Well, Palermo Viejo, actually. But, yeah, that's where I am -- Buenos Aires. Nina and I are staying in a very charming bed and breakfast-type place called La Casa Palermitano where we have an enormous green room with our own bathroom, a built-in heater (it's winter here), and fuckin' WiFi. The proprietress, Lorena, is impressively tolerant of our mangled castellano and has a parrot named Lucas in her office who likes to be petted and wrassled like a cat. (Seriously -- the thing rolls around on her lap with its feet in the air, lolling its head back on her knee and waiting to be scratched on its tummy.) In the mornings we slop our way out to the bright little kitchen next to our room and munch on dulce de leche-infused pastries while we listen to a morning zoo radio show that features the host singing along to full-length pop songs (Radio Diez: El Radio; siempre noticia).
Buenos Aires is, you know, a full-on city, bearing a more than passing resemblance to San Francisco -- lots of medium-sized apartment complexes with boxy, ivy-draped terraces, each with an opulent marble-and-brass lobby. They've got a six-line subway system with free WiFi and trains that come every seven seconds (until 10:30, that is) and a European fondness for carbonated water.
But it's also a long way away! Truth be told, I was a little nervous to fly down. Have you looked at the map? The goddamn country's practically at the South Pole! I had more apprehension than I'm comfortable admitting that it'd feel, you know, physically weird to walk around down there, so far south -- would I feel like I was falling off? (Actual thought.) So I had a small case of the jitters heading to the airport on Friday. But there this funny thing about airports -- all the waiting and sitting and shuffling through metal detectors (and listening to Anderson Cooper express outrage at the hypocrisy of John Edwards for keeping something so important out of public view) is kind of calming. And by the time they've started showing you that little video telemetry display of where the plane is on the Mercator projection, it starts to feel like you're just taking a relaxing eleven-hour trip across town. Which is good, because otherwise I might have started to really freak the fuck out at having to spend eleven fucking hours with my skeleton frame crammed into an itty-bitty coach seat. I tossed and turned and checked my watch over and over again.
Eventually it was over and I got to see Nina for the first time in a month and a half, which was wonderful, and we got to nap for a while and enjoy the comforts of a bathroom that's larger than our living room in Brooklyn. And then we launched ourselves into the streets of Palermo, armed with our Lonely Planets, looking for cheap eats. You guys may remember that Argentina's currency and economy underwent a near complete collapse circa 2000; they've largely recovered, but a USD still buys you three pesos. And so when you're at a fancy-pants restaurant looking at the menu, you get to divide all the prices by three! Shamefully enough, that's part of the draw, at least as far as the guidebooks present it: Eat the best foods for the least money! Sure enough, we went to a fancy place called Bar 6 and had steak and foods from the sea for practically nothing. And it was delicious! That's the other thing about Argentina, or the version of Argentina that Lonely Planet is pushing -- they eat lots of beef and lots of fish and so must you when you're there.
The next day we walked over to Plaza Serrano, a small park west of our hotel, and ate a fancy, cheap lunch among the leafless treetops on the roof of a hip restaurant within view of the other tourist-y venues: Sullivan's, the Irish pub; Crónica, the dive bar; and a place no obvious name but a huge Budweiser sign on the front. We shopped for some clothing-type presents for people, as well as for the right kind of alfajores, which are sort of the national cookie of Argentina? They're a little like mallomars, except without the marshmallows and with a whole lot of dulce de leche. (We ended up bringing back seven (7!) boxes of the ones from Havanna, which is sort of like the Ghiradelli down there...)
Among the stuff we visited:
* MALBA, the fancy art museum. Think the Whitney, both in terms of the scope of the collection as well as the swank part of town it's in. They were running a survey of twentieth-century Mexican political artwork that included a video of a performance artist (maybe) eating his own shit.
* La Casa Rosada, the executive government building in Buenos Aires and the seat of fuerza Cristina. It looks like a pink version of City Hall and has a small museum that we visited that has a collection of presidential and historical artifacts (i.e., canes and cravats) that covers up until around the 1970s, when a military junta with a serious enthusiasm for torture and forced disappearance came to power. Across the Plaza de Mayo is the Catedral Metropolitana, in which Gen. San Martín's casket sits on top of an enormous altar-like structure guarded by a couple of beefeaters and a statue of somebody who might be Athena.
* The plaza in San Telmo, which is not unlike Union Sq. in terms of the vibe and assembled natives. We watched a tango class being conducted in the evening before getting swept up, Pied Piper-style in an impromptu drum parade that we followed to the border of Montserrat. Ate some outside dessert (banana crepes and whiskey ice cream) at a tourist trap named Nefertiti, where a homeless guy sidled up and sold us a copy of the Argentine version of Street News (he pointed out in his pitch that it's a big problem in Nueva York as well) before asking if we wanted to know where to buy cocaina. Later in the week we returned during daylight hours to visit a
* El Cementerio de la Ricoleta, which is where a whole bunch of really famous Argentines are buried -- it's an actual necropolis, with streets and avenues filled with mausoleums, plus a wall around the perimeter where they stuff the coffins of the somewhat less fancy dead people. There were also a half dozen lazy, friendly cats just kind of lying around and taking dust baths. Most of the crypts have windows that you can peek through and a little room with and assemblage of furniture and artwork or flowers to accompany the casket. In some of the little rooms it looked like somebody'd been in very recently to freshen things up; in others, not so much -- broken glass, dust, the leavings of insects and small animals. Some of the crypts didn't even have a casket on display, but there'd be a tiny hatch or stairwell leading down to a subterranean level I wished we could've visited. Hey, you know, corpse sewer. We visited Eva Perón's crypt, which had had a lot of affection / flowers lavished on it. Nina wanted to do some shenanigans and photograph the evidence, but the stream of earnest devotees didn't let up. She did, however, get some pictures of herself in front of the grave of Hipolito Yrigoyen, El Peludo. Afterwards we had nice sandwiches (completa -- which means, apparently, with slices of hard boiled eggs) on pan arabe at a little cafe. While we were eating, an old, fancy lady in a fur coat got her purse snatched and had a bit of a conniption ("!Todos mis numeros de telefono! !Que pena!"), complete with fanning herself, feeling faint, etc. Buenos Aires has had an exhaustively publicized issue with petty crime since the economic collapse -- but from what we could tell, the guy who we're pretty sure took it was a senior citizen himself, limping into the shop and gumming his toothless palate as he snooped around for a moment before limping off down the street. Go figure.
* The National Library, a grim, Le Corbusier building full of weird little port-hole windows and caked with bird shit. We visited an exhibit about Leopoldo Lugones and Alfonsina Storni and argued over whether or not the building's style of architecture was conducive to human existence. I like it. Me parece como un "engineering building."
* Puerto Madero, a working port on a kind of canal of the Río de la Plata. We crossed the Puente de la Mujer, which is shaped like a kind of diagonal spike and is meant, I think, to represent a couple doing the tango. I can see that, actually. There's a sort of national park -- mostly rush-filled marshes -- to the east of the canal on the banks of the river that we couldn't really figure out how to get into.
Thursday, in the early evening, we headed over to La Boca, which Lonely Planet alternately described as being the hip, South American analogue to the L.E.S.; and the scary, dangerous part of town into which no turista must ever go. It's probably one of the more well-known, iconic parts of the city -- the immigrant dock workers that settled there built sprawling shanties out of sheet metal and spare lumber and painted them with leftover paint, which tended to be any color but white. The houses are a kind of bright and pastel rainbow, and the newly-added row of tourist-friendly shops clearly wanted to capitalize on the scrappy, Cinema Paradiso feeling of the place. We wandered slightly out of the pretty parts, to a grimmer, kind of actual shanty town area where there were dogs fighting in the street, and then we went back to the bus stop and rode back to our fancy hotel.
Nina left early Friday morning, but my flight back to JFK wasn't until 8:15 that evening, so I figured I'd take the day to tie up loose ends. I hopped the subte over to the Plaza Italia to check out the Jardin Zoológico. It was only 10:00 AM or so, but the line was long, and when I got to the ticket window, the lady couldn't change my 100-peso note. A lot of other people were in the same boat and had kind of clustered around the head of the line kvetching in Spanish ("es inaceptable" "es una lastima"), but I didn't have the energy or confidence to join the fray, so I wandered around for a while looking for a bank that'd make change. About an hour later, 10-peso notes in hand, I bought my zoo pasaporte and got to check it out. It was great! The first (and maybe best) thing I saw were the little gangs of nutrias roving the park. Like at the Staten Island Zoo, you could buy small bags of "llama food" to hand-feed to the larger quadrupeds, but at this zoo, the majority of the animals were set up to be fed, including the nutrias, which would wander up to you and climb up in your lap to take a pellet out of your hands. Also wandering the grounds were these weird goose-like things that were apparently some type of Muscovy Duck, which were equally friendly, though, as birds, harder to feed. They'd waddle up open-mouthed and kind of tremble their warty beaks at you while making a wheezing noise. My pasaporte got me into the rain forest exhibit, the reptile house, and the aquarium; but the most exciting exhibit was probably the monkey house, where they had a dozen fairly active baboons, doing baboon things exactly like the stuff from A Primate's Memoir. There was a lower-caste male baboon waiting for food pellets to be dropped down the ramp who'd be pushed aside by the dominant male whenever any visitors tossed food his way, as well as an older female baboon sitting by the food ramp on the other side of the cage who'd pat the side of the ramp impatiently (and totally anthropomorphically) whenever the flow of pellets stopped. "Come on. Come on. Food. Right here."
So that was that. We didn't drink any mate, although we wanted to. My plane trip back was as crampy as the trip out -- my seatmate this time was a big futboller type who seemed to have no problem conking out as soon as we'd taken off. I found him snuggling my blanket and pillow after I made a trip to the bathroom, and it took him an hour or so before he realized. "O. Es tuyo," he said.
1 comment:
Sounds fabuloso.
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