On being a tour guide for six days in Buenos Aires.....

I now have a new great appreciation for tour guides....Sister, brother in law, and niece came for their first trip to Buenos Aires for 6 days only.  I had a great time researching all the things I wanted to show them, made lots of lists, time tables and calendars.  I thought I had it all figured out, except some things turned out to be closed, or I hadn't figured in transport times, or how tired our feet or brains got, or contingency plans for the one day it rained....Here are some of the highlights of last week:

The double decker tour bus leaves from Florida and Avenida Roque Saenz Pena every hour.  You can get off and back on at stops all over the city.  I thought this might be boring for me because I had walked all the areas it covered, but being high up and not having to watch your step gave a whole new perspective, as did the audio guide, in the language of your choice.  Be sure and check out how well your head set works before the tour starts as some had bad connections.

;

The Recoletta Cemetery-again, I had spent lots of time here before, but it is so varied and vast that I was again wowed.. an encapsulated mish mash of architecture, sculpture and history...  It's like peeking into people's living rooms at times....each plot tells a different story... 

Some are fancy, some filled with decorations and paraphernalia, others long neglected... 

We took a bus ride out to Temaiken, a bio reserve that was far more amazing than I thought it would be...Tuesdays its half price (25 pesos).  Each area was more spectacular than the last...(I thought this guy's knees were pretty cool)

But the best thing of last week was a night at The Pale Blue Door.  London set designer Tony Hornecker 

and his crew came into town a month ago and set up an amazing unique space in an abandoned San Telmo old mansion, gave us a great meal and outrageous entertainment....they served some of the food via buckets on a rope and pulley system....

and the featured entertainer had multiple costume changes, danced like crazy and got the whole restaurant doing greek dancing by the end....The group just left Buenos Aires and will set up new dinners in Toyko, Berlin, New York, and maybe your town...check it out via Tony Hornecker or The Pale Blue Door web searches.

Art shot for this week is of a three D painting I was captivated with in one of the galleries on Esmerelda street...

And your food shot for the week was taken in a Chinese restaurant near the British Ambassador's residence at a luncheon of rowdy expats....

Mafalda, Real Estate, Art and Eats

I had been seeing this cartoon character around town... on tee shirts, posters, like "hello, kitty" in Japan, and I didn't think much about it....then this statue appeared last Sunday in the square half a block from our apartment, and people (many with tears in their eyes) started gathering for a ceremony to honor her creator, Joaquin Salvador Larado. Mafalda is her name, and her comic strip has been described as "Doonesbury meets Peanuts in Buenos Aires." The series ran from the 60's to the 80's, during military dictatorships, repressive times... and for many, Mafalda's questionings struck a personal chord. The ten books of her strips have been translated into 20 languages..so I bought one in Spanish and have been stumbling through it... what a great way to get better with the language..




Larado is the grey haired man on the right...

An Argentine friend let me tag along as he checked out an old hotel building he is considering buying that is a block away from our place... right now there is a business on the first floor and 14+ apartments on the second and third floors, two huge interior courtyards, and a huge roof top patio... some of the 20 foot ceilings have plaster relief decorations, marble stairs..beautiful old tile floors, all for $150,000!.... His dream is to remodel into 11 apartments, adding half lofts in each for bedrooms... but to do that he will have to install plumbing, wiring, fix all the cracked marble and tile floors, etc. etc. and ECT., plus somehow get the current tenants out (not an easy feat down here).

The view out to the terrace and down into one of the interior courtyards....

view from the court yard up to the third floor...

Second floor mezzanine looking out into interior courtyard...

After yet another trip down to the port area Immigration office for another stamp for another three month wait on our permanent visas, we saw this sailing ship that is part of the Argentine Navy. She goes around the world each year with graduate sailors.

this is the part I liked best.

This week's food shot is our new favorite neighborhood hangout... most of our neighborhood joints are pretty fancy, but I spied this place next to a car park down the alley... back in the patio, there's a BIG outdoor grill and great daily specials.....

But they can't beat the french restaurant on our corner for onion soup and fancy deserts... this is a piece of apple pie...but not so simple... and I think the apple slices were poached separately in liquor based syrup? , then placed on a shortbread crust...

Bon Appetit!

August in Buenos Aires

It's the last month of winter here... most days we have had temps in the 60's and 70's, but this last week its been an unusual 80 most days, with flower buds starting to pop out.

Avenida de Mayo is a big downtown wide boluvard with some amazing architecture....

One of my favorite places down town is Central Cultural Recoleta...that's where Dave is working on a stone carving and I have enrolled in a painting workshop. The place is huge and has ongoing exhibitions and shows, besides the classes. These sketches of Obama and Castro by Buenos Aires political cartoonist Pablo Temes caught my eye.....

One of the interior patios at the culture center has a great little cafe...the top photo of this series is also another view from this patio

But my food shot for this week is not from a fancy downtown eatery, but the daily special sign at a small joint near the train station Belgrano. Typical winter fare offered around town is "lentejas" (a rich lentel soup), "locro" (a corn and tripe stew), or mondongo (my dictionary says "innards"). I haven't tried Mondongo yet (wasnt that the name of a character in Blazing Saddles?) but lentejas is grand...

The World Tango Festival....

For the last two weeks of August, Buenos Aires hosted the world tango festival... with workshops, films, competitions and preformances every day, and all for FREE!

I went to two events... the San Martin Dance Company preforming to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and Piazola's Four Seaons in Buenos Aires ...

and the semifinal competion of Salon Tango...Couples from all over the world.... and some remote providences in Argentina... with everything from glitter and fancy lifts, to stately mature chunky couples displaying understated grace and connection...

And here is a movie of my favorite couple from Mexico...

(I know.... you are asking,"why did she turn the camera sideways?," and the answer is that the birdbrain part of me forgot that you, the viewer could not easily turn your computer on its side to get the dancers' whole bodies as they moved towards me!)

Our new neighborhood.......

Our new digs, and what we've been up to....

our new hallway and living room....

two bedrooms

and the kitchen... note the bright yellow thing on the wall... its a typical gas flash hot water heater... no more running out of hot water cause the tank is used up....






our view out the living room window....we traded lots of view at our old place for a very central location

half a block away is a small french restaurant where i had this poached lemon filled with a sabayon custard, and lemon sorbet on the side...

If you haven't seen one of the new Walt Disney three D movies yet, you are missing a treat...Forget that they are corny cartoons.. not only are the loaner glasses very cool, but the effects are much more startling than i remember from the late '50's versions. We have seen two now, and i am ready for more!

And, in closing, a quote from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by my favorite living writer, Salman Rushdie:

"For a long while I have believed that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as "natural"a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that; for those who value stability, who fear transience,uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigma and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identifies which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out...in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book....The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent,...if we did not recognize in them our least-fulled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time."

This and That, part 2

Most thursday nights you will find us with the other Buenos Aires members of Drinking Liberally. I found out there are Drinking Liberally groups all over the planet that meet together to socialize, and this one has been our main source of comrade. The Buenos Aires group had been meeting in a club down town, but the volume of the music kept going up and all of us were getting horse from shouting. So now we meet at Sam and Nadie's house in Palermo. Through this gathering, we have met Texas oil people, students from all over the world, film makers, lots of computer geeks, expats from all over, and of course Porteños (Buenos Aires folks).



This photo is for folks up north that picture Buenos Aires as having a steaming tropical climate... note the yellow leaves and the shakey focus due to my shivers... It's now still dark at 7am, and dark by 6... was it just a few months ago that it was cooling off by 9 pm and we would be walking around in tank tops in the light? Seasons happen fast down under here... i have just bought gloves and one of those knitted hats with ear flaps.

Dave asked that i take a shot of this great old truck. I took it in the dark without a flash, and when i lightened it, there appeared this man...

the 49 studebaker lives! not so many old cars in buenos aires, but a few. don´t have a photo, but perhaps you remember the citroen 2CV? seem to be quite a few. mostly in perfect restoration, new ragtops, fresh paint, and looking very cool.












The Chineese Gate was not at the entrance to China Town a week ago... and its huge and made out of steel and concrete... in fact I just found out that 20 years ago, there was not even China Town...We come by here often cause its the main Belgrano bus and train stop, has great grocery stores, restaurants .... and Dave´s favorite old man bar is right across the street. this concrete entry gate is just the core. it´s being faced with terrific red granite and, i´m guessing, gold leaf will be added to the details. love this neighborhood. always bustly.







Now this may just like like a regular pigeon to you... but its not! Its a Paloma Picazuro, the size of a chicken, and our new pet. Every morning it waits for bread along with other smaller birds on this tin roof out our kitchen window.

Argentina textile artists at the Palace de Glace, #1

This building always takes our breath away... and this show was amazing... two floors of pieces that continually surprised... and "textile" was rubber, plastic, metal, dresses to political statements, and other things i didn't understand at all....









The axe and stump are the real thing, and the giant leaf is woven out of fine thread....












if you look close, you can see in the middle the bodice of this amazing dress... i would have loved to see someone walk around in it...












There's friend John, taking a break from all "that weird stuff," ready to get out on the streets again.














and here's the view out on the street....

Goin downtown...

We went to one of the cultural centers for a puppet show, and found out back a circus tent with people practicing on the high wire... circus is big down here ... a big revival world wide I think, thanks to cirque du soleil ... we have spied circus workshops in old factory buildings all over town, seen agile folks shimming up long stretchy cloths in the park trees... jugglers and clowns come out and preform for waiting cars at big intersections... the city seems to focus more on promoting art and culture than on fixing potholes and bad sidewalks...they reduce rent and taxes to property owners who hold an event or workshop. This whole cultural center, in barracas, does all the art theatricals exclusively... circus acrobatics, mime, puppetry, movement improv, musical theater ... its a really interesting place. The buildings were once an estancia, wide open air balconies, open but covered stable facilities for thirty plus horses. These are still intact looking like an open air stable, with a stage and seating in the middle. This is a neighborhood we are seriously looking at as our next place. In a dozen blocks, right by the river, lots of combination living and light industrial buildings, plenty available and far enough upstream that the river is quite clean.




... a shot from the top floor, fifth floor of the downtown university of buenos aires, housing the schools of language and philosophy. I spent a month here for first spanish classes. It, (unfortunately no photo) is a huge magisterial structure with twenty foot ceilings for the first two



floors, sweeping marble staircases, sixty by sixty foot mezzanines and is, unfortunately, the case with public buildings in serious disrepair, but what a place it must have been. This photo is looking east to Puerto Madera, the huge river right beyond, and the trees and park like area below is the landing zone for the presidential helicopter. The residence and offices etc. for the presidential couple, pink house it's called here, is a block to the right.





















Out the same window looking the other direction, some of the dense downtown business district. There are actually apartments to be had here, some very inexpensive and quite nice, but you're living in a zoo. Millions of pedestrians on the narrowest of sidewalks, lots of bus traffic, tons of delivery motorcycles, it's really exhausting for us to spend even one hour going to just a couple of places. The building in the center low part of photo is the Chinese trade delegations permanent home. I'm not sure how, but lots of business gets conducted in this madhouse. With this mass of people, there are probably twelve restaurants per block, all surprisingly good and inexpensive and contrary to the Argentine norm, fast and efficient service is the order of the day. Of course, for the heavyweights of the business world are the small, tucked away bistros where a two hour business lunch is a couple hundred bucks, that's dollars. I'll wait for some heavyweight to invite me before commenting on the quality of the food in a place so exalted. Just had a call from our Portland pals, Malia and Jason who are just now, in a taxi in front of our place here for a two week visit. i get to be a bit of a tour guide and that sounds like fun.



Jamye has been working on this piece for a few months now.. its in homage to all the centuries of artisans who beatified rugs and tiles and cloth and everything around them with tiny repeat design...

and here's to more dogs in the park and more good meals!