catedral" (pueyrredon and medrano) that was cool. imagine if david lynch owned a restaurant that held tango classes: funky paintings on the walls, old avertising posters in aluminum with rusty corners, dark lighting that created huge looming shadows all the walls, mismatched furniture that looked like it had come from the city dump, old dingy chandeliers, and a huge wire-mesh heart (a human heart) covered in red fabric that hung suspended above the bar with valves and veins to boot. the best part was the old 30s tango music and all these argentine couples learning the steps patiently. as we stood there against the wall gawking: man, i want to live here!

but. montreal is our home. at least for now. not sure how long we will stick around there, one project i'm going to be working on the spring may require some china-time in our log book. masa's dream is to go back to thailand, though i'm more ambivalent about this, at least right now.

next week are flying up to iguazu falls, something both masa and rupe are looking forward to. it'll be good to get out of the city for a few days anyway.

reading edwin williamson's borges: a life, a great thing to be reading in the middle of buenos aires: the life of the writer is certainly interesting but it's the history of this city that has me enthralled. the story of buenos aires is one rife with booms and busts and one need only walk around any neighborhood to see evidence of that: borges himself grew up in palermo and belgrano, considered very rough and dirty neighborhoods back in his day. now those areas are upper middle class and this area, once teeming with the wealthy, is more of the "rough and tumble" variety...(though making a comeback. slowly).

hello, weekend...

i used to have a "thing" about cemeteries. in a good way. (or, in a bad way, depending on how you look at it.) i used to sit in cemeteries and think about dying. about how transitory life was. about the cycle of life & death.

i was an idiot.

in paris i wrote poetry while sitting at the cemetery in montparnasse. i had the spot in my little guidebook marked with a red circle and felt that i had really accomplished something when i asked a total stranger to snap a photo of me with a sombre look on my face standing next to the headstones of simone de beauvoir and jean paul sartre. how embarrassing!

ah, the things we do when we're young and think we're trying to find ourselves.

but something happened to me--maybe my 30s, maybe just being that much closer to death. regardless, the fact is that now i think cemeteries are comical,  just plain old funny.

i mean, there is something more than faintly ridiculous about stone angels looking heavenward, stained glass with images of saints, a family name etched in marble, squeaky iron-wrought swinging gates, thousands of dollars wasted on all this for the benefit of a rotting corpse. and if you consider the more famous cemeteries in the world (does it strike no one else as bizarre that cemeteries can be tourist traps?), i just feel this archaic classist subterfuge which justifies (or justified) a reason for their entire existence: as if even in death these people have to feel superior to all the faceless nobodies who didn't have the money or connections to finagle a spot inside. 

aren't cemeteries the epitome of bourgeois?

i don't want to sound like an elitist asshole, but, man, when cemeteries start pushing people (i.e., tourists) right to the famous "deadies," you know they've lost their respectability. all paths at the recoleta cemetery seemed to lead to the hallowed spot where eva peron's bones lay around. how this woman (married to a fascist dictator) ever became anybody, and why anybody still cares is something which just escapes my comprehension. and i'm sure that the "don't cry for me" business is something the world could certainly have done without (andrew lloyd webber should get some cut of the profits from all the tourists clattering through the cemetery in recoleta. ok, well, they don't actually charge anything, but i'm sure some enterprising young person could make a killing selling madonna as evita t-shirts outside the gates). i don't give a rat's ass about eva peron, but we had to see the spectacle, it just simply had to be done (kind of like not going to jim morrison's grave at père-lachaise in paris -- that show is far more entertaining than he ever was).

true, other famous argentines are buried there, people who are far more deserving of accolades (or t-shirts). but even so, it just feels like a who's who of dead upper-class argentines: i envisioned spectre-filled cocktail parties since i imagine most of these people knew (and/or were sleeping with) each other. and, again: it all just seemed ridiculous to me. and i wonder if our view of death has simply changed: do people still build big marble mausoleums in cemeteries? or is all this "memorializing" of the dead (at least in this way) kind of passé?

naaaah, not for me. when i'm gone, just toss my ashes in the back of a closet somewhere until the next vacation to the coast when they can be dumped UNceremoniously into the ocean. hell, keep 'em in a folgers can for all i care. ah, i know: find a beautiful old tree, dig a hole at its base and pour my ashes in there. no stone monuments, please, no plots on a hill overlooking town, no "quaint views" or plots next to somebody famous (who needs that kind of pressure, even dead).  

pics from today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

first stopped off and snapped some photos of this beautiful little courtyard over near dorrego square.

masa hammed it up for the camera:

while rupe pretended to be some kind of fashion model:

then we walked over to this cute little cafe called "pride cafe" where we befriended the waiter, hernan.

we had a great lunch (sourdough bread, sliced apples, walnuts, celery, mayonnaise and chicken breast YUMMMMMMMM): it was such a nice day out we sat outside until it got a bit too blustery...

then we hopped the bus just to see where we would end up:

then we discovered this amazing building near the university of buenos aires faculty of medicine, so we jumped off the bus and got some photos of it:

 

 

then we did some shopping, ate a sundae (dulce de leche) and hopped in a taxi to come back home:

came home, cooked spaghetti, took a nap, then went out and met all these gay soccer players, here in buenos aires for the gay world cup of football.

it was FUN. chatting, a few drinks, meeting new people. great night!

masa and i got home at 3 and rupe stayed out even later! hahahahaha.

so colorful! and so much better than that crappy little camera we've been carrying around....

pic by rupe.

• today felt like spring. this is only noteworthy since i still feel like it's fall...trees are budding, flowers blossoming, birds twirping, that kind of spring mud which suddenly appears in grassy knolls. yep, spring.
• this morning i dreamt i was in a plane, my own plane, i think, as it made its way above an empty, expansive stretch of land below, colored a darkish blue color. the thought occurred to me that if we crashed, they would never ever find our remains. then this blonde lady in the seat next to me began to cry (she had this tiny white handkerchief embroidered with diamonds) because she said she could see steve fosset waving a flag below and she knew he'd never be found. then i was woken up by a pounding on the front door. it turned out to be the maid. grrrrrr.
• some cities are night cities and some cities are day cities: what this means to me is that some cities are just better, more interesting at night when the mass of people are all closed up, sleeping or staring at the tv and streets are empty and colored only by the streetlights. buenos aires is a night city. bangkok is, too. so is shanghai. but montreal isn't. neither is paris or london. not that these cities don't have great things about them at night, but they are just as interesting in the daytime, or more so...hong kong? night city. los angeles? day city. just my opinion, of course...
•  the idea of "the disappeared" is an interesting and scary one. first of all, background: around 30,000 people in argentina disappeared from the late 70s until the early 80s. most were political activists and most have never been accounted for (more detailed background information in english on this fantastic website): it's safe to assume, of course, that they are all dead, but no traces of most have ever been found. according to some testimony that has only recently begun to leak out, some at least were blindfolded, beaten, chained up tightly and tossed out of airplanes into the sea. the fact that the verb (to disappear) has been made (in english) into a noun (the disappeared) gives these people an odd sense of victimhood but also an odd sense of power. the disappeared are very much a part of argentina's modern national psyche and you constantly hear and see references to them. and it's not only historical: jorge julio lopez disappeared one year ago after testifying in a very public trial against one of those accused of being involved in human rights abuses dating back 30 years. in odd places throughout your day, you will suddenly notice a sign, a scrap of paper, a sprawl of graffiti across a wall: Donde esta Lopez?   

more to write, but enough for today. spent the day working and now we are headed out for thai food and nightlife. random pics from today: