Turned out that we weren’t going to go to Patagonia after all. Another job came though for the crew to do down here so Catherine is staying for another week. That meant that today was the first day where I really tried in earnest to write most of the time. Stayed in the room until about 1:30, then I went out to a Northern Argentine baked stew place called Cumaná. Had a hot beef empanada, a salad and a stew with pumpkin, other veggies, meat and a crust of cheese on top, like a French onion soup. It was good. From there I walked to the museum of Xul Solar in Barrio Norte. It’s one of this town’s little boutique museums. It was built specifically to hold a collection of works from this one artist and thinker. His art looks most like Paul Klee. Most of it not to my taste, but interesting to see one vision all in one place. He was also kind of a renaissance man—inventing these organ-like instruments where the keys looked like crayons. I couldn’t read the side notes, but I imagine that the colors corresponded to melodic combinations.
From there, I took the subte (after first going the wrong way on both the first and the second legs and then overshooting my stop) back to the Avenida del Mayo to try and catch the Madres selling T-shirts.
Congresso
On the way through the park in front of the Congresso, I took a better look at Rodin’s The Thinker and saw something I’d never noticed in pictures or smaller castings: the hand his chin is resting on isn’t a fist, but rather is completely limp—like he’s set his chin on top of his palm and, without flexing the muscles in his hand at all, is just letting the weight of his head push his bent wrist down. This is a much more natural position for someone actually thinking than resting on a clenched fist. His body posture is slack, not tensed up, and his limbs are kind of folded in on themselves. (This cast of The Thinker is one of the three full-size casts done by Rodin himself.)
The Thinker, with red spray paint on his face
I walked down to the Madres and their door was open but when I walked inside, it wasn’t a headquarters but just a warehouse. There were two kids standing around outside in the T-shirts that I wanted, so I plucked at my shirt and asked, “Donde?” They pointed up the street (Yrigoyen) and said “derecho” which I thought meant on the left. So first I took a left, but there was nothing there, then I backtracked to Yrigoyen and kept going up it the same way, sure enough, there was a huge space occupied by the University of the Madres further up Yrigoyen to the left. It was just opposite the Thinker. (Just to correct all my illiteracy, “derecho” means straight not left. “A la derecha” with an “a” means to the right. “A la izquerda” means to the left.)
The Madres had a huge café as a front with a pretty extensive bookstore—lots of Marks and Che and other communist stuff along with psychological stuff. I ordered a coffee and a water, but before sitting down, I asked a guy to help me buy some T-shirts. I ended up buying 6 in all. The sizes made no sense. Catherine thinks they’re child sizes. I read more of my book on Buenos Aires, finished my coffee and took the 150, which runs along Av Callao then down Santa Fe and home.
Wrote to my sister and the rest of the clan to see if they wanted belts. They did. So I’m going to the fair to score them some tomorrow. Catherine got home around nine and we ordered room service.
Catherine had to wake up super-early, so I slept past when she left, went to have breakfast and then set out to Tigre, the resort on the river delta to the north and a little west. It’s confusing from the way it’s represented on maps, but Buenos Aires sits on the edge of a very broad river that is due east of the city. The Rio de la Plata is fed by the Uraguay river and the Rio Parana de las Platas. This latter river is the river delta that Tigre sits on the edge of. (It’s funny how so many Spanish colonial names aren’t descriptive but hopeful. Just like Costa Rica, which turned out to be anything but a rich coast, Argentina was not full of money and the Rio de las Platas had no silver plate.)
The train from Retiro station runs to Tigre every ten minutes, stopping at all the little suburbs on the way. I got to the tourist information office at 1 pm, got a map and instructions on how to take the local boat taxi, or lancha, to Tres Bocas, one of the more settled areas in the delta, where I could get out and walk around.
The launch wasn’t leaving for a half an hour, so I took one of the walking tours she’d recommended, thinking I’d have plenty of time for a small circuit by the time the lancha left. Fortunately, I looked at my phone when I thought I was about halfway and found that I had only 12 minutes to get back. I had worn my Birkenstocks but I had to run back unless I wanted to wait another 30 minutes for the next lancha and I didn’t. Running in Birkenstocks isn’t fun on the feet. I started to feel the blisters from Saturday, which was the last time I’d worn them. I made it and rode out to Tres Bocas. The ride was most of the trip really, past vacation homes, high and humble both, with jetty’s out into the muddy river channels. Kids were diving off them and people were swimming, and if someone waved their arm from a jetty, the taxi would pull a bit past and then back up into the stairs. The caboose man would then leap off, tie up temporarily onto the stairs of the jetty, help the passenger(s) aboard, untie and then the lancha would take off again. Saw a lot of dredging equipment as well as boats carrying supplies to grocery stores and cafés in the delta. At Tres Bocas, I disembarked and immediately struck inland as I wasn’t yet hungry.
I had been let off at the jetty of a restaurant called the Riviera. I walked right by it and to the end of the path, where I saw a bridge spanning a little delta channel. At the crossroads was this little lady with a clipboard. We were hopeless at finding a common language, so I just let her hand me the flier for a restaurant called El Remanso. She tried to tell me where it was, but I didn’t understand. I wanted to walk a bit and didn’t have time for her sales pitch.
So I jumped over this bridge—a man on it told me the river was called the Santa Rosa, all of the little channels in the delta have names, I suppose. Each side of the deep channel was lined with small houses, none of them grand like those of the taxi channel. Some were very nice though and some broken down. I walked down the Santa Rosa’s far bank, hoping to find a bridge that would allow me to cross back, so I could make a circuit and get back to the Riviera or maybe find El Remanso. I walked and walked and walked and there was no bridge back. I was facing an intestinal crisis and the path looked like it was running to dirt so I gave up on finding a bridge and just retraced my steps.
When I got back to the Riviera, I took care of my crisis and then ordered bife with mushrooms and French fries plus a salad plus some cider. I thought a little bit of alcoholic cider would be fun to have. When the cider came, it was in a champagne-sized bottle. I took in the possibility that I’d just spend the afternoon drunk and thought that was probably OK. But when I started drinking, I discovered that it wasn’t alcoholic after all just super-sugary. So I stopped. My food was good. I ate everything except the fries. Then I grabbed a map of the hike around the island (offered by the Riviera) and set out.
The first part of the hike, I just retraced my steps from my initial walking jag, only on the opposite side of the Santa Rosa channel. At the end of the section that had little houses, I finally did come to a bridge and realized that on my walk before lunch I’d given up about 50-yards too soon. Anyway, at this point, the map told me to cross over on a bridge and walk on the opposite side of the Santa Rosa Channel and then take a second bridge back over to this side. Well, I crossed over the bridge, but the going got pretty rough and the trail wasn’t all that well cleared. I forged on until I walked straight into a huge spider web. After a bit of mad brushing at my clothes and throwing my hat off, I satisfied myself that I didn’t have some tarantula-sized spider on me and I turned back across the bridge and continued the walk on the well-marked trail on the island-side of the Santa-Rosa channel. This part of the walk, as I noticed later on the map, was entirely in a natural area. It was a wooded path, nicely kept clear, with very innovative bridges across the various little channels and bog areas. The bridges were made of broken branches nailed to larger branches and to pilons sunk down into the bog. To cross channels, there were larger branches just felled across the channel, with a railing to help your balance. Quite sufficient but a little freaky to do in my Birkenstocks, so I changed into my Nike’s which I had cleverly brought after my terrible Birkenstock blister problem of my second day.
The nature area was a wetlands and unlike the wetlands to the east of Buenos Aires that serves as the jogging path, this wetlands was actually wet, which meant mosquitoes. I didn’t notice them until I came upon this odd-looking series of raised platforms made from wood. They looked like a full bed and a single-sized bunk bed, only where the mattresses should have been were small sticks laid across the frame. More than anything, they looked like funerary pyres, like what they use in India to burn corpses. This was freaking me out a bit, but I still stopped to take a picture and that’s when the mosquitoes, which must have been following me in a crowd, just swarmed and started biting the shit out of me. I slapped my arms and kept rubbing my neck (I’d worn long pants, fortunately) for the rest of the nature walk portion. It dawned on my that I wasn’t 100% sure that I couldn’t get malaria in Argentina, so I walked faster and faster to keep ahead of the mosquito swarm, which was too happy to follow me since I was the only mammal who’d been stupid enough to walk through there for the last several hours.
Somewhere in this section, Catherine called and of course, I couldn’t stand still to talk to her in an area of good reception, so we didn’t get to talk at all. I wanted to have her ask someone if I could get Malaria, but I never got the question out. I was out of the nature walk in about 45 minutes and on to another residential section. (I didn’t end up getting malaria, by the way.)
The houses on this side started becoming nicer as I turned onto the large channel that the taxi takes. As I got close to the jetty where I’d disembarked, I heard a taxi coming up behind me and Istarted running—I wanted to get out of there! The boat outran me and landed at the jetty and took off again. I stopped running and when I looked around to see where I was. I was standing on the patio of the restaurant El Remanso, which was just two doors down from the Riviera, in the opposite direction from where the older lady had been passing out the fliers. I suppose it would be unthinkably rude to solicit on the Riviera’s jetty or even just too close to their restaurant, so she went way far down the path, but that was far away from both restaurants. Anyway, this whole thing seemed absurd at the time, especially when I turned towards El Remanso and saw the old lady who’d fliered me. She seemed happy that I was there so I ordered some water and a beer. It took quite a while for the next lancha to come. When I got back to Tigre, I walked over to the Puertas de las Frutas, a permanent market on an old dock. It was unimpressive and I was glad to have gotten Tigre done on a Friday because the Saturday market would have made things mad.
When I got the train back, I forgot to get my ticket from the turnstyle in Tigre. I vaguely thought I might need it, but it didn’t come out or at least not fast enough, so I left without solving the mystery of where it had gone. In Retiro (the end of the line in Buenos Aires), I had to pay $7 pesos to get out because I didn’t have a ticket. This was 10x what the trip had cost me, and still pissed me off in principle even though it was only $2.30 US. I’ve kept the ticket because it says “Multa Evasion” on it. That’s right, I’m an evader. Don’t forget it.
That was the end of my little adventure. I got back to the hotel and waited for Catherine to get home, which she didn’t until after midnight because they were still shooting.
Let me take a moment to describe the breakfast that Catherine and I share every morning in the hotel dining room. The buffet is a classic European breakfast. Cut and whole fruits take up a third of the table, cereals another third, including a wonderful granola of the German style and that muesli that comes already mixed with yoghurt. The last third of the table (I hope I remember to take a picture) is filled with pastries like pancetta, that Italian Christmas bread and croissant and other goodies. On the sideboard are cheeses, ham, lox and prosciutto.
As soon as we sit down, the very polite and attendant wait-staff offers us either orange juice or grapefruit. (We’ve only ever taken the orange juice. I don’t know what Catherine’s logic is, but I think the grapefruit juice looks sweetened.) They also ask if we want coffee or tea. I get coffee and Catherine gets tea. Catherine then gets up and makes herself a small bowl of cereal with what looks like Special K. I on the other hand fill a bowl with the liquid German muesli, bran cereal (the stringy kind), the European-style granola and a few apple slices and I pour in milk, then I eat it. Leave it to an American to take a bit of everything regardless of how grotesque the resulting dish. All I have to say is that it’s keeping me regular. Then I go and get some meat and cheese. Catherine gets some fruit. I get my fruit last and walk out with a peach or a pear for later.
After breakfast, I came upstairs to change my plane ticket, as Catherine and I had decided to stay three more days to see the Patagonian glaciers. I had to walk to the Delta office and from there I walked to the internet café on Libertad and Ave de Libertador and did my internet business. Once that was done, I returned my computer to the hotel, because walking around with it the day before had given me a terrible neck-ache. Tragically, I forgot to change my shoes from the Gola that I bought on Saturday to my Nikes and so ended the day with another round of blisters.
I took the 152 to the Puerto Madero to get some masks for a friend. I got of the bus several blocks too soon, as is my habit. Somehow, I’d rather walk four blocks in the right direction that backtrack by even one block, so I’m probably doomed to get off too early for the rest of my life. The shopgirl said the masks were made by a famous northern Argentine “ceramist.”
City View from Puerto Madero
It was around 2:00 by then so I had plenty of time to walk up and find a place to eat around the Plaza del Mayo and wait for the Thursday 3:30 Madres protest. Unfortunately, I struck out at finding the first few recommended restaurants. (I’m a slave to guidebook recommends ever since eating at a series of terrible restaurants in Italy. Yes, Italy!) It was 3:00 by the time I arrived at my last pick, a place called London City, “El clasico y moderno sabor de Buenos Aires.” It was a business lunch place, the kind of thing they call a confiteria, serving pizzas and other things. I jumped at one of the cheaper lunch specials when the waiter mentioned that it was a milanesa. What I didn’t and couldn’t have understood was that the milanesa, which I took to meant a breaded steak, was in this case, just the breading with a little ham, tomato and cheese on top. There was a side of “mushed” pumpkin in the middle, the best part of this otherwise revolting meal. It did however come with coffee and bottled water.
I got out of there around 3:25 and went to the Plaza del Mayo pyramid, where the weekly protest was supposed to happen. At first I saw nothing, then I saw a small crowd of dozens of tourists taking pictures of maybe 20 older women in headscarves who were holding a long banner. Like ice skaters playing an arthritic version of crack the whip, they marched this banner around the pyramid. Their presence in this spot is so established that their scarf logo is painted in the outside of every pie-wedge of paving that surrounds the pyramid.
The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo
I took photos for a while then got tired of just filming it, so I started marching with them.
After a few laps, the ladies retired to a statue between the pyramid and the pink house and one of them got on a megaphone and made a speech that everyone applauded.
One woman in the crowd, who had come with her own mother, was wearing a T-Shirt. Nothing makes you feel more like an American than attending a rally and coming away from it wanting to get merchandize. My feet were killing me by then and I didn’t have the stamina to walk up to the Madres headquarters as I had the day before, so I took the Linea A subte, which is the subway with the oldest cars, really cool looking, hope the pictures came out.
Subte A car
I got off at the Madres and their doors were padlocked, of course, because they were all marching. I might try to go back. I then jumped back on the Subte A, transferred to the Subte C and jumped off at San Martin square. I was really dying with my feet, but a museum of South American art was more or less on my way to the hotel, so I stopped by. It was on the Av Suipacha one block up from Av de Libertador. It was free and full of colonial art, the kind of stuff that’s important to collect, I’m sure, but that I totally hate. I was hoping for some Frida Kahlo type art or something. No such luck.
Finally then, I came home, soaked my feet and wrote this. I think I’m going to walk to the internet café now and check out some web stuff before Catherine gets home.
When she got home, we ate at one of the restaurants under the bridge at the beginning of the Av 9 Julio. It was an Italian place with a woman Norwegian chef. I got the seafood pasta. Catherine got monkfish with a bean, pea and bell pepper ragout. Both dishes were great. But the best was the entrée, which was a poached egg on a bed of arugula topped with smoked salmon and drizzled with a mustard sauce. Delicious.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007,
Day 6 in Buenos Aires
Bought a Guia-T bus map on the way to an internet café on Liberdad and Ave de Libertador. Internet connection was very slow but I got my business done. The Guia-T (GHEE-yah-TAY) is an amazingly efficient presentation of the massively complicated bus system, but the efficiency makes it quite difficult to figure out at first. The guide is a city map in book form. It’s overlaid with a grid and in a matching grid at the top of each map page are listed every bus that runs through the grid below. So if you know the grid you are starting from and you know the grid you are going to, you can find a bus that goes through both. Then, you flip to the bus listings and figure out which streets that bus runs through in the starting grid. You go to that street, walk down until you find a bus stop running in your direction and you’re set. Easier said than done, as you’ll see.
With my Guia-T bus map, I chose the 130 to get into La Boca. This, it turned out, was a mistake. I should have taken the 152, which goes down the main drag.
The 130 dove down to the docks and stopped beneath a road in a nasty, industrial part of the neighborhood. The whole of La Boca was pretty working class, car repair shops, machine shops, etc. And the place was very sketchy to walk around in. I hauled ass from the bus terminus to the main drag, taking a few pictures along the way, worried about having my camera out, but then thinking how silly that was. Regardless of what I had in my hands at the time, any person interested in robbing me would correctly have assumed that they had less.
Finally got to the main drag (Ave. Alte Brown) and saw 152s going by ever few minutes as I walked safely to the docks at the far end where there’s a pretty cool abandoned bridge. Took pictures of that then I tried to find the cool artsy area described in the tour books. (As it turns out, the cool artsy area was just to my right when I was looking at the bridge. But somehow, I didn’t see it.)
It seemed to be one block off the main drag, but every time I got to a side street, it didn’t seem like a good idea to walk down it. Finally, I found a street that didn’t look too bad and a woman carrying a baby stopped me, “No.” I thanked her and turned around.
Catherine and the tour books had recommended a restaurant called El Obrero, which was only two blocks from the sketchy area I’d been dropped off in. So I turned down the street I’d come up originally (B. Peréz Galdos) and jogged over to Caffarena, where I found the restaurant.
By then I’d learned to walk according to the local fashion. The warehouse docks make the sidewalk a series of trips up and down staircases next to grumpy looking junkyard dogs. So the locals walk in the middle of the street.
El Obrero
Obrero was decorated with all kinds of memorabilia from the local favorite Boca Jr. soccer team, pictures of Diego Maradona especially. There were even pictures of some referees, a boxer and one dictator. I ordered the revuelta gramajo a dish of scrambled eggs, French fries and ham; it was Borges’ daughter’s favorite dish and an original of Buenos Aires. I also got a raddicio and tomato salad and fried kidneys a la provencale, which I downed with plenty of salsa chimmichurra.
Revuelto Gramajo, delicious
As I continued to wander around, the poverty and history of the area really started to sink in. There were many political and social justice posters around, my favorite being graphical images of all that women did followed by questions about why they weren’t treated better.
There was also an old Mercedes bus. Busses as public transport apparently began in Buenos Aires. They were always Mercedes busses, still are, and this is one of the old ones put out to pasture.
Old Mercedes Bus on Boca Main Drag
I got out of that neighborhood and back to the main drag with little trouble then I took the 152 back towards the Plaza del Mayo. On the way, at Ave Passeo Colon and Belgrado outside the Hall of Justice, there was a medium-sized labor protest or human rights protest going on. I’ll have to get my pictures of the signs translated to know for sure. Some guys wearing hard hats in a small make-shift hut were rallying the crowd.
Protest outside Hall of Justice
From there I walked up to the Plaza del Mayo and back to the so-called Block of Light. I wandered around inside this old building but the tour had already started, so I didn’t get to see much.
I then wandered north on the Plaza del Mayo trying to find the café started by the protesting mothers of the disappeared (the Madres). I did find their headquarters at 1438 H. Yrigoyen but the café was gated shut. Looks like that venture didn’t make it. So I stepped around the corner and had a coffee at a non-politically oriented café, where the beggars were intense. I got solicited at least once every 5 minutes.
Walked from there up to the congress building then caught the 150 down to Rodriguez Peña square. Jumped off and walked down Rodriguez Peña towards the hotel. Got in, took a shower and wrote this. At 7:30 or so, going to the barbeque at Catherine’s production company headquarters.
Took the 110 up to where the local production company was located in Palermo Soho. It was a large door opening into a building whose interior courtyard was a grassy atrium with a swimming pool that took up about a sixth of a residential block, or so it seemed. Very lovely. The food was wonderful and I chatted with Catherine and the production assistants.
Left the hotel without having put on sunblock. In my defense, I’d been going out for a few days by now—sometimes with and sometimes without, and it hadn’t seemed to make a difference. But on those previous days, I’d been walking around in the city, with all the shade offered by buildings. Today, I’d decided to walk around the ecological reserve located between the docks and the River Plate, no shade at all. But that’s getting ahead. Despite the previous day’s success, I didn’t take a bus. I wanted to stop first at the Tourist information center at Dique 1 of Puerto Madero, so I walked there, through Plaza St. Martin, which was quite lovely, lots of trees. St. Martin was the liberator of Argentina and parts of Peru. A freelance tourguide hit me up in front of his statue, but I kept walking.
From there, I dropped down to Puerto Madero, walking right by the Sydney Opera replica, which is currently a nightclub. The tourist office lady told me that the new museum that was slated to open soon was still not open, so I walked the rest of the diques until crossing over between numbers 3 and 4. There were tons of barbeque vendors cooking outside the park, but I resisted in favor of a lunch I’d planned at a well reviewed parilla restaurant (La Caballeriza) in Puerto Madero.
Sydney Opera House take-off, now a bar
The park claimed to be the kind of bog-like environment that all of Buenos Aires would be
without the city there. It was lovely. Many views of the city from across marshes and bogs. Not a ton of flowers at that time of year but lots of green. A nice break from the city. It would have been better on a bike. Anyhow, it took an hour to circumnavigate on foot and, by the end, I was burned to a crisp.
Three views of the city from the ecological reserve
I walked to La Caballeriza and got drunk at lunch. I tried to give an off-the-cuff compliment to the waiter about how I liked Argentines because they are so polite. He didn’t understand me, so before I could stop him, he raced off to find an English speaking server. This girl came over and now, I had to drunkenly repeat this trivial observation of mine. To which they both said thank you, after which I ran away.
I asked downstairs what bus to take to the Plaza del Mayo. They had to go pretty far down the chain of employees before finding someone who knew. I got the 152 from Avenue Esmerelda and Av. De Libertador. I gave my seat to a woman pretty quickly, as had the gentleman in front of me, so I couldn’t very well see the street signs. Worried that I’d overshot, I jumped off the bus and found, of course, that I’d vastly undershot. The bus dropped me around Avenue Corrientes. So I walked into the downtown, down Florida street, which figures heavily in the literary companion I brought.
(I should probably spend a sentence on the books I brought with me: My basic guidebook was the 2005 Lonely Planet’s Buenos Aires, City Guide. Easy to carry around, very comprehensive. Can’t compare to others, since it was the only one I used. The second book was Jason Wilson’s Literary Companion to Buenos Aires.
finally found the Plaza de Mayo. The Pink house of the Presidents was being renovated, so there wasn’t much to see there.
Casa Rosada, with scaffolding
I walked into the cathedral. It’s so ugly on the outside, as you can see, and on the inside was unimpressive. The grave of San Martin was there. (San Martin liberated South America.) Took a picture of it with the two guards who are constantly flanking it.
Cathedral
Grave of San Martin
I looked at the outsides of a couple of buildings then walked up the Av de Mayo to the Café Tortoni, where Borges and a lot of other Argentine literary types hung out. I ate lunch there—ensalada completo and a sirloin sandwich. Argentina is a great place for salads. The completo typically has greens, shaved carrots, celery, hard-cooked eggs and maybe beets.
On the way to the Café Tortoni, I walked into a used book store, there were dozens of them, and bought a first edition, second printing, of All Quiet on the Western Front for $10 pesos about $3 dollars. It’s probably worthless, but it’ll be fun to have. They also had an 1894 printing of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru for $150 pesos. I almost bought it on impulse, but I’m such a cheap bastard that I decided to go do some research online first. Lucky too because that night I found an original 1847 edition going for 64 British pounds. It was a popular book.
After the Tortoni, I walked down a side street and tried to get an Argentine address marker with 1556 Elevado stamped on it. (The typical address marker in Argentina is a distinctive, convex, white metal oval with black letters.) Unfortunately, it would have taken until the 8th to get it done and we didn’t have that much time.
Walked back towards the Plaza de Mayo, walked into the church on the Block of Light. (It’s called that because the first court and public library was located there.) The church was not very interesting.
Original foundation cutaway in the Block of Light
Got a little lost and ended up in a kind of sketchy area. In Buenos Aires, you can always tell you’ve made a wrong turn (or several) when you hear the sound of people sifting through garbage—banging bottles together, etc. Odd thing is, if you happen to catch their eye, they don’t act like they’re doing anything furtive or lesser than. Sifting through garbage is just what they do. I kind of liked that. Walked down to the Ave Libertador and caught the 152 back to the hotel.
Mural in the sketchy area from when I got lost in San Telmo
This was Catherine’s one full day off with me in Buenos Aires. So I took her to my highlights of the previous days: First we went to the cemetery, where we saw Eva Peron’s grave. I was glad to go back actually because it wasn’t raining this time. Then we wandered around the craft fair—bought a belt for me and a hair barrette for my sister. Then we went to the MALBA. Then we went to check out the Sunday flea market at San Telmo, where I bought a hat. We walked from San Telmo to Puerto Madero, where we saw the aftermath of a mugging–the only crime I would ever witness in the city. A local told us to cross at a major street, so we went over to Independenia and crossed there.
We were both pretty tired after wandering Puerto Madero so we came back to the hotel.
We had dinner at the Green Bamboo, a Vietnamese place in Palermo. Very good. They did a cubed beef thing like at a Vietnamese restaurant in Los Angeles called Gingergrass, but much better. Catherine got a vegetarian curry with lentils. Delicious except for the ginger and pumpkin gyoza in the middle, which were just gross. Cabbed it there and back.
(Since this diary was originally written for Catherine, I obviously didn’t write a lot on a day when she was with me. But we did take a lot of pictures.)
Cemetery Cats
Evita’s Grave, quite humble, relatively speaking
Puente de la Mujer (Women’s Bridge), by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava
In Puerto Madero
Today, I chose to wear my Birkenstocks since my sneakers were still wet from yesterday’s rain. I walked back towards the cemetery to the craft fair that lines the walkways between Recoleta and the Avenida Libertador on the weekends. After looking at every wallet in the fair, I found one that would serve as a backup when mine went out. Cheap leather goods are plentiful and, unless you’re determined to get the absolutely cheapest, are of good quality.
Done with the fair, I went to the Museo National de Bellas Artes. The European art downstairs was disappointing, kind of like going to museums in Austin, Texas, where I come from. The guidebook had advertised a Cranach, one of my favorite painters, but it was “School of Lucas Cranach.” Stuff like that. The upstairs was amazing though—all Argentine artists. The nudes painted by the Argentines are much more erotic than standard Western nudes. They also had several paintings dealing with torture and political repression. Surprisingly no paintings dealing with Catholicism. No plays on religious iconography. Not like you see in Mexican art. Curious, as Argentina is not a secular country, by my reading.
Then I walked further along the avenue to the MALBA, their modern art museum. The exhibits here were pretty great. All Argentine or Latin American on the second floor and on the third floor was a retrospective of a German art group from the sixties called Fluxos. It included John Cage and others whose names I only kind of recognized. The best pieces as far as I was concerned were these outside balcony sculptures made of heavy screening and other metals. They were plays off the Cycladic statues I love so much, the ones the Getty museum in Los Angeles has a few of: a woman with arms crossed in front and pointed toes. But this artist had taken this conventional pose and changed it to a wavy pose or a twisted one. And they were monumental: twice as tall as I am. Called Catherine to see when I should join her in Palermo. She said I had an hour, so I decided to walk it. It was about as far as I’d walked so far and it was through a nice park-heavy part of town. I tried to walk through the zoo, but the line for tickets was too long. I took some pictures of trash on the way. I did cut through the botanical garden, which had a ton of cats.
The walk was longer that I’d anticipated and the buckle on my Birkenstock was wearing a hole into the top of my foot. I met Catherine at Bar 6. Ate a chicken breast open-faced sandwich with a fried egg on top. Delicious. Then we went shopping. Bought some shoes from England called Gola and a messenger bag. She bought a purse from Humawaca, which is a phonetic spelling of a colonial city in the province of Jujuy in northeastern Argentina, and is also a Buenos Aires street. I think that’s all we bought. Catherine had already bought some tango shoes, which are very sexy.
After a stop back at the hotel, we went to San Telmo to have dinner at Desnivel, a super-legit parilla place in San Telmo. (Parilla, pronounced pah-REE-jah, is Argentine barbeque.) Desnivel was so legit that the service was legitimately lousy. They didn’t give us half of what we ordered and by the time the sides came the meat was stone cold. Terrible experience. The director, the Argentine DP and a local guide came in when we were walking out. I’m sure they got better service as locals. We took a cab to a tango place (Confiteria Ideal) but the show was ending and the tango upstairs was for experienced dancers. Lessons start at 9 pm, so we’re hoping we get a chance to go back. (Tragically, I never got to go back, although, after I left, Catherine did go back and said it was amazing to watch the Argentines of all classes come in and dance. Next time.)
My wife Catherine was working on a commercial shoot in Buenos Aires. She was planning to be gone for one month. As I’m a writer who theoretically can work anywhere, I joined her for a couple of weeks in the middle of the job. This is the diary I kept so that she could read about what I’d done during the day while she was laboring away.
Friday, January 30, 2007,
Day 1 in Buenos Aires
I got off my plane at nine in the morning and went through customs. I’d been recruited to mule in “rags” for the director of photography. (Rags are large sheets of light-diffusing fabric that they put, where else, in front of the lights.) The metal eye-holes in the rags must have looked odd in the x-ray because the customs officer wanted to see what they were, We opened one of the bags and I started to explain. Once he got the gist of what they were for, he couldn’t dismiss me fast enough.
Outside customs, I was met by a man named Mario, who barely spoke any English but was one of these people who just had to talk, regardless of the quality of the communication resulting from it. On our long traficky drive to the hotel, he ran into the brick wall of my Spanish illiteracy time and time again, but forged ahead. I don’t know what he understood of anything I said, but I gathered that he had four sons and two brothers in Florida.
When I got to the hotel (the Palacio Duhao / Park Hyatt in Recoleta), Catherine had just flown in herself from Sau Paulo, Brazil. (She’d been casting there with the director.) She went to work pretty much as soon as she got there. I spent some time sending my final proposal rewrite to my agent then I changed clothes and ran to change some money at a place called Metropolitan near the Recoleta Cemetery. It started raining, so I ran back to the hotel to get an umbrella. As soon as I got back, the rain stopped. I took an umbrella anyway, just as a precaution, then retraced my steps to the cemetery. A woman at the entrance sold me a map for $4 pesos, but before she let me walk off, she made me promise to see all the people on the map, not just breeze by them on my way to Evita. If I did that she said that the other dead would be sad. Always the good boy, I promised and did follow her instructions, even when it started pouring. Not a drizzle like before, but a dumping of tropical, Texas-like rain. I took a lot of pictures of cats and people standing in mausoleum doorways to get out of the wet. The rain blocked out so much of the light, that I don’t know how well these came out. My shoes were soaked by the time I left the cemetery, but I kept on touring. On the way out, I passed a group of Goths giggling and chatting on their way in.
Next I hit the white church butted right up against the cemetery. In the entrance is a statue of the craziest looking saint I’ve ever seen. I think it’s of the monk who started the Recoleto monastery. I paid $2 pesos (that I’ll never get back) to tour the monks’ quarters—boring. All monasteries in Latin America were vacated in that anti-clerical nationalism of the 1800s. I remember reading about this but can’t remember the exact details.
Next, I hit the big design center that abuts the cemetery. It was a collection of galleries, some good, some like really bad student art projects. One was presided over by this crazy looking lady who had a photo of herself when she was much younger. You could have recognized her despite the years because she still had that same crazed look in her eyes.
The jewel of the galleries was an exhibit tracing the diaspora of writers from Barcelona after Franco won the Spanish Civil war. They fled north to Catalonia and southern France in 1936, but then, of course, the Nazis took over those areas in 1940 and they had to flee again, this time to the Americas. There were these wonderful maps detailing where exactly each individual writer had ended up—mainly Mexico but some in Argentina and in every country in the Americas. It tracked the various fates of the writers, how they fared in their new country, how long they were there, etc. Some thrived in their new digs but others couldn’t handle it and did poorly. Most returned to Europe after WWII but some stayed, liking their new lives better than their old. I got home around the same time as Catherine. We went out and had dinner at Spanish restaurant—split a paella. Very yummy. Catherine likes Malbec wine, a variety I’d never heard of until getting here.
Since I’d been walking all over, I convinced Catherine to walk home instead of taking a cab. Bad idea. One block away from a row of busy cafés, we turned onto a street with urchins digging through trash. A guy kind of walked towards us saying something. Catherine gripped my hand and we hauled ass out of there.
Called Catherine to see when I should join her in Palermo. She said I had an hour, so I decided to walk it. It was about as far as I’d walked so far and it was through a nice park-heavy part of town. I tried to walk through the zoo, but the line for tickets was too long. I took some pictures of trash on the way. I did cut through the botanical garden, which had a ton of cats.
It started raining, so I ran back to the hotel to get an umbrella. As soon as I got back, the rain stopped. I took an umbrella anyway, just as a precaution, then retraced my steps to the cemetery. A woman at the entrance sold me a map for $4 pesos, but before she let me walk off, she made me promise to see all the people on the map, not just breeze by them on my way to Evita. If I did that she said that the other dead would be sad. Always the good boy, I promised and did follow her instructions, even when it started pouring. Not a drizzle like before, but a dumping of tropical, Texas-like rain. I took a lot of pictures of cats and people standing in mausoleum doorways to get out of the wet. The rain blocked out so much of the light, that I don’t know how well these came out. My shoes were soaked by the time I left the cemetery, but I kept on touring. On the way out, I passed a group of Goths giggling and chatting on their way in.
I got home around the same time as Catherine. We went out and had dinner at Spanish restaurant—split a paella. Very yummy. Catherine likes Malbec wine, a variety I’d never heard of until getting here.