Ye Old Grand Dame

                    Our city tour of Buenos Aires was quite nice but mainly a drive around to see buildings and such and sometimes get out to look at such, like the generic flower.   But we did get a feeling for the area and realized we weren't going to be looking at great distances to go back and visit anything on our own.  Some of the museums looked interesting.  We had our stop at La Casa Rosada - the presidential home - and a stop at Eva Peron's statue in the park.   We had passed the parliament building on our way in from the airport and our guide did not want to go back to that area because she said a demonstration would be happening later that day.  The household maids were striking for better pay.  Demonstrations are almost an everyday way of life here, she said.  But only on the weekdays as people don't want to mess up their own weekends.  Hmm.  I suspect British trains follow that same reasoning.  

              We found Buenos Aires to be an interesting and bustling city but rather faded.  As if her glory was all in the past and she was just hanging on to the remembrance of her beauty and pride.  La Boca was one of the more interesting areas of B.A.   Like many of South American country capital cities, it does seem overburdened with keeping up with past memories and underwhelmed with the ability to try and fix them.  A lot of graffiti and trash and yet some fantastic efforts at gentrification and beautification.   money, drugs, crowding, crime, lack of jobs, lack of education, lack of medical care, etc. etc.  all of societal problems showing up in most cities these days.  Sometimes just rather more visible than others.

               La Boca:  one stop we made where we got out and wandered around quite a bit .  It is a neighborhood in B.A. where early Italian immigrants, mostly, settled and is now a colorful and vibrant area of restaurants and shops and tourists and more.   So La Boca was quite fun with its murals and colorful buildings (Several stories on the colors, the most popular one we were told is that immigrants used to beg small bits of paint from the ships to paint their dwellings so they got all kinds of colors) and its statues of immigrants hanging off balconies, standing in doorways, sitting on benches.  Most of the early buildings for immigrants fresh off ships were corrugated sheet metal so color was important to try and feel something more homey.    There are still people living there and of course now it is the "in" thing to have one of the old immigrant buildings but was rather commercialized and we were warned not to be here at night as everything closes and more "local color" comes out - which we didn't want to see.

              As we'd just come in this morning, my hubby was feeling the flight and wanted a nap before our evening Tango Show!  This was dinner and a show but it started with our hotel pickup at 9:00 p.m.  - just a half hour before the time where we usually head up the stairs for some reading in bed!  But we were game to try.   There are many venues around the city advertising Tango Show and Dinner.  Most of them start around 9:30 or later.  And we had just arrived that morning.   This was a group thing meaning there were vans all over the city stopping at hotels picking up people and dropping them into large rooms full of tables with tiny stages at the front.   We were checked into our table which was a table for two and fairly close to the front - much better than the seats we had in Rio for the Salsa show (yes, we have seen many shows and most of them somewhat questionable in taste giving more umph to get the tourist dollar than cultural relevance or significance and yet we keep going).

          Dinner was prompt and good Argentine beef - our first.   The room only half filled but then we were on the shoulder season - not quite as many tourists in town.  There is always some entertainment during dinner.  Tonight it proved to be a movie - rather an old timey documentary of how tango evolved from the early Italian immigrants and the famous names of tango which included soundtracks of some of the singing and musical interludes.  I didn't realize that most of what I knew of tango has come from bad movie dancing between spies or wanna be spies.   It was after 10 before the actual dancing started.  Dinner was finished although they were happy to keep serving the wine.  Not sure what I expected but tango was definitely more intricate and vigorous and energetic and leg throwing and bending than I thought.  Plus all the costumes were vintage roaring 20's and Al Capone gangster era style.  It was interesting but with the big dinner, the wine, the room being rather warm, and not much sleep the night before, by 11:15, we were both falling asleep in our chairs despite the vigorous activity on the stage.  So sorry to say, we bailed.  There was probably another good hour left to the show which would have put us back at the hotel at 1:00 a.m. or so.    Someone found us a taxi and we were back to hotel and in bed and asleep by the time the show finished.   Think we got the main gist of the dance and there's no way we'll ever learn it but we do appreciate the gymnastics and intricacy of it more than bad movie spy dancing now.

Icons, Twisted Histories, and Illusions

Traveling to a new place or country, I do not do a tremendous amount of research other than finding tours, if needed, places to stay, if needed, transportation, etc, if needed.  Being a very visual person, I do better reading up on a place after I have seen it and then the stories make more sense and I can picture the famous people of history in the location and visualize the moment.   Usually I do know something about where I am going.  I am going for a reason, albeit increasingly that reason is just "because I haven't been there."  This was not the case with this trip which grew out of a desire to visit Easter Island and became a fly around Argentina and Chile and see what we can in 3 weeks.  

I enlisted the services of SouthAmerica.travel as my agency and throughout, they did a terrific job of engaging local services, hand holding for me, organizing the flights and the cruise, and solving problems that arose.   As I have been my own travel agent for years, it was rather nice to hand over some of the problems to another person.  So the suggestions to add Buenos Aires and fly there to begin the trip was logical and I was quite interested to see B.A. because of Eva Peron.


I must admit that I don't know a whole lot about Argentina history and culture but I knew about her and felt that she was someone worth seeking out information once we got to B.A.  Now I will also admit that most of what I know about her is courtesy of Andrew Lloyd Weber and his musical Evita.  I knew this musical to be a fiction about a historical figure but somehow I did have the idea that the Argentine people did love Evita.


I think they do love Evita but we were about halfway through our city tour of driving around Buenos Aires before we were passing a park with a statue in it which our guide said - almost as we were past - that it was a statue of Eva Peron.  STOP.  We had already stopped at the generic flower - this monstrous metal flower with petals that open and close between day and night.   Our guide was very taken with the flower.  But this was the very first mention she had made of Evita.   The driver was quick to pull over and stop so I could get out and take a photo.  I must admit, she didn't look anything like Madonna.


 

Perhaps I should have said something to our guide that I'd like more information regarding Evita but somehow I just kept thinking it would come out in a gush of love and pride.   nope.  didn't happen.  We did go to La Casa Rosada though, which is their presidential palace, The Pink House, and she did point out where Evita would stand to give speeches.  She had two places, a larger balcony where the ministers would also be gathered and then a smaller balcony when she was just speaking or was just with her husband.  good to know.  And at that point we also found out that she is buried in Recoleta cemetery where we had gone earlier in the day to try and find her grave but had been unsuccessful because I hadn't even thought she might be buried under her real name of Maria Eva Duarte de Peron.  She's in the Duarte family crypt.

So my impressions of Buenos Aires were colored by not finding much on Evita.  It was still quite an interesting city and we saw some great things, had some really good food but my history lesson of that huge city shall remain very much in the illusion of Evita.  Probably didn't help that I kept singing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" the whole time we were walking around.

Recoleta Cemetery and Watcher Cats

This particular blog is for Sci Fi fans / perhaps Sci Reality fans.

Flying into Buenos Aires, we were picked up by our guide and taken to our hotel.  As it was fairly early in the morning, they had thought perhaps we'd take a nap or something before going out for a tour of the city in the afternoon.  no,no,no.  Can't do that if you want to avoid jet lag.  We'd made sure we had our room available in the morning so we could take a shower.  Not happy to arrive somewhere and have to sit in a hotel lobby for a few hours before we can get clean or wander around waiting for a shower.  really like being clean which is certainly one reason why we don't camp so much anymore.

     Anyway, everyone had told us to go to Recoleta Cemetery which was just a block away from our hotel.  Said it was the oldest and best cemetery in the city.  As cemeteries are always picturesque and interesting, sounded like a very good idea to us.  Showers, breakfast, then out on the streets of B.A. - singing in my head the soundtrack from Evita.


Of course, we managed to go the wrong direction so ended up walking totally all the way around the cemetery before we found the entrance but that put us walking past the Church of the Divine Pillar so we went in there for a look.  As always, a good Catholic church with amazing decorations richly covered in gilt and gold and silver.   Also we could look out the windows into the cemetery.


Finally into the cemetery which is surprisingly large with many little walkways and turns and might be easy to get lost.  Also many old crypts and mausoleums and tombs.  hardly any grave sites with just a grassy space and a small headstone.  All massive with carvings, cherubs, stained glass, weeping angels, the Virgin Mary, other religious ornamentation, plaques, memorials,  marble, concrete, porcelain, brick, and other materials.  Just wonderful to wander through and see how revered some tombs were and how sad others were in that no one was coming to visit them anymore.  Yes, some places were brilliant in their shine and gloss and being kept clean and polished and then others, mostly very older ones, must have lost all remaining family members so no one comes to visit and the tomb would slowly be fading away - dirty, neglected, and grown over somewhat with weeds.   All fairly typical of most cemeteries that are very old.  broken masonry and faded out lettering.  


    You may have noticed I mentioned weeping Angels.  For Doctor Who fans, you know what I am talking about.   But I believe we stumbled upon a secret weapon.  As there are many people wandering the cemetery every day - many tourists, groundskeepers, historians, family member, etc, it would be a hey day for the weeping Angels and some people would not  know to keep their eyes on the Angels.  We discovered quickly that there is a large population of cats living in the cemetery.  They weren't all prime specimens, some a bit beat up and show signs of heavy wear.  But also, someone is taking care of the cats.  There were signs of  food bowls out in many places and we saw some of the cats having their breakfast in doorways of crypts.  Many of the cats were happy to have a quick pat on the head from us, seeming to recognize "cat people" - which we are.

We have long recognized that cats have powers.  Ours always warned us if a large earthquake was imminent (when we lived in earthquake country).  And many times cats will chase the Dreamerlies - ghosts that flicker through the house and the cats chase them away.  So we were pretty sure here that the cats are tasked with keeping eyes on the weeping Angels.  If anyone wonders why cats spend so much time sleeping, it is because their jobs are so arduous - Disaster warnings, ghost chasers, Angel watchers.  And who knows what else.   

So ha ha you might think, what a silly blogger, but have you ever been in a cemetery without a cat somewhere in residence?  Has your cat ever run through your house for no reason that you can see? Is your cat nervous before an Earthquake?  Sci Fi?  hmmmm.