Graffiti in Recoleta

I observed this graffito, presumably by a tagger named "Rouz", at the base of the Biblioteca National:



Here's its neighbor. I don't know if this is also the work of Rouz. But the term "Love Killer" reminds me of the famous photo of William Burroughs in which he's dominated by the legend "Life Is a Killer."



This graffito (which, in case it's not clear, reads "Peronismo Militante", or, perhaps obv., "Militant Peronism") is from a wall next to a vacant lot along Azcuenaga, an area that's nowhere near as scary-looking as this nighttime photo (one of the few nocturnal iPad pix that actually worked out) makes it look. It's clearly a reference to one of the sixty million variants of Peronism, though I can't tell if it's meant to be ironic, because...



It appeared next to this other graffito, referring to Argentina's current (and weirdly hot for a head of state) president, Cristina Kirchner, who is by no means a militarist. But as I plan to explain in a future post, my understanding of the incredibly confusing jumble that is Argentine politics grows less clear with each successive attempt to understand it, so the truth is really that I have no idea what these graffiti are meant to express.

DF, el Lector

This past Sunday, two facts emerged that lay sharply at odds with one another. First, it was an unseasonably gorgeous, sun-drenched day here in the Bs As. Second, the resfrio that I'd felt coming on slowly but surely on Thursday had finally effloresced into into a full-blown, and really quite wicked resfrio, which left me riven with resfrio-related fatigue of the illest sort and disinclined to do the sort of thing one typically does on an unseasonably gorgeous, sun-drenched day (e.g., sit outside, go running, &c.).

Nevertheless, I summoned the energy to hop on a colectivo and hoof it down to one of my fave health-food establishments, a sucursal in a cadena known as "Tea Connection" (yes named in English not in Spanish, perhaps because Ingles is more strongly associated with health, which is, all told, not unreasonable), and partook of a large licuado (mixed-fruit drink carrying all manner of vitamin C) as well as something else that was conspicuously not the delicious but not particularly healthy standard Argentine troika I'd been consuming theretofore (e.g., steak, empanadas, pizza).

My spirits and sense of physical health lifted by aforementioned repast, I resolved to walk back from Palermo to la Recoleta, and in so doing passed by one of my favorite spots, which the Broad Readership will find herein depicted.



This happy spot is the Plaza del Lector, a well-kept park located in the shadow (quite literally) of the Biblioteca National (see looming edifice pic #3 below), along (but elevated above) Av. Gral. las Heras (one of the main drags of the area, and the street that connects Palermo with la Recoleta, and a street I've found myself walking along perhaps more than any other).



I was fortunate to find a spot on an unoccupied bench in the Plaza del L., and shared the next hour or so with various lounging Argentines, all of whom were drawn outside by the unseasonable and fortunate warmth and sun.



I hesitate to make cultural generalizations, but I think it's safe to say that Argentines are more into this kind of activity--sitting and relaxing with no particular aim or purpose--that us Estadounidenses. As an Arg colleague observed about such sitting without temporal or purposive constraints, "I like to just sit and let life pass by."

The notion of letting life pass by without doing anything constructive gives me something akin to the incipient fantods, as I'm a classic estadounidense who feels that time is only used well when it's put to a constructive purpose. So perhaps it was national-mood-by-osmosis that allowed me to pass an hour or so sitting on a bench in the P. del L. with the Bonaerenses, reading (DFW's The Pale King, btw, the subject matter of which is actually acutely relevant to this whole theme of how time passes and what to do with it; cf. also Swann's Way (obv.)).



And in the vanishingly unlikely event that you're at all interested in what I do on Friday nights here in Bs As, when others are out with friends and/or loved ones enjoying the city's legendary evening life, consider the above pic: It's the Cafe del Lector (are you getting the "Lector" theme, B.R.? and are you getting that this means "Reader" and is nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter, though now that I think about it the choice of his last name was likely not coincidental, and I certainly don't like the association), where they have pretty good steak and a kind-hearted Peruvian waitress who puts up with my endless questions about Spanish and does not bug me when after eating my de rigeur Fri eve steak (a ritual that is kind of really extra-unacceptable for a Roman Catholic, when you pause to think about it) I spend hours at table reading various things on my beloved and now miraculously self-repaired iPad.

But I suppose if you don't want people sitting and reading in your cafe all hours on Fri eves., you shouldn't call it "del Lector," verdad?



P.S. You may recall the Biblioteca National from my earlier reference to it as the former site of the Arg. presidential palace during the days of Juan y Eva Peron, and the subsequent rumor that the libe's stacks are haunted by the ghost of Evita herself. For the record, I have not seen any ghosts of ex-Argentine lady presidentes in situ, though I'll be sure to update should that change.

I went to Uruguay yesterday

Yesterday, I went on a trip to Colonia, Uruguay. Colonia is right across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires, though "Right across the R de la P" is a little deceptive because the Rio is huge and vast, really more like a sea at times, and you actually have to take a ferry for like 45min to get from Bs As to Colonia.



Taking the "BuqueBus" (ferry) from Bs As is more involved than the usual ferry trip because it technically involves international travel. The station for the B-bus is elaborate and really quite beautiful. You have to go through customs before boarding the B-Bus, and both Argentine and Uruguayan immigration officials stamp your passport, which is quite exciting if you're a fan of passport stamps as I am.

The BBus itself is enormous and fancy, like a really big living room on the water, and there's a big duty-free store as well as wi-fi. I was tempted to buy much-needed sunglasses in the duty-free area (having lost my brought sunglasses within .03 seconds of arriving in Arg), but decided against on cost grounds.

I did, however, purchase and eat a duty-free Snickers. It really satisfied, as the old ad campaign justifiably promised.



We disembarked in Colonia, and officially set foot in Uruguay. I could see signs there of what I've heard differentiates Uruguay from Argentina (and certainly from Buenos Aires): It's more rural and there's more of a native influence. Possibly related, yerba mate consumption is enormously common. I lost count of pedestrians strolling around toting the telltale gourds with steel straws.



Colonia itself is small and quaint and lovely. There are cobblestone streets with dazzling flowers, and old, low houses dating to colonial times (many of which have names rather than street numbers). I found myself stopping to take iPad pixes, with differing degrees of success, constantly.



We ate lunch at a parrilla right by the water. I had all manner of strange grilled meats: kidney, blood sausage, ribs, and some other kind of non-blood sausage. It was delicious and so plentiful that I could not finish it.



The weather was perfectly temperate, which, I'm told, is borderline-miraculous for winter. The sky was clear and cloudless, and the air was cool but so not-cold that I walked around jacketless, even along the shore, for much of the day.



After lunch we walked around the town square and occasionally looked into arts and crafts shops. There were more sun-dappled views of squares and sparkling ocean vistas than my iPad can do justice to. At one point I sat on a stone bench outside and read for like an hour, though I may have been asleep for part of that time.



Not being a fan of arts and/or crafts, I wasn't tempted to buy any of the aforementioned (and pictured). I did, though, want to pick up a Uruguay soccer scarf as a souvenir. They (as well as pale-blue Diego Forlan jerseys) were on sale everywhere around the time we arrived because the Uruguayan national team was playing Penarol in a friendly match (apparently--I can't find a report of the game anywhere).



But when I was walking back to the BuqueBus terminal later in the evening, the game had ended and all the scarves were gone from the stores on the way back. So I didn't end up getting a Uruguay soccer scarf after all.



That was my trip to Uruguay.

River Plate 1:1 Colon de Santa Fe

At the end of last Sunday’s trip to the estancia, our bus was briefly surrounded by buses full of rowdy River Plate fans. They leaned out the windows, singing songs and waving flags and gesturing at us. River Plate was playing Colón de Santa Fe that night in a rare Sunday night fixture, it appeared. This led to the rebirth of a discussion that many of us in the program had touched on before: Should we go to a soccer game while in Buenos Aires?

The real question was actually, could we go to a soccer game in Buenos Aires (since obviously the members of the group inclined to attend clearly wanted to go to a soccer game in Buenos Aires). This was up for question because many games are sold out, tickets via resale can be expensive, etc.

Asking locals about how to get into the River Plate game yielded answers along a spectrum from “Don’t try to attend because there will be no tickets for sale save for those available from evil gouging resellers, and even if you do get in, you’ll be sliced from thorax to genitals by crazed hinchas” to “Take a cab to the stadium and buy some of the plentifully available tickets on offer there; you will have a pleasant and memorable time.”

About eight of us decided to cab over to the el Monumental to try our luck. We took two cabs and were dropped off about a half-mile from the stadium. As we approached el Monumental (capacity: 80k), we could see the lights and, much more impressively, hear the roar of the hinchada in the upper end of the stadium.

After some confusion, we managed to find our way to a ticket window, where the seller explained that great seats were on offer for the equivalent of US$60. This seemed steep, and just about cashed me out, but for a once in a lifetime chance to see one of Buenos Aires’ legendary clubs in action, it seemed well worth the outlay. We all coughed up the requisite dough and headed on in.

At this point it should be clear that between the two extremes people had predicted (certain death and a happy, pleasant time), our experience of the game was much, much closer to the latter than the former. Our seats were in a lower section of the stadium, in view of but not in the section with the hinchas, and any paranoid fantasies of unchecked mayhem were immediately put to rest. Though most of the fans were scowling men in their 20s and 30s, there were a fair number of old dudes, women, and even families including little kids. Hardly the kind of bacchanalian Mad-Max-style Thunderdome some of the tamer locals had predicted.

That said, the atmo was much less streamlined and sanitized than what one normally gets at a US sporting event. Our seats, all eight purportedly together, were all taken by the time we arrived, and we ended up sitting separately in other random empty seats. There was lots of smoking and standing to yell (even standing is banned in a lot of English stadia these days), and the whole affair reminded me of Nick Hornby’s description of his first experience of soccer back in 1960s England, before stadia had been turned into something closer to family-friendly amusement parks. There was an appealing untamed scruffiness about the experience that lent an authenticity and rawness that lacks at, say, gleaming indoor NBA arenas or luxurious, sparkling NFL super-venues. It wasn’t anything like chaos, but it was a tad more dog-off-its-leash than the contemporary, obsessively ordered sports experience one gets in the US and even Europe these days.

None of this moderate disorder compared, of course, to what was going on above and to our left in the northern (?) end of the stadium where the River hinchada stakes out its territory. What turned me from a casual observer of soccer into a much more serious fan ten (!) long years ago was the experience of attending the Amsterdam Tournament in summer 2001, which featured Ajax, AC Milan, Liverpool, and Valencia. But more than that, it featured the fans of each team, whose massed intensity made an indelible impression on me (esp my ears, which were ringing thanks to the relentless singing of F-side as though I’d been to an Ozzy concert by the time I left).

It’s said that Argentine hinchas are the most intense in the world, and I have no reason to doubt it. We’d heard them clearly (and loud) as soon as we got anywhere near the stadium (as soon we saw the lights of the Monumental, really), and throughout the game they provided a constant, roaring soundtrack to accompany the on-field action. The hinchada takes up the entire upper north part of el Monumental, and must number several thousand. What’s most impressive to me is the group organization that they manage. Despite being so numerous and rowdy (and, I suspect, drunk), the hinchas manage to coordinate their songs well enough that even I could make out some of the words. The hinchada experience always looks exhausting, as they’re constantly jumping up and down, and/or waving their arms in the air with a peculiar loose-wristed hand-flick and/or brandishing red-and-white flags and/or bobbing enormous red-and-white umbrellas (this latter striking me as kind of adorable rather than threatening).

Oh, and there was a game, too, though as you can tell the hinchada was more interesting (though sadly I don’t have pix, not wanting to tempt fate even more by taking my iPad to the stadium; for some good indications of what the River fan group is like, go here and here and here). The context: River Plate is one of Buenos Aires’ two great teams (the other being Boca Juniors), but they’ve had a bad season and needed badly to get a win to avoid relegation to the second division.

In the first half, River had more possession but very few ideas, as Colon (who is mid-table, and thus has no reason to play hard to win or lose, since they don’t have a chance at the championship but also aren’t at any risk of being relegated) more or less played a patient defensive game that succeeded in snuffing out all but one really good chance for River. When River missed this chance, what seemed like a sure goal about to happen in the waning moments of the first half, the assembled folks in my area were moved to apoplexy. One man stood for a good minute after everyone else had settled down and swore full-throatedly at the players until the people around him calmed him and made him stop.

Given the context, the mood of the fans in my area was neither excited and happy, as you’d expect for a team that was successful or promising, or indifferent, as you’ll find at many mid-summer baseball games played by average teams where people are really there just to have a baseball experience and not because they care about the result. Here, the fans resembled people who are waiting in a hospital for the outcome of life-and-death surgery on a loved one. There was much in the way of pacing, and grimacing, and tortured exhortation, and skyward gazing, and general conspicuous group suffering.

This all was, obviously, awesome. I found myself pretty strongly wanting River to win too, and when the second half started and a defensive breakdown by the home side let Colon prise their backline to score an easy goal for a 1-0 lead, I felt some share of the disappointment that the locals felt. (Interestingly, when Colon scored, my section reacted with stunned, stoic silence, while the hinchada—which was mid-song at the time—got even louder in an act of emotional defiance.)

The aforementioned hand-wringing &c got worse and worse as the game went on. I don’t know the details too well, but a loss would all but seal River’s place in the second division, while a tie would at least give them some hope. Then, about ten minutes from time, a long pass led to some chaos in the Colon area, and River forward Ruben Caruso (I learned later) lasered a loose ball high into the roof of the goal to knot matters at one-all. The reaction was more relief than unadulterated joy. Caruso’s goal had turned a pending humiliating home defeat into a slightly less gutting result that kept alive, if barely, their chances for staying in the first division.

Caruso’s goal ignited something in the River eleven, and for the first time that night, they began to play with creativity and purpose. In the remaining ten or so minutes (including a very generous allotment of extra time from the ref) they carved out a number of chances, including two consecutive chances that flashed in opposite directions diagonally across the face of goal, each seeming to miss by inches, and whipping the crowd into a frenzy of frustration and denied-joy.

Then, it was all over. The River players tromped off the field right in front of us, and there were more whistles (the Arg equivalent of boos) than cheers, though Caruso himself walked separately from the main group (because he was being interviewed by a news reporter) and received more or less unadulterated, if not particularly thunderous applause.

We had to wait about twenty minutes while they ushered out the Colon fans (presumably to avoid any aggro), and then we all streamed out of the stadium and into the cool Bonaerense night.

Goals and highlights of the game here.

A Random Walk Down Av. Costa Rica

La Avenida Costa Rica is a street in Palermo Soho that I'm very fond of. Today I went there hoping to try a well-reviewed sushi place (and, in turn, to mix up the old diet a bit, which has been a bit overloaded by delicious though heavy Argentinian specialties).

Desafortunadamente, the sushi joint was closed, but the trip wasn't a total bust. For one thing, it allowed me to improve my understanding and usage of the local buses (called "colectivos" for reasons that continue to escape me, and about which I'll write more later).

The day was also clear enough that I could continue practicing taking pixes with the iPad. Here they are.

This is a willow tree, right? I seem to remember that willows are supposed to weep, and that seems metaphorically accurate for this tree. The storefront is a pretty good example of the kind of fashion-boutiquey kind of place that characterizes Av. CR (I have no inclination to patronize these stores, but they are interesting to look at, and into).



This sign appears to be in Italian. It may be some kind of reference to the famous line from Dante's Inferno that is the epigram for The Waste Land (abandon all hope, all ye who enter here), but then again I may well be wrong about this on all fronts.



Another physically attractive storefront. Note the two oldsters in the lower right checking out DF using his iPad. (NB: "E" is for "Estacionar," which refers to parking, I think.)



Intersection of Av. Costa Rica and Av. Gurruchaga. Sa Giara is a Sardinian restaurant that I think is kind of famous. I haven't been.



Ever seen cobblestones up close? Well, have ya, punk?



Avs. Costa Rica & Gurruchaga, opposite side of the street. You can't see it, but there's a boutique called "Amsterdamn" featured here. This amuses me because 10 (!) years ago when I was living in Amsterdam for the summer working on a Let's Go travel guide, a running joke btw me and the other writers was that "Amsterdamn" was such an obvious, overused, and lame play on words that we'd automatically not include it in the guide.

Walking in B.A.

It's been said by the band Missing Persons that "only a nobody walks in L.A.," which is after all DF's native city. But this admonition about loss of identity is pretty LA-specific, and does not apply at all to my city of current residence, la Cuidad Autonoma de Buenos Aires (oft abbreviated as "CABA").

On the contrary, walking here happens often and with a robust flair that says much about the city itself. For one thing, the timidity of LA walkers (who will stay on a corner for a red light even in the absence of any discernible traffic, out of justifiable fear of jaywalking citations) stands in razor-sharp contrast to the unadulterated brazenness of Bonaerense walkers, who purposefully jet into busy boulevards at pretty much any time that they're not going to be taken down by an oncoming vehicle.

This photo epitomizes the aforementioned brazenness:



The gentleman in the picture is crossing the street immediately beneath a clear (and, so far in my experience, truly unique) sign reading "Pedestrian crossing prohibited." I had actually extracted my iPad to take a photo of the person crossing the street underneath the "don't cross the street" sign before him, who was a frail old lady (but I remain slow on the draw in terms of using my iPad as a camera, due to its bulk and to my tendency to keep it securely locked away in my bag at all times out of concern for theft).

(It is not my fave image epitomizing Bs As-ian street-crossery. This was an elegantly dressed woman, clearly some sort of professional, who wandered out into a crosswalk against traffic, all the while talking on her cellphone. In the middle of the crosswalk, traffic began to swirl around her, with cars and even a bus coming within mere feet of her. She calmly talked on her cellphone while the traffic maelstrom happened, and then when it passed, finished crossing the street. I was too mesmerised to even think about extracting the iPad for photo purposes.)

Nor does the locals' enthusiasm for rampant jaywalkery slow traffic, because if there is a rule that Bs As drivers have to defer to piatones (pedestrians), it's certainly not observed. Cars whizz through crosswalks as though they didn't exist, and walkers seem unfazed by this. On one of my first day here, I was crossing the street (with the light, obvs.) when a car suddenly came from my right rear and crossed in front of me by only a yard or so. Stunned, I looked around to see if others had registered my near-death experience. Looking back, I am not surprised that they didn't.

I've since happily embraced these less restrictive, and far more exciting, street-crossing norms. Now I have a sense of comfort with the much greater proximity that people and cars have (he said, realizing this was a scary act of fate-tempting or possibly even negative foreshadowing), as well as its analogue when driving in a bus or cab (where vehicles drive quickly only inches from one another, and with no apparent difficulty or road-rage).

This is all consonant with another overarching theme of my time here, which is the much more lax approach to rules and law that Argentines appear to have. Several locals have, sua sponte, lectured me about how their country is not honest. This is usually about government corruption, but also has individualized analogues, such as the prevalence of pickpocketing and the generalized fear people have of having their bags or valuables snatched from tables. (When you're at a cafe and you go to the bathroom, you have your compatriots put your bag or iPad on a chair next to them. Leaving a bag on an empty chair--even with other people at the table--is considered an invitation to theft.)

This laxity in rule enforcement is an apparent sticking point for Argentines everywhere. People do bad things all the time, and no one gets punished, really, so people keep doing bad things, whether kinda bad (petty theft) or really awful (high-level governmental corruption). In comparison, the Argies have said, Americans seem naive. Example from a local: In the US our newspaper machines on public streets allow you the chance to take all the papers after paying a quarter (or whatever--and do these machines even exist still?), but people are generally honest and take only a single paper. My compatriot explained that in Argentina, everyone would take all the papers immediately and without any compunction. "It's just not an honest country," he said, "You get away with whatever you can."

Graffiti in Palermo

Palermo is the district next to Recoleta, and ranges from fashion-house fancy to down-at-the-heels. Somewhere in between these two I took the following two pics, near the intersection of Costa Rica and Gurruchaga.

This one is a fish, obviously, though it appears that this fish is being ridden by a small child with a snorkel (presumably so the child can breathe):



This related graffito appears to be Aquaman, though the dollar sign near his hand makes me think there's some political reference (presumably to corruption) that I'm not getting:



And yes, I'm posting these as much to show off my improving iPad-photo-taking skillz as for their intrinsic interest.