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Post by ilbonito on May 6, 2010 11:26:30 GMT
I came to Buenos Aires from Sao Paulo (about which I made a separate thread a while back). It was a massive readjustment. The two cities are polar opposites, night and day. Sao Paulo is hideously ugly, but bristles with energy. Buenos Aires is beautiful, but morbid. Sao Paulo has not so much forgotten its history as willfully obliterated it, while Buenos Aires wallows in nostalgia. It is almost as if the city were forever waltzing through a doomed love affair with its own past. It reminds me of that movie “The Golden Compass” where everyone wears top hats and the buildings look 1920s/Victorian and Nicole Kidman plays an arch villainess who dresses like Coco Chanel, but they still have modern technology and electric devices, just called by other names. Buenos Aires is like that. It has vegetarian restaurants and cell phones and gay pride marches and media debates on anorexia and immigration – all the hallmarks of modern, big city life – but they play out against a backdrop that hasn´t changed much since the end of the First World War. Its as if the city took an odd turn somewhere and ended up in its own, alternative reality; one where the 21st century co-exists with wooden subway trains and buildings still drip in wrought iron and naked Classical statuary. Or the clock just stopped some time around 1920, but life went on willfully without it. The city continued on as it always had, unaware that the world around it had changed. Like a Borges story, come to think of it. Buenos Aires is a living, breathing monument to Art Nouveau. Blocks and blocks of it. The whole city looks like this; Or this: Everywhere. All the time. Its amazing. This was my hostel. Check out the antique cage-lift! But the tear in the space-time continuum is mostly strongly felt on the city´s subway ( or “subte”). Opened in 1913, it is one of the oldest in the world, and still trundles around in its pre-modern fashion today. You enter through a rabbit warren of tiny, humid passageways, built to human scale but feeling cramped and claustrophobic today. Each station is decorated with its its own unique pattern of intricate tile mosaics, now cracked or fading. There are no ticket machines, you have to go to a window and buy from a person. Late at night when the sellers have gone home, they just open the turnstiles and you go in for free. And each station has its own Virgin Mary shrine in a corner somewhere, where people bless themselves and leave flowers. It seems utterly at odds with modern life. Instead of blaring advertisements or booming messages about the dangers of terrorism, the stations play classical and tango music, and people come by selling roses. At one station they play retro old Roadrunner cartoons on old-fashioned screens, (what decade are we in now? It certainly doesnt feel like any time since at least the 1950s). The trains on some lines still look like this: You can open the windows and stick your arm out. And at least one station has escalators made of wood! The city that everyone compares Buenos Aires to is Paris. Indeed it purposely modeled itself on the French capital. But curiously, the other city it reminds me of was my own, Melbourne. A much bigger, and much more glamorous Melbourne to be sure, but the basic ingredients are the same. The two cities boomed at the same time (late 19th century) and both are full of ornate, grey buildings and lovingly tended parks. Both cities have largely European immigrant populations (BA is the first place in South America where I can disappear seamlessly into the crowd. Until I speak, everyone thinks Im local, which never happened in Brazil). Maybe thats why I didn´t “get it” at first. When I stopped by Buenos Aires for a few days ten years ago, I didn´t like it. I had come to South America for the exotic; for multiracial crowds speaking sexy languages (for me, Spanish isn´t), for weird jungle fruits and brightly colored birds, all of which Brazil delivered in abundance and Argentina manifestly did not. Buenos Aires doesnt really do “exotic”. But what it does, it does spectacularly well; the pleasure of watching life unfold in a vivacious city drowning in monuments to its past and haunted by an air of mystery. If the past is another country, then Buenos Aires is a border crossing. This time, with a better idea of what to expect, the city seduced me completely. It sucked me in with the beauty of its fountains and plazas, with the intense golden daylight that shines every day from morning until 9 at night. It romanced me with its sadness – all those bright hopes that came to nothing, and mistakes gone unmended (its no wonder BA is said to be the most psychoanalysed city in the world, with more shrinks than New York). And it dazzled me its glamor and its trickery. BA is a brilliant illusionist. It still looks rich, still fabulolus. Its beauty hasnt faded, even if the good times have long since gone. Buenos Aires has gone from capital of the world´s fourth richest country (!!!) in 1910 to an economic basketcase, a city where bad times have become a way of life. And yet its not depressing, not at all. It is bewitchingly, perplexingly, alive; still waltzing away as ever, looking over its shoulder at its own reflection, and hoping the music will never stop.
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Post by lagatta on May 6, 2010 11:40:05 GMT
Well, Argentine Spanish is half Italian anyway. Lovely pics.
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Post by bjd on May 6, 2010 13:53:34 GMT
Funny, I didn't have that impression about BA at all. I came there from Santiago, Chile, so obviously the feeling is different after Brazil. But I really liked the place immediately -- I wanted to go back, which I did 2 years later, after learning enough Spanish to get along.
Ilbonito -- we can do the same as Valparaiso -- you post some pics, then I'll post some too.
And admit it -- it's only one subway line that has the wooden carriages! And if you go to the crappier areas, even downtown, but parts of San Telmo and towards La Boca (which all the guide books warn you against visiting except on that one street), then it's no Art Nouveau jewel.
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2010 14:01:37 GMT
ilbonito. really enjoyed looking at all these pictures. And the way you described it all, it so easy to read and brings it all to live.
It's the kind of place that would fascinate me, something that has not changed much as time has gone on and the world has evolved. And wooden elevators?! Oh no.
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Post by bixaorellana on May 6, 2010 17:39:00 GMT
Ilbonito, I found myself sputtering "but, but, but ..." as I read the first part of this presentation, with its gloriously romantic pictures of elegant beauty mellowed by time. However, you do a great job of expressing why it affected you the way it did the first time. Really, you made me feel the unease of feeling trapped in a Borgesian alternate reality. I can just imagine you arriving there, all young and ra-cha-cha and raring to meet lively South American difference, then finding yourself practically back home in your own sedate city. If the past is another country, then Buenos Aires is a border crossing. ~~ ~~ Your pictures, as always, are such great glimpses into another place. The photos and this statement make me really want to visit Buenos Aires. what it does, it does spectacularly well; the pleasure of watching life unfold in a vivacious city drowning in monuments to its past and haunted by an air of mystery.
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2010 18:12:45 GMT
I have always been attracted to Buenos Aires, probably because it looks so much like "home" to me. I don't know when I'll finally be able to make a trip there.
Terrific visual presentation and explanations as always, ilbonito. Both London and Paris still had wooden escalators until the end of the last century. I loved them, but I very well understand why they could not be kept.
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Post by lagatta on May 6, 2010 20:43:50 GMT
Wasn't there a very serious fire in the London Underground due to a wooden escalator shortly before they were all changed? I loved wooden escalators too - they made a beautiful xylophone sound. Found it - a 1987 fire at King's Cross - a huge station - that killed 31 people: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Cross_fire bixa, I have a friend born in Bs As who is a professor in France now. He bought a little flat in Bs As during the currency crisis and has invited me to stay there any time they aren't using it. Too bad it costs quite a bit to get from one end to the other (almost) of the Americas!
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 0:02:48 GMT
bjd - of course! Its an open thread. The more contribtutions, the more viewpoints, the better And of course, impressions are totally subjective. I'm sure many people have a Buenos Aires that is completely different to mine. It'd be interesting to see how different they all are! I'll post more pics tonight (at work now)
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Post by hwinpp on May 7, 2010 2:27:46 GMT
I've always been fascinated by Argentina and if I ever went to live there it would be in Buenos Aires. Actually, when I think of BA, the first thing I think of is steaks, don't know why...
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 6:39:16 GMT
hwinpp -- that's not so surprising, given that Argentina is known for its meat. Last night in Spanish class, the teacher, who is Argentinian, told us that when she was living with her parents 30 years ago, they ate meat twice a day. A meal wasn't a meal without meat. Things have changed a bit, but I still found their meals meat-heavy and lacking in vegetables and salads. I'll post a few pics of the fancy, Paris-style buildings in the centre, along Avenida de Mayo, which is the main street leading from Congress to the Presidential palace. These are definitely very photogenic buildings, even though they are large, so sometimes difficult to photograph.
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 6:41:27 GMT
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 6:46:52 GMT
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Post by hwinpp on May 7, 2010 6:57:30 GMT
I get a good impression, probably the city center? Does BA have shanty towns like the favelasin Brazilian cities?
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 6:59:01 GMT
One of the best places to savor BA`s trademark wistful-living-in-the-past vibe, I found, was at the city's zoo. Like almost everything else, it was built at the turn of the twentieth century and has hardly been touched since. Our ideas about zoos have changed a lot since 1906, when this one opened. Today, they all about “conservation” and “education”, forever droning on about “endangered this” and “captive breeding that”. But in the good old days, they were little more than elaborate themeparks, selling exotic escapism to the masses. BA`s zoo belongs firmly to that camp. So, you can buy popcorn (with which to feed to the animals), and each enclosure has an elaborate, Hollywood -set- like “theme”. It kicks off in fine style with some classical statuary. Here the god Zeus, in the form of a goat, is attempting to rape a nymph. Just the thing to put the kiddies in the mood for a day out – a bit of interspecies rape, rendered in white marble. Things move on swiftly to the next highlight, the elephant enclosure ( sorry, “Palace of the Elephants”); a kind of bogus Hindhu temple, dedicated to Lakshmi the goddess of love and carved with more mythological statues and fake hieroglyphs. The elephants have been trained to do demeaning tricks, like carrying tyres with their trunks, to win more popcorn. Next: Meerkats in a pseudo-Egyptian temple; The world`s most extravagant rhinoceros house; All four species of South American camelid (llama, alpaca, vicuna and guanaco) in this stable; perhaps supposed to be an Inca temple? And a statue of a black person (!!!!) You know, to go with the other animals. These South American mara, like a nervous cross between a rabbit and a capybara, wander about freely through the whole park. But the animal I had really wanted to see was the one I had traipsed through the forests of Minas gerais for, the giant anteater (known in Portuguese, beautifully, as the tamandua and in Spanish by the less attractive name Hormiguero Gigante ). I knew the zoo had one, because the year before it had made international headlines when it attacked and killed an inexperienced keeper ( the animals have powerful claws, designed to rip apart termite nests, but which can also be used for other purposes if the animals feel threatened or backed into a corner). I guess this was the culprit; it was in a kind of “solitary confinement” enclosure away from the other, smaller anteater (to stop it giving it ideas, maybe?)
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 7:03:58 GMT
I didn't go to the zoo. Did you go to the Jesus theme park, Ilbonito? If I ever go back to BsAs, I plan to go there.
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 7:06:47 GMT
I get a good impression, probably the city center? Does BA have shanty towns like the favelasin Brazilian cities? Yes, it does. They are called "villas" for "villa miseria". My impression is that they are not quite so numerous or deprived as the favelas, but I didn't venture into them to find out. There is one highly visible one behind the central train station. At night, you see impoverished people, often children in rags, wheeling huge barrows down the street, to collect scrap paper and cardboard to sell for recycling. They are called "cartoneros".
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 7:13:09 GMT
I didn't go to the zoo. Did you go to the Jesus theme park, Ilbonito? If I ever go back to BsAs, I plan to go there.No, I didn't make it there either! Great pics btw
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 7:21:48 GMT
When we were leaving BsAs to go travelling a bit, we took the bus from the hotel to the bus station/train station area. Missed the stop and ended up in that slum behind the bus station. Since we were taking a night bus, it was evening and we felt rather uneasy, walking with our backpacks to the bus station, sticking out like sore thumbs! There is such a difference between the area facing the bus station and behind it.
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2010 8:32:02 GMT
Great pictures from both of you! They make Buenos Aires look even more and more fascinating.
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 9:30:57 GMT
I found that there were not that many "sights" in BsAs. It's rather a place to walk around and just look, but among the places listed in guidebooks is the cemetery in Recoleta where Eva Peron and other wealthy Argentines are buried. It's quite small in right downtown. This is a small church just outside the cemetery; Since we went around there on a Saturday, there was an art & handicrafts market in the park nearby
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 9:36:50 GMT
And this is one of the best pictures I ever took -- absolute chance coming down a street in Recoleta. This is one of those occasions where you learn that there is a lot of poverty in Argentina too -- all the people selling things on the street, although not so much around this area.
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 9:55:22 GMT
Hahaha! I love that one! Here is one of my fave BA street pics: The people of Buenos Aires love their dogs. And not the small, yappy ones that make such handy status symbols across the emerging cities of Asia. Argentines like their dogs big and mean; presumably to double as guard dogs as well as pets. But like the inhabitants of big Asian cities, most people in central Buenos Aires at least live in apartments. What do you do with your dog? The solution; you take them out for long, late-night walks (which you often see) or this, you hire one of the city`s professional dog walkers who circulate the streets and parks with whole packs of beasts, often yakking on their cellphones all the while.
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 10:00:38 GMT
And went to the cemetery too: Perhaps fittingly for a city so haunted by the ghosts of its past, Buenos Aires does a nice line in cemeteries. In fact the Recoletta Cemetery- location of the predictably shrine-like Evita grave - is the city´s top tourist draw. But the number 2 cemetery, Chacarita, is also pretty special. Its surrounded by a huge pink wall, and fronted by a park of screeching green parrots and jacaranda trees. As I walked in, my jaw dropped. In this minitiature city of the dead, the mausoleums are laid out on neat plots like houses. There are blocks and blocks of them, all incredibly over the top to Anglo-saxon tastes; acres of marble (white, black and pink), crosses, chained doors (to keep the living out, or the dead in???), roses, Byzantine domes and of course, everywhere, statues. There are weeping marble angels, statues of the dead, statues of Jesus, statues of the dead being embraced by Jesus, statues of Jesus weeping while he embraces the dead… The biggest draw here is the grave of tango god Carlos Gardel – the city´s second most visited dead person – but as so often happens with these “sights”, it was less impressive than I imagined, (although the workmen apparently halfway through exhuming his body added a touch of drama). But that was more than made up for by the flamboyant final resting place of Argentinian aviation pioneer Jorge Newbury (after whom the city´s domestic airport is named). He had died preparing to fly for the first time over the Andes mountains (and having recently flown over the Andes, let me say; respect. I found it terrifying in a 747). My guide book had described the monument as “four hungry condors look(ing) over a supine male form” and promised it was simulataneously “magnificent, sinister and camp”. All I can say is, they undersold it. Because the final resting place of Jorge Newbury looks like this: The pilot is transformed into a winged angel, naked (of course), with fresh flowers sprinkled over his crotch, lying like some sleeping Adonis, about to be ravaged by savage beasts of prey. Newbury was a national hero, and (we can only hope) a raging homsexual, because he was certainly buried like one. You can just imgine all the little gay kids gone to visit their recently passed grandmothers, walking past and thinking “Mummy, I want a grave like that when I grow up!”
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Post by bjd on May 7, 2010 10:25:29 GMT
I think the Argentine taste for over the top cemeteries comes from Italy. The first place I ever saw like that was Staglieno in Genoa. This paseoperros posed for us but these guys were just being lazy and not walking
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Post by ilbonito on May 7, 2010 10:35:35 GMT
Hahahahahaha. The dogs!! Love it. ;D
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2010 14:37:25 GMT
Great pictures! Fascinating place. I want to go and see it now. I never knew it was quite like that. Wow, that guy has his hand full with all those dogs.
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Post by Jazz on May 7, 2010 17:10:28 GMT
Gorgeous thread, thank you both! I think I would be very excited to visit Buenos Aires. ...the dogs, the anteater and the mara...love them ;D
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2010 17:42:34 GMT
Thank god the dogs get along! So unlike an equal number of people.
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Post by lagatta on May 7, 2010 19:37:51 GMT
Did you notice all the cats in the cemetery? They look well-fed - someone must be feeding them.
bjd, many Argentines are from Liguria, the region of which Genoa is the capital.
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Post by ilbonito on May 8, 2010 2:10:54 GMT
Walking around Buenos Aires, looking up at the streets of splendid old buildings, the weirdness and tragedy of what happened here really hits you. You are forced to ask yourself the question that confronts every visitor to Argentina, and I guess, every Argentine: What went wrong? How could a country once confident enough to erect streetscapes like these, falter so badly? Buenos Aires was spectacular, the Dubai of its day. The evidence is all around you. But then…what happened? At the dawn of the Twentieth Century, it looked as if the future would be Argentina´s. Why not? The country was rich. ( Apparently there still survives a saying in French for someone flush with cash, “as wealthy as an Argentine”). It had endless natural resources, vast fertile fields, corn and cows, magnificent cities, roads and railways. The people were well-educated. There were those who thought Argentina would soon be a world superpower, a rival to the United States. It was as the capital of this expected empire that Buenos Aires was laid out, explaining its grand scale. It would be the Washington DC and New York, the Moscow, the London of South America. But of course, that never happened. The country stagnated, and then regressed, burdened by an ever-increasing debt, military rule, pointless wars and economic mismanagement. How did a country so full of promise piss it all away? I went to the “Museum of the External Debt” to try and find out. The museum is in the basement of the University of Buenos Aires´ Economics Faculty and it tries to tie in the growth of Argentina´s foreign debt with the decline of the economy in general. Perhaps aware of the rather dry nature of the material, it takes an interesting, pop-culture approach. Above, a curtain flaps in the airconditioning, showing all the different currencies Argentina has tried and abandoned over the years to curb its inflation. ´ Propaganda poster But the most striking exhibit shows the growth over the years of unemployment. Each statue – of St Joseph, the Patron Saint of working people – represents 1% of the work force, with the unemployed clustered in the centre: Thats a big jump. Notice the smiling President Menem playing golf in the background. (Since then the rate has improved, I think its now about about 10%.) Sometimes the museum employs slightly abstract, kitchy pop art to make its point. It explains - through brighly colored diagrams - the Brady Plan (I dont really get it, but hey , I dont read Spanish). The plan tied the value of the peso to the US dollar. When it was abandoned due to lack of confidence in 2001, the peso plunged 40%, and Argentina was forced to default on its foreign debt, admitting that it just couldn´t pay. It was one of the biggest defaults in history and sent shock waves around the world. The country was in an economic disaster. As the currency plummeted, prices surged. The country´s economic status (as measured by GDP per capita) was wiped out almost overnight, falling back to 1968 levels. Officially recognised levels of poverty went up from 35.4% in October 2001 to 54.3% a year later. The government declared a freeze on bank account withdrawals - noone could had any access to their own accounts, you couldn't withdraw anything - to prevent a run on savings, and protestors hit the streets banging pots and pans and demanding what was, after all, their own money. Here, a TV screen shows footage from the ensuing riots, mounted in a metallic guard. These were used by banks to protect their doors against the surging mobs during the crisis. Elsewhere the numbers simply tell their own story. Nothing else needs to be said. This is the country's foreign debt: In the years since those dark days, Argentina´s economy has rebounded strongly. Things are much better now (although what happens next, in the current climate, is anyone´s guess). Certainly, the country has slid backwards before. The warning from this museum is stark. When I was in high school, the last time Australia was in a major recession, I remember reading shrill articles warning that the country could be “the next Argentina”, a once prosperous country that got complacent, and threw it all away. Of course, thank god, they got that wrong. Since then, the opposite has happened; Australia experienced a 10 year boom and is wealthier than ever. Perhaps its the Greeks who should've been paying attention?
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