Saturday's Tour

The delay on this post is due to the fact that I didn't want to do it without pictures, and I was too lazy to get around to loading the pictures before right now.

Saturday all of the people in the program who had arrived so far met up at a pizza place across the street from where most of our classes are - "La Continental". Sidenote: all of the pizza that I've seen here is made with like, 5 pounds of cheese. But anyway, as Anna and I had gotten here a day early and had thus not been driven from the airport by the program people, this was the first time I met Viviana, the main coordinator of the program. I also met most of the other people who are in the program - there were a few that trickled in later on due to rescheduled flights, etc, but this was definitely the majority of the group. I still don't have all the names straight.

After lunch we were shown where to meet for our Spanish classes which would meet Monday (today), and then we were put onto a small tour bus with our guide, a professor of Argentine history at the University of Buenos Aires. The bus took us first to the Plaza de Mayo, which I had seen before, then into San Telmo, which so far is probably my favorite neighborhood that I've seen. It's quiet and very old, with cobblestone streets and old, Mediterranean - style houses. After consulting my guidebook (as I could only understand about half of what the tour guide was saying) I learned that San Telmo used to be where the richer and more elite of the city lived. There's a strong Italian influence on the whole city, which can be seen especially in the San Telmo architecture. San Telmo, apparently, was Buenos Aires's richest neighborhood until disease struck in the early 20th century, and everyone who could afford to move out, did, leaving San Telmo to the poor. The big Mediterranean houses were converted into smaller apartments and shops, and eventually San Telmo turned into the place where lots of artists and musicians and general bohemians made their home. Basically it's awesome.

From San Telmo we drove to La Boca (passing the gigantic stadium that's home to Buenos Aires soccer team the Boca Juniors), which was the most touristy place I've seen yet. For example: instead of dancing in the streets, which is touristy enough, the only tango dancers that I saw in La Boca were posing for pictures for tourists. La Boca was cool, but the neighborhood is very poor and as a result you're advised to stick to pretty much just a two-block area, which is a huge tourist attraction and is thus heavily patrolled by police. The buildings are beautiful - old and really brightly colored. I'm not sure if this is true, but I think I read that the reason the buildings are colored the way they are is because the inhabitants of La Boca were too poor to afford to buy paint, so they used whatever colors were left over from the nearby port. Leaving La Boca, the bus took a back route, I think on specific instruction of our guide. I think he realized that from what we would probably see in our time here, we might see Buenos Aires only as a cool, cosmopolitan city - I think he wanted us to see the poverty too. It was tough to look at the conditions that the people were living in as we drove out of La Boca. Houses were basically lean-tos made out of tossed-aside boards and pieces of metal. I don't know - I find it difficult to describe.

From La Boca we drove through Puerto Madero and Microcentro, and our last stop was in Recoleta, where our tour guide actually left us. I can't imagine more contrast than that that existed between Recoleta and La Boca - Recoleta was beautiful, full of parks, clearly the wealthiest neighborhood that we had seen so far. The main site here was the Recoleta cemetery, which was like no cemetery I've seen before. Basically within this huge, walled in area, the richest families of Buenos Aires all had small mausoleums, where the dead would be entombed. These structures were amazing, with huge statues and stained glass - a lot of them appeared to be miniature Gothic cathedrals. The place was beautiful but very eerie - and the eeriness wasn't helped by the fact that there were tons of stray cats just wandering around the cemetery, lying on the entrances to the tombs and sleeping under the statues.

The whole trip was pretty cool. It was good to meet everyone and kind of get a chance to hang out together for a bit, exchange some phone numbers, etc. After touring the cemetery (sin tour guide) with a couple of the girls - Shannon, Jessi, and Emma, my roommate - we grabbed some helado and sat for a while, and then made the trek back to the residence - maybe half an hour's walk, or a little more.