Tour de Tigre and Late Night Life of the Portenos

Travel

Argentina La Parte Tres:

Portenos outside Metropolitan Cathedral, Plaza de Mayo
Portenos outside Metropolitan Cathedral, Plaza de Mayo

At breakfast the next morning an Argentinian guest at the hotel strikes up a conversation with me addressing me initially in Spanish, until he, a little embarrassed, realises his error. Quite a few of the locals seem to think I’m a Latino, until I open my mouth that is! Having inadvertently broken the ice we converse whilst choosing consumables from the buffet selection. He mentions to me that the Argie president (simply known as ‘Cristina’ to the masses) was in the process of having an operation on her brain (I was aware of this, it being the main topic running on the BA news). He said it with such gravitas seeming to infer great respect, but then he applied the sting in the tail, adding in a deadpan tone betrayed only by a trailing chuckle, “Perhaps they will find nothing there!” I ask him if he knew Hugo Porta, curious if El Puma has a profile here in soccer-obsessed Argentina. Yes he does, not so much because he was an international rugby star for the Argentine team, but because he was the Government’s sports minister under the Menem regime.

The breakfast news runs yet another story about La Desaparecidos. A woman is being interviewed on television about her sister who is one of the young Argentinians who was suddenly and mysteriously seen to disappear from society. In South America this is code for ‘abducted’ by the authorities or the military and probably murdered for alleged left-wing activity (defined as subversive activity). The television ‘interview’ comprises the distraught sibling, wailing and sobbing incoherently, pleading for the return of her lost sister. What was extraordinary about this spectacle, was that, despite the woman being largely incomprehensible and reduced to a rambling, emotional mess, the coverage uncomfortably persists, letting the story run live on and on for over half an hour on prime-time TV without cutting it! On Australian or UK TV they would never permit something as indulgent and as loose and unstructured as this to happen, but I understand why it is accepted here. The plight of ‘the disappeared’ is THE emotional issue for so many South Americans, the raw wound for ordinary people which remains unhealed. The lingering issue of La Desaparecidos is the continuing, unaccounted for exemplar of justice denied for so many citizens in Chile and Argentina in particular.

Having ticked the previous day’s city tour off my list of things to do, it was now time to take the excursion to Tigre. The “Eye of the Tiger” tour, as it is called, is a standard part of all Buenos Aires tour packages. Tigre is a town at the mouth of the delta region of the Paraná River some 30 km north of BA and close to the Uruguay border. ‘Tigre’ is a bit of a misnomer, as it was thus named by the early settlers because of the presence of jaguars (not tigers as you might presume) in the region during the pioneering years. The delta comprises many branches (5000-plus waterways in all) linking thousands of tiny islands. We set out from Tigre on a river cat cruiser down one of the main tributary rivers of the Paraná, Rio San Antonio). Our guide for the Tigre tour was a very personable, gentle young guy called Jeremy (Jeremias) who looked like an Argentinian Ferris Bueller. Jeremy was very informative and accommodating, and spoke excellent English, albeit with some delightful idiosyncrasies which betrayed his non-English speaking background, for example, he referred to Canberra as a ‘planified’ city (a real gem!), I didn’t try to correct him, after all the meaning was clear, and the idea of the insular hinterland of Canberra being described as ‘planified’ sounded spot on! Jeremy mentioned that geoscientific experts have predicted that the Tigre islands which under tectonic force, are ever so slowly moving south, will eventually collide with the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires!

Tigre Art Museum
Tigre Art Museum

The cruise went past a number of distinctive buildings on the foreshore, none more impressive than the Tigre Art Museum with its large classical columns, extended upper deck and classy marble staircase. The waterfront along the Paraná contained a number of 19th century mansions, where the upper classes engaged in leisurely activities. There wasn’t a lot of passing traffic on the river as we cruised on it, mostly single scullers doing their rowing practice, with the occasional pilot boat and water taxi. The sight of moored houseboats and smaller ‘family’ boats were very common on the river, given the isolation of delta dwellers maritime vessels are just about obligatory. Other sights that we pass further up the river include a casino, an amusement park and old shipbuilding yards.

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The floating ‘corner shop’

Another distinctive feature of Tigre and common to the entire length of the delta’s waterways is the presence of heavily-laden, wooden provisions boats. More than anything else in the region. these moored boats illustrate the isolated nature of the delta region. With no supermarkets or even shops around, the 3500 or so Tigrean locals rely on these “floating stores”. The supply boats, laden with household goods, cruise from dock-shed to dock-shed, from property to property, enabling the rivers’ residents to stock up their weekly shopping needs. Right along the lower delta there is an interesting array of riverfront houses (all dwellings on the river are numberless but are identified by their own distinguishing names), as well as holiday and camping grounds providing a weekend escape for the Portenos, and heavily wooden parklands, the delta was a traditional source of osier wood used for construction in the capital (the Osier is a willow found in wet habitats). The number of homes on the Paraná raised up on stilts was testimony to the threat of flooding, an on-going reality.

Not just the houses get put on stilts!
Not just the houses get put on stilts!

The river itself was alluvial, exhibiting a muddy brown colour which gave the impression of being brackish, which Jeremy assured us was more to do with the particular sediments in the water rather than any indicator of pollution. The river cat looped round in a circuit past the weird spectacle of Museo Sarmiento, a small house totally encapsulated in a large, transparent glass enclosure, which reminded me of the imposing glass cathedral in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda. From Sarmiento we headed back into the open channel at River Plat, docking again at Tigre Delta Station. I tipped the rivercat captain 60 pesos because he got us back in one piece. The delta excursion was an interesting diversion but not really a riveting tour, and it certainly didn’t live up to the tour provider’s brochure description of the Delta del Paraná experience as a “sensation that cannot be transmitted,” and even more obliquely, “(containing) tiny details that enclose big emotions.” The tour visited the nearby city of San Isidro, which is the stronghold of rugby union in Argentina, stopping off at Puerto de Frutos to visit the dock markets where other members of our tour, comprising mainly Mexican car dealers and their spouses, clicked into bartering mode for a hectic 25 minutes of shopping! Puerto de Frutos, despite the name, seems to be a emporium for bargain domestic goods with a few tourist shops thrown in. The fruit vending side of the markets was nowhere to be seen.

Ocampo
Ocampo

Later, we took a tour of the Villa Ocampo also in San Isidro, the former home of a famous Argentinian woman writer and publisher, now owned and administered by UNESCO. The childless Victoria Ocampo, to avoid the Villa being acquired after her death by the right wing, militaristic Argentinian government of the Seventies, signed it over to UNESCO. Villa Ocampo is a magnificent mansion, quite eclectic stylistically, with various, many French and British, influences evident. During Ocampo’s time, it was a meeting place for many famous intellectuals and writers (Camus, Lorca, Le Corbusier, Tagore, Malraux, Borges, Graham Greene, etc), today it is a cultural centre, a venue for music and the arts. Inside, the rooms are very grand, stylishly decorated with a room devoted to the literature and magazine work (SUR) of Ocampo. As we were visiting, workers were setting up the drawing room for a jazz recital. The gardens (Centro del Paisaje) are extensive (the property is 10,500 square metres in size) and a particular delight, a reflection of the great passion Victoria Ocampo had for gardening, and for the Villa in its entirety. From Villa Ocampo, we connected up with the Av de Liberador (named in honour of the ubiquitous General San Martin whose statutes line the Avenue), the main thoroughfare passing right through the city. At the Tigre tour’s end, after getting some advice from Jeremy on what to see, I set out on foot to explore more of Buenos Aires. Being in the metro central I went first to the nearby Av 9th de Julio, reputed by Argentinians to be the widest avenue in the world. It is very, very wide, but it depends on how you look at it! Within parts of the Avenue I counted what I might call five distinct streets, the two inner ones being restricted to metrobus transport.

The 9th of July
The 9th of July

On coming to South America, and venturing out into the busy pedestrian zones, I soon realised that here, the practice is that you walk on the right of the footpath (a reverse of the ‘down under’ custom). This makes sense, you drive on the right side and you walk on the right, so wherever I walked, I tried to be conscious of this ‘rule’. What I found though, is that the locals in the various cities do not consistently adhere to this rule. Some pedestrians automatically just veer straight across to the left side when it is closer to the shops. Accordingly, I soon adopted the approach of walking in the middle of footpaths to be flexible enough to hop either to the left or right as the occasion required.

Power dressing: 1950s dictator's wife-style
Power dressing: 1950s dictator’s wife style

After traversing 9th de Julio I headed for the Parques district where the Zoo and Museo Evita is. Despite having an electronic assistant (my iPad maps), but because of my poor sense of direction, I managed to get hopelessly lost, and ended up backtracking to Microcentro, where I started from. Trying again, this time using a different route, I did get eventually to the Zoo and close by, the Museo Evita. I passed on the Zoo as it was too close to the closing time & headed for the museum. It had a very elegant interior with a classy staircase, but it wasn’t a very propitious entrance for me, the first thing the girl at the ticket booth mentioned to me was the toilets weren’t ‘available’. I wondered, is this code for ‘not working’? – or for “we only say we have customer toilets on the brochure to get more tourist brownie points”? Either way, after walking halfway across BA, I thought ‘great!’ Museo Evita was a good insight into Argentina’s most famous woman. On display were carefully assembled items from Evita’s childhood, her theatre and movie careers, and of course, given that Evita was a fashionista for millones of Argentinian women, her dresses and outfits (lots of them!). And, very stylish they were. A curious exhibit included in the display was Evita’s kitchen, complete with fake slabs of meat on the griller. The once powerful husband, Juan Peron, does not get much of a look-in, a single bust and one of his military uniforms encapsulates his total representation at the museum. After the museum, I did some more sightseeing around the Palermo district, before heading back in the direction of the hotel. I noticed the widespread habit of naming streets in Buenos Aires after Argentinian generals, they’re everywhere, Avenida General Paz, Avenida General Alvear, Calle General Balcarce, Avenida Díaz Vélez, and of course, Calle General San Martin. There is even the practice of naming streets after cruisers named after generals (the outstanding example of this, geared toward achieving maximum propagandistic effect, is the General Belgrano). Walking down General Las Heras I passed a street named Coronel Diaz, and concluded that they must have run out of notable generals to honour! Something else occurred to me whilst strolling around the city, there were very few priests to be seen on the streets. I had come across maybe one member of the clergy in my time in the Argentine, which seemed strange in the capital of such a staunchly Catholic country. Whimsically I pondered, were priests becoming the new desaparecidos? I stopped off in Av Las Heras for dinner, picking a restaurant that was reasonably busy but not crowded. I had pizza again and a pisco sour (I did not like this South America specialty when I first tried it but by now I was warming to it). I declined the sweet on offer, dulce de leche (I had tried it earlier at the hotel – way too caramelisingly syrupy for me!), but washed the meal down with what is becoming a custom, a bottle of Qualmes.

BA after dark
BA after dark

Walking around Buenos Aires at night you experience a different side to the city. All sorts of things come out of the woodwork after dark. I didn’t have to stray far from my Centro hotel to find the dodgiest parts of BA. Walking down Calle Florida from Lavalle I soon came across the illegal money changers all shouting out “Cambio, cambio” at the passing punters. Usually these street touts quote very good exchange rates for USD, but this can be a risky venture with a fair chance of you ending up lumbered with counterfeit notes. Florida is an area to exercise caution, I was warned that flashing a wad of cash could be an invitation to robbery around here. Along Florida you will also find callow youths on every corner or cross-section handing out their tiny squares of paper advertising either some special pizza deal or certain massage parlour services which may with or without the additional “happy ending”!

Wander a bit further along to Av Corboda, close to Av 9th de Julio, and you’ll soon find the spot where the local streetwalkers ply their trade. It was after 11.30 when I passed a girl standing in the shadow of a door of a closed business who canvassed her ‘recreational‘ services so softly and in such a low-key manner that I virtually didn’t notice her! My second encounter, which followed minutes later contained no such ambiguity. I was waiting at the lights to cross the road, when one overweight, overenthusiastic woman, in a very forwardly way, bounced up to me grabbing my arm and proceeded to try to entice me to accompany her to a nearby hotel for “a little drink and maybe some massage later, eh?” Caught somewhat off-guard by her directness, I fumbled around for several seconds eventually managing to utter some excuse and slipped out of her grasp and up the street. Later I learnt that the ‘sting’ involved enticing the target back to the hotel to fork out for overpriced drinks, before a taxi to a telos (quaintly described by Portenos as “love hotels”). A lot of the night action seemed to centre around Avenida Cordoba and Noveno Julio, where you can experience both the subtle and the not-so subtle approach of the street-stalking girls.

I don’t know why but this seems to happen to me on a regular basis when I head overseas. Perhaps it’s because of my preference for exploring new cities on foot and often late at night. When I do venture out in places I am visiting for the first time I often find that without either knowing where I am or any dubious intention on my part, I end up in the heart of the local red light district! I was similarly accosted by overzealous working girls when I innocently stumbled onto Canton Road in Hong Kong and Ronda Litoral in Barcelona. To avoid more encounters with late night shift workers on Av de Cordoba, I head off in the opposite direction. Needing to make another early start in the morning for the next leg of my trip, I decide to call it a night and return to my not-so-Gran Hotel. I take a circuitous route down Lavalle, noticing that despite it being past midnight the restaurants are all full of people who, revived by a late afternoon siesta, are now tucking avariciously into supersize portions of pizza, parrillada and bondiola. Everywhere Portenos demonstrating the Buenos Aires obsession with late night non-vegetarian dining!

Back in BA: Tango in the fast lane, Finding Evita, La Boca and the Cult of Maradona

Travel

Argentina La Parte Dos:

This morning was my last in Puerto Iguazú but my time of departure had become an issue. The night before Rodrigo had read out the pickup times for airport transfers, I noted that he indicated that my time was 9am, but when I later checked my itinerary provided by Chimu, it said 11:20. At reception I tried to resolve this but they didn’t seem to know (or understand). Before having breakfast I tried phoning the Chimu reps office in Buenos Aires (I had no mobile connection in Chile but my service in Iguazú appeared to be functioning). I couldn’t get through to the Chimu number in the capital but eventually the hotel receptionist did get on to them and confirmed that the original, printed time (11:20) was the right one (Rodrigid the spoiler had struck again!).

As I sat down for breakfast I remembered that I had asked the receptionist to keep my cholera vaccine in a cool place for me (the restaurant fridge), and that I needed to take the last dose before leaving. I stopped one of the passing staff, and motioned towards the fridge inside the bar annex (only a few paces away from where I was seated). The guy ‘seemed’ to get what I was wanted. I waved my room key with the room number 221 on the tag (my vaccine in the fridge was in an envelope marked ‘room 221′). Before I could clarify further, he said ‘Si, no problema senor” and suddenly grabbed the key and bounded up the stairs to my room before I could stop him. I scurried out to intercept him on the stairs, beckoning him back down to the restaurant. I have no idea what he was going to fetch from my room because he had totally misunderstood what I was after! As he was returning, another staff person walked past and I was able to guide her by the arm to the fridge and finally retrieve the medicine. Neither of the staff seemed to have comprehended the word ‘fridge’ (although I didn’t think it was all that remote from the Spanish, ‘refrigador’). To top off this farcical exercise in miscommunication, the attendant guy didn’t return the key to me, instead the dodo leaves it with the duty person at the front desk, so I had to retrieve it later. Grrrrr! After breakfast I filled in the two hours till the departure time by making a last sweep of the Port shops for souvenirs.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The airport at Puerto Iguazú turned out to be LESS than the sum of its parts … and its parts were not all that flash to begin with! I would give it Fs for communications (big surprise!) and for facilities. The check-in baggage staffer told me my flight departure would be 30 minutes late but the Departures screen said it was on time. Who to believe? … such is South American impreciseness! The regular loud speaker announcements, heavily accented and crackling with static, didn’t clear up this contradiction (so inaudible it was impossible to be sure if the announcement was in Spanish or English, or perhaps Spanglish!). When you go through the hand bags and body search point, it was conducted in the old fashion “touchy-feely, nice to meet you” way – no technical aids like hand scanners here). Amazingly, there were no refreshment or snack facilities available inside the airport. Also, no air-conditioning, so you just had to sit there in the heat waiting for your delayed flight. A tin shack structure, but then again, maybe I’m being a bit harsh, on the positive side Puerto Iguazú was probably quite good by Fourth World standard airports!

Chatting with a widely-travelled Japanese female tourist filled in time until the flight finally got off the ground. It was a shortish trip with no dramas but one curious coda. As LA4025 descended into Buenos Aires and the aircraft safely touched down on the tarmac, the Argentinians on the plane, perhaps momentarily releasing their grips on their rosary beads, spontaneously burst into a prolonged round of very enthusiastic applause! They had done the same thing when the plane had landed at Cataratas del Iguazú International Airport on the way into Iguazú. As this didn’t happen with any flights within or to either Chile or Peru, I concluded that this over-the-top appreciation of piloting and navigational skills appeared to be confined to Argentina and Argentinians. Worryingly, I wondered if it said something about the general lack of confidence in Argentinian pilots.

My Buenos Aires hotel, blandly but inaccurately named La Gran, was in Marcelo de Alvear in Microcentre (the hotel diagonally opposite is a drab, one-and-a-half star hotel tongue-in-cheekily called ‘The Sheltown’!). La Gran is close to a square dominated by an imposing statue of San Martin, the especial Liberator of choice, I gather, for much of South America. Before coming to the Americas, based on my superficial grasp of Latin American colonial history, I had always thought this handle had been the property of one Simon Bolivar, but around here, San Martin is the Liberator getting the bulk of the adulation (in BA alone you can find a Teatro San Martin, Centro Cultural San Martin, Palacio San Martin, San Martin Partido, General San Martin Metro, etc, etc). Chile also elevated him to the pantheon of their national heroes with the mandatory plaza statues, but in that curiously-shaped, tiny Andean republic, the exotically named Bernardo O’Higgins monopolises most of the bragging rights as Libertador of his nation.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERALooking around the streets of BA I notice a real cosmopolitan flavour in the faces of the Portenos, compared to the more homogeneous-looking Chileans. Whereas Chileans tend towards a mestizo or native countenance and are shorter in stature, Argentinians, in the capital anyway, tend to have more of a European appearance (Spanish/Italian/German). The women, especially, on the whole are appreciably taller than Chilean women, and with a high proportion of blondes. I observed the cosmopolitan nature of the city within the hotel as well. The bellhop helping lug my suitcase up to the room was a friendly, young Armenian migrant called Haug. I engaged him in an interesting conversation and mention a curious incident in Australia which more than intrigues him (given his ethnic background), the backstory behind the mystifying murder of the Turkish consul in Sydney in the 1990s.

Tango in the street
Tango in the street

In the evening I walked around the square to get an idea of the meal options. I discover almost immediately that my hotel is very close to the BA “red light” district, I have to say I wasn’t looking for this – seriously! Wherever I go I seem to have a knack of effortlessly stumbling in no time into the part of that particular city that houses this, most pliable of trades. I change tack and head down to Plaza Lavalle in Tribunales, where I found plenty of options for dinner. Before dining, I happened upon a nocturnal street performance of tango dancing in the plaza. Portenos call popular tango dances in plazas milongas (where punters can pay to go and take the floor to live music accompaniment), but this was a demonstration by tango enthusiasts who were basically buskers (immaculately and formally-attired buskers it should be said). Moonlight strollers milled around the canvas mat square, some in appreciation of the elegant performers throw money into the containers that had been strategically placed at different ends of the mat. I had positioned myself a bit back from the action, up against the shop front, which seem to earn the ire of the dancers who were waiting their turn for a spin. They loudly exhort me (and other apparent transgressors) to move up to the edge of the impromptu dance floor to get a better view, (more to the point I suspect their motive is to ensure the audience is within reaching distance of the containers!).

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… or pretend to tango!

I selected a restaurant in Lavalle to eat, a pizza place that looked OK, it wasn’t very well patronised when I went in at around quarter to nine (fairly late time for dinner for me), only a sprinkling of customers, but the place looked quite presentable. I had a leisurely pizza and a couple of Quilmes’ (actually I was an inordinately long time choosing the pizza as there was only a marginal different between each one on the menu!). When I finished and was leaving, at around 10:30, the restaurant milieu had transformed, it was packed with people having, and still coming in to have, their evening meals. I was to learn that this was characteristically Porteno in behaviour, as late, even very late (post-midnight) dinners, are the norm for urban Buenos Aireans. Walking back to my hotel close to midnight and seeing how alive the place is, I come to appreciate what I had heard about BA, this is a city that pulsates and parties more and more the later the hour!

25th May Square
25th May Square

The next day is the city tour – our group was guided round BA by a tall, slim, dark-haired young woman who looks as much like a model as a guide. We headed first to the central Plaza de 25 Mayo where Diana the guide-model gives us a rundown on the Square’s critical function as a platform for Portenos to protest against the excesses of authoritarian Argentinian rule. Some of these protests have a ritualistic nature, such as the mothers who regularly gather at a particular spot (an X literally marks the spot!) in the Plaza to stage a vigil, a silent protest with placards against the unaccounted for disappearance of their children (la desaparecidos). Our tour takes in the ritzy neighbourhood of Retiro, the more fashionable, comfortable eastern suburbs such as Barrio Norte and Palermo (which has several parts, one ostentatiously called ‘Palermo Hollywood’), San Telmo, the dockside Puerto Madero (once a rundown slum area now reconstructed as aspirational middle class), and La Boca, one of the city’s tourist highlights. Along with large numbers of visitors, we strolled along the safe part of La Boca, El Caminito, a triangular walkway lined with convertillos (rows of oddly-connected buildings in a dazzling diversity of bold colours), beautiful murals, sculptures, souvenir shops, art and craft markets. In the plaza tango dancers demonstrated their steps whilst visitors eagerly snapped pictures. A popular feature of the brightly-painted museums in Calle Caminito is the presence of dolls on display on the balconies which are caricatures of famous Argentinians. Maradona, Evita and Juan Peron, and other, less recognisable figures, gaze down on visitors from second floor balconies. Maradona worship is of course alive and well in Argentina, and nowhere is this more on display than in the heartland of his former team, Boca Juniors. In Caminito there are a number of similar caricatures in doll or other form which gently and affectionately poke fun at the flawed football maven.

Guys & dolls in Boca
Guys & dolls in Boca

Our BA city tour ended at Recoleta where we visited one of the most fascinating cemeteries in the world, Cemetaria Recoleta, whose most famous expired resident is Evita Peron. For a cemetery, it is a constant hub of human activity. BA Walking Tours advertise their tour of Cemetaria Recoleta as being “fun, comprehensive, in-depth (but not literally”)”. The amount of time that Argentinians appeared to spend here, I concluded that they can’t all be here ONLY to see Evita’s tomb. Many of the curious visitors seem to come to explore its dozens and dozens of rows of vaults in hope of discovering some famous statesman or general (very many of which are interred here), for whatever reason it exacts quite a pull on people. Diana, our ciudad guide, recounted her own father’s experience that he was initially very reluctant to visit when she suggested it, but once there, he ended up staying for five hours! Recoleta is a large, crowded cemetery, comprising countless large vaults and towering monuments, many very old, all tightly packed together in rows separated by narrow lanes. Open space in the Cemetery is at a premium, all the land is taken up with conjoined vaults and monuments, many of which are examples of impressive and elaborate masonry.

Recoleta from the Mall
Recoleta from the Mall

Whilst Argentinian visitors to Recoleta Cemetery delight in discovering the monuments to the famous personages in BA history, the number one objective for the majority of non-local visitors is to locate the burial monument to its most internationally famous resident, Evita Peron. Given that Argentina’s one time First Lady was so famous (and became so much more famous posthumously thanks to the Rice and Webber musical), there is a surprising complete absence of signage pointing the way to her tomb. I used the directions provided by the Lonely Planet Argentina Guide to trace the indirect and convoluted path to Evita’s tomb. I’m pleased to say the book did accurately guide me to the precise location of the tomb. Also surprising, there is nothing special or distinctive to mark the final resting place of Evita, its not gold-lined or especially ornately grand or even large in any way, it is like all of the other family vaults around it. Actually, she is buried in HER family’s vault (the Duartes), rather than in the presidential Peron vault (in fact Juan the dictator is buried separately to Evita in a different cemetery in Buenos Aires! There must be a story in that.) There was no big crowd milling around the Duarte vault, just a constant trickle of visitors coming up for a look and a photo and then quickly moving on. I had a short conversation at the vault with a couple of nice expatriate Persian women who were now domiciled in London. They were interested in Iranian migrants in Australia, I told them how they had split into three distinct camps based along political/religious lines (uncharacteristically of me to go off-topic, I probably hadn’t done this for at least a day!).

Cemetaria Recoleta is home for untold numbers of cats, moggy strays in all manner of colours, shadings and patterns. They look pretty comfortable and settled in this “city of the dead,” I suspect that cemetery workers and the odd local visitor provides food for them. One sight that I came across intrigued me a lot. In one of the lanes, about four rows west of the Duarte vault, there, crammed in between two family vaults, three cemetery labourers were sitting and eating in a tiny box structure (about 2 metres wide by 4 metres long), which was their lunch room! For these workers, there was no sense of distance from the subjects of their labour, even in their off-duty moments.

After leaving the Cemetery I removed to the Recoleta Mall directly across the road from it to have some lunch with two Chinese/American women from the tour. We went to Macdonalds (or, in Spanish America, should that be called Macdonaldos?), the girls enthused about how much better the Angus beef burger was in Buenos Aires compared to California … “Really?”- but what caught my eye whilst we were eating, was that the side balcony of the Macdonalds store offered the optimal, elevated vantage point to get great overview photos of the vast, sprawling cemetery, which I duly took advantage of!

The tour activity that night was a trip to San Telmo to see the Ventana Tango Show. As the result of some random selection process I was seated at a table with a Francophone and frank-talking Gallic woman and a non-English speaking Columbian technician. The Frenchwoman (let’s call her Clare, that sounds familiar), had a reasonable handle on English, was quite loquacious, and she seemed to have a lot of opinions (doesn’t really sound French, does it?). Being sociable, I tried to engage in conversation with the non-English speaker at the table, the Columbian guy, but clearly I was making no headway. Several minutes of frustrating and awkward attempts at conversation ensued. At first, he would appear to follow my question (or at least not look discomforted by it), but whenever I tried to extend this line of enquiry, I would lose him totally.

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Tango Club in Balcarce

Despite these setbacks I was determined to keep the conversation going … somehow. I remembered that Clare had mentioned at the introduction that she was a teacher, or had been a teacher, one or the other, I wasn’t paying that close attention. So I developed this, well, I’ll call it a method for lack of a better word, to get the conversation past the stillborn stage. I would proceed with an opening gambit, a question to engage the Columbian (his name incidentally was Pablo), and then when, inevitably, the conversation would get log-jammed and Pablo would register that blank and uncomprehending look that was becoming familiar, I would turn to the only-too-eager-to-help Clare, and repeat my statement in English to her (with a bit of hand-gesturing and Spanglish thrown in for emphasis). The over-keen Clare would then pick up the threads of my floundering question and try to translate it to Mr Columbia using the limited amount of Spanish she commanded. I would sit back and watch Clare struggling to translate my question with Pablo looking more and more uncertain. Admittedly, this did not get us very far in the direction of a flowing three-way dialogue, but it served to get me off the hook that I had put myself on in the first place! I felt kind of bad for Clare’s discomfort, but I figured that, being a teacher, she would probably view the whole thing as a pedagogic exercise and maybe even relish the challenge! At least that’s what I told myself. And, it did eat up some time while we were finishing our dinner and waiting for the show to begin. When the tango show finally got underway, we were seated right at the front and so had an excellent view of what was an enjoyable performance. But as the show went (and on), I started to get very tired (the comprehensive lack of sleep in Santiago had at last caught up with me), and I could hardly keep my eyes open. The show itself, when I could focus on it for any miniscule amount of time (constantly drifting in and out of the “half-dream room” as I was), comprised tango dancing supplemented by some other auxiliary activities on stage (eg, a comedic performance of rapid fire rope snapping by an urban gaucho). Clare, unsurprisingly, was NOT impressed by these extra-curricular acts. I kind of agreed with her about the lack of purity in the performance, but at that stage I was just happy that it was finally over and I could get back to the hotel.

On the bus returning to the hotels a couple started addressing me in Spanish, when I indicated to them through gestures and expressions that I had no español (or at least, to put a very generous spin on it, un poco español sólo), they apologised for mistaking me for being Hispanophone and switched to talking in halting English. I discovered that the couple were los recién casados, newly-weds from Madrid, this was the second time in three days that I had crossed paths with Spanish honeymooners from Old Castille. In Madrid it must be the “lets honeymoon in Latin America” season, but more to the point I realise that it makes logical sense for Spanish outward-bound tourists to gravitate towards Latin America – for convenience of communication, and out of a curiosity about a geographically distant set of countries which share a common language with Spain but are distinctly different types of societies to it.
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