Aug. 22, 2011
As we were preparing to leave on our trip, so many people told us they loved Buenos Aires. Valter, a Brazilian tennis pro I know, said, "You will love it, Phil. I guarantee it! You will love it!" After a week on the ground, with perhaps 50 miles walked within the city limits, here are a few reactions delivered with the painful feeling that they may be very shallow observations that I'll later reverse. Still, first impressions are important. So here goes.
First, Buenos Aires is a huge city, noisy and smelly, where beautiful Parisian-style apartments, are sandwiched between modern concrete monstrosities with water stains running down the sides. There are cell phone towers everywhere along with radio towers, water towers and cables spanning enormous concrete canyons of buildings. The city is also relatively flat and its relationship with the bay and the ocean is uninteresting.
The city streets are crowded not only with "portanos" (the people of Buenos Aires and also the name of this blog) but also stray cats and dogs. The sidewalks are tile, often cracked or missing, and you have to dance around garbage and dog crap (though the locals believe that stepping in is lucky). The streets are jammed with small cars I've never seen before made by VW, Renault, Citroen, Ford, Chevy and Peugeot. Motorcycles shoot in between any space and always work the way to the front of lines of traffic,
then blast off as the light turns green. The avenues can be nine lanes wide except the cars don't follow lanes at all. Avenida de Neuve Julio (Avenue of the 9th of July), the main drag, is spectacular. In one direction is a skyscraper draped with the Argentinian flag, superimposed with a portrait of Evita Peron while in the other direction is the famous obelisk.
The side streets are narrow and dark and filled with echoes of voices, dogs barking and motorcycles accelerating. Storefronts are covered with grates or roll down steel doors at night. During the day, every possible shop exists with little pattern; a golf store next to a wine store, bookstores everywhere, a window filled with printing presses and at least three candy and gum stores each block.
These were my initial impressions and they were to be the first layer of my impressions of Buenos Aires. Then, Drew took us to the northern section of the city where they were broad avenues and miles of parks. I felt relieved to have space around me. In one park, owners had brought their dogs, tied them to fences and left them to happily bark with the 50 other dogs in the chorus. I was amazed that, with all the loose dogs, I never saw them fighting. In this area, near Palermo, there were apartment buildings with formidable doors and polished brass knobs I can only imagine the beautiful apartments they hid.
Gradually, I began to appreciate the grand palace-like structures and trained my eye to sort out the hodgepodge of new buildings or shrug them off with amusement the way the locals apparently do we also had several wonderful lunches in corner cafés with tall windows where we could sit in safety and observe the city outside.
The restaurants. We had heard so much about eating in Buenos Aires, but of course we had to experience it for ourselves. The first night, we bought a platter of meat, which the country is famous for with its cattle ranges and gauchos. It was absurdly large and we knew from the start that we would never conquer it. I liked the informality of the lunches better. Seeing the mounds of pastries still available from breakfast. The coffee was served so nicely with a small glass of agua con gas and a few cookies, free of charge, just to make things nice.
Now, the people.
Drew's Brazilian roommate, Thiago, said the people of Argentina are "calm." He was right. The people aren't pushy and they don't always seem concerned about getting tipped. They have a philosophical air to them. The night before we left we saw a group of a dozen women 45 to 60, in a café, drinking, laughing, talking with an attitude that this was what life was for: being together, having friendships, fully engaged in sharing this time together. I loved watching the people greet each other by kissing. I saw a cop coming on duty kiss another cop!
The faces are a mixture of European and Indian blood. There are some blonds but mainly the men and women have dark hair. The women didn't seem especially beautiful at first, as many people had promised, but after a few days I saw it was all about their coloring and their dark, dramatic eyes. Vivian noticed that many of the women had strong noses which gave their faces so much character. The men could look quite aristocratic and intense.
So, did I fall in love with The city? No, not yet. But it certainly was fascinating and mysterious with echoes of Paris, Madrid and Mexico City (though I've never been there). Ultimately, I have to make these comparisons just to describe it better. It is utterly its own city, completely out of the control of any one person, government or group. I can't help thinking how it is a part of this enormous continent so far south in a place I've never been to before. I like to think of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, walking through a park here on a winter day, in his overcoat and hat, hands clasped behind his back, thinking about time and space and the universe we live in. After visiting Buenos Aires, that image kept coming back to me as a visual representation of my reaction to this vast city.
