Buenos Aires is probably one of the most widely-known South
American cities, along with Rio de Janeiro. Although we encountered tourists
throughout our trip, Buenos Aires was certainly the biggest tourist draw of all
the places we visited. In fact, it was the biggest everything draw we visited.
I tend to think of myself as a pretty resilient person,
particularly as a traveller. I’ve taken a long walk home at night through Paris,
shared a two-bedroom apartment with 10 people for a few nights, rearranged
itineraries due to missed connections, and hitchhiked on a deadline. I’m pretty
adaptable. But it has been shown, on occasion, that cities challenge me. I grew up in a city (of 30,000 people). My parents live in a
city (of 55,000 people). Sometimes they drive 90 minutes to go shopping in an
even bigger city (of 160,000 people). And once in a while, they need to run
down to a still bigger city (of 2 million people). But as my planning degree
taught me, cities are now getting so big that they require new words to
represent their size. Buenos Aires is a case in point (13 million people).
If I were to invent a new word to describe Buenos Aires, there's a chance it would be unpublishable. Looking back on it almost two years later, my strongest
memory of Buenos Aires is of feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. The sheer quantity
of people and buildings made for a constant barrage of external stimuli that
drained both of us – though especially me, I think – of our fascination with
our new surroundings. I can recall several times waiting for the city’s very
affordable metro to arrive and hearing my travel companion say, “Nope. Not
getting on that one,” when he saw how crowded it was.
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| Often crowded, always well-decorated. |
Compounding this problem was the fact that no matter how
well we thought we had prepared an outing, it inevitably proved to have more
monkey wrenches in its works than we had realized. We would find museums with lines
long enough to fill the place until well after it closed, bus routes with up to
eight mapped variations that were not indicated on the vehicle as it arrived,
and truly otherworldly traffic.
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| A picture is worth a thousand honks. |
Perhaps the most representative example of our frustration
was our visit to Le Recoleta cemetery, the final resting place of Evita Perón. Until
arriving in Buenos Aires, Evita had been buried in the dusty attic of my
memories of Latin American history courses (she may also be buried in your memories
of the film Evita). I had learned
about the cult of personality around her, but not fully appreciated it until I
saw her likeness popping up around every corner in the Argentinian capital.
Although she died over sixty years ago, she seems to be about as culturally present
as Pope Francis – the first non-European Pope and a native of Buenos Aires.
So we made our way to La Recoleta and began looking for
Evita. Bear in mind, North American readers, that this cemetery was not built
like most of ours. Instead of simple headstones, most sites were filled to
their proscribed limits with a single rectangular stone mausoleum, up to about
ten feet (three metres or so) in height. The half-hearted maps and signage did
not fully eliminate the challenges of navigating the narrow alleyways between
these memorials. When we knew we were close to Evita’s site – a reasonably
well-marked one, we assumed – we kept having to ask for directions. Someone
would tell us it was two alleyways over. Another would tell us it was three
more. Then another would tell us it was back two.
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| How often do you take a panorama of a cemetery? |
I still have no idea where the memorial is because we never found it. Whenever we
thought we had arrived, we hadn’t. By the time we found the next person to ask
for directions, we were so far from where we’d been that we were basically
starting from square one. Maybe she’s not even buried in La Recoleta, and they
just say that to draw tourists. Maybe she moved when she found out we were
looking for her (unlikely). Whatever the case, we were within throwing distance
of perhaps the most famous resident of La Recoleta (a location that trades on her presence), a woman whose face still lights up the widest avenue in the world every night, and we never found her.
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| Evita still watches over Avenida 9 de Julio. |
I realize, of course, that much of our frustration can be
chalked up to our unfamiliarity with the culture. Although my Spanish had
revived significantly by this point in the trip, it did not help us overcome
local nuances in conversation. According to one source – a dual
British-Argentinian citizen at our hostel – residents of Buenos Aires are noted
for their habit of not answering questions directly. Instead, they might simply
state a related, but not directly helpful fact. This claim might be spurious,
as I have not been able to verify (or deny) it since, but it did help ease my
fears that I was simply a bad Spanish speaker.*
However, I do not wish to sound as though I disliked Buenos
Aires. It was a challenging place to adapt to as an outsider, but I realize
that the challenge probably works the other way as well. In a philosophical
sense, the monkey wrenches we found in our plans may have simply added to the
mystique of the place; perhaps Buenos Aires is not meant for clinical execution
of goals, but for serendipitous discoveries (we had a few of those too). As
ever, it’s a question of perspective. Here are a few highlights:
- El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a former opera house that
has been converted into a bookstore with a café built on the former stage.
- Patagonia Sur, a restaurant started by celebrity chef Francis Mallman. I was lucky enough to be treated to dinner here by someone who cares about me very much (and who was thousands of miles away).
- La Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, a coastal nature
reserve that was our respite from the city.
- El Museo del Humor, a window into Argentinian humor that
we discovered coincidentally and that introduced me to Mafalda.
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| One of my favourites from el Museo del Humor. |
Still, after a week of Buenos Aires, a dose of bed bugs (accompanied by a side of denial from our hosts) and a farewell to my travel companion, I was eager to continue on to Uruguay. Hopefully you are too.
*I’d associate this nuance in porteño communication with
others like the Canadian habit of apologizing pre-emptively and the Jewish
habit of answering questions with other questions. Note also that Buenos Aires is where Lunfardo was invented - a dialect that intentionally mixes up syllables to confuse the uninitiated, somewhat like Cockney rhyming slang does with entire words.
