Escuelismo

Thursday night was the opening of the Escuelismo exhibit at Malba. The third floor had been closed since I arrived for its installation (second floor is hits of the permanent collection and two temporary exhibitions and first floor is recent acquisitions), but Cintia had taken me up on Tuesday to show me the installation crew and introduce me to one of the artists who was there gluing part of her piece together. The pieces in Escuelismo were mostly pieces in the permanent collection acquired in the big 2004 buy but not yet shown, some loans, and some post-2004 acquisitions.

Malba at night

I and Nico came early, at 5:30, and got to hang out in the café-turned press room per Cintia’s invitation. I was given a press folder despite my protests that I was not, in fact, a member of the press. Cintia thought this was funny and told me to keep it. It had a very specific summary of the exhibit concept, pieces, and artists, which is always helpful.

Nico and me. Note press folder.

We then moved up to the exhibition room and heard an introduction by one of the women from the publicity department and then—Cintia had to explain this to me—contemporary art inside jokes. This involved one of the artists flitting about the room, gesturing at different pieces, and singing in English, Spanish, and French, of which I understood zero percent. There was definitely some Celine Dion in there:

Cintia getting interviewed about the exhibit for a TV show! I told her she would be famous and she said the interview would air at 2 in the morning. A lot of porteños are awake then, anyway.

The title of the exhibit was Escuelismo: Argentine art of the 90s. The term refers not to an art movement but to a critical approach to contemporary Argentine art. Basically, by now much of this art is very conceptual, so you have to think of weird ways of mentally organizing it for it to make sense. “Escuelismo” was the name of an essay published in 1978 by influential Argentine writer and art critic Ricardo Martín-Crosa, so influential that artists actually started to produce work that followed trends he identified.

The three themes that he named in the essay were imagery of primary school (toys, cartoons, colored blocks, school supplies), traditionally “childlike” acts of creation (cutting, pasting, collage, crafts), and classroom relationships (teacher/student, individual/group). You can almost look at any art piece and qualify it as some interpretation of one of those themes, and that’s what the exhibition chose to do. The themes were assigned red, green, and blue colors and each given their own section within the exhibition space. I think the exhibition did a good job of making the art more accessible:

Cintia was kind enough to invite all of the Yale interns, who enjoyed the event and seeing the inside of Malba for the first time.


I was worried about Escuelismo being difficult to access—it definitely took me a while to understand the idea—and a few of them voiced that, but Paloma and Elena said that they were glad it made them think.

Chris looking at tiny people in one piece.

Nikos was especially fascinated and disgusted by a video piece that showed sketched cartoon creatures torturing each other, which was a commentary on how seeing violence in cartoons and video games conditions us to more easily accept it. When I took everyone around to see the rest of the museum, Paloma and Elena especially liked the Antonio Berni painting of the faces from my first post, and Nico liked this pink abstract acrylic number that I do not much care for. Everyone enjoyed the Pablo Reinoso bench that has wood slats extending to wrap around 2 stories of the museum.

From 7:30 onward the event was open to the public, when means anyone in the neighborhood could walk in, grab some champagne at reception, and head upstairs.

Other highlights of the evening were chatting with Socorro (news to me that this is a name. I was taught it as the expression you use when you cry for help in a disaster situation), a co-worker who started the same week that I did, about her childhood in Mendoza in the provinces, and then meeting Maria Costantini of the Costantini Foundation. A.k.a. un gran honor. She was very nice and shared some refreshing skepticism about the accessibility of some of the Escuelismo work. She prefers the museum’s early twentieth-century work, she said—big surprise as they were her family’s personal art collection. Overall, the evening was great and I am so grateful that Cintia included us all.

me, Chris, Tsega, Nico, Casey Blue, Marisa, Leslie, Elena, Nikos and Paloma out front afterward

Feliz Día del Padre!

Happy Father’s Day, Dad and Granddad! My dad and Granddad are gems. These photos of them are from my Black and White class last semester.

Dad in front of his orchard, Spring Break

enjoying a sandwich that sweet Donna made. Note the trusty Dublin Dr. Pepper.

showing off some star bricks from his collection

leading Mason and Cameron in some Dutch oven cooking

enjoying his Sunday New York Times while waiting for steaks to finish grilling in the backyard

Granddad behind the Becton Center when he, Grandmother and Claire came to visit Yale in April!

Love you both lots and Happy Father's Day to all.

Winter and company

I stayed home from work today and am now feeling much better (this also after Power Jump), but will share some thoughts from yesterday afternoon when I returned home:

It’s very strange having winter in June. I made a comment the other day about how it’s just the beginning of winter and it felt like fall temperature (in New Haven. Austin fall is 85 degrees), and someone responded that June 21st, which is just around the corner, is actually the winter solstice here. I couldn’t believe it. Now that I think about it, the coldest months for us are after the winter solstice in December so I guess we haven’t reached the peak of the cold yet. It usually gets up to 62 degrees during the daytime and down to 45 at night.

Parque Tres de Febrero, Monday

A few observations about this: it actually makes me sad to have winter coming without Christmas. Now I realize how everyone in Narnia must have felt. This also means that the holidays that do occur around this time are huge deals and explains the apparent fanaticism—beyond just retail—about Dia Del Padre coming up, also on June 21st. Thinking of you, Dad. Argentine independence day is July 9th, and the tradition is for vendors in the Centro to sell hot chocolate and churros while everyone comes out and celebrates and the president is forced to attend a mass in which the Father lambasts her administration in the sermon. I am very excited about this and plan to attend.

I also realized that I’m spoiled by New England fall because I’m sad that the leaves here are falling without turning orange and red.

Elena and Nico in the park

Everyone is feeling a little engripeado. I’m referring to the people on our trip and the city in general, who is rushing the emergency rooms in fear of Gripe A because they have free healthcare (of which they are very proud, but also which Elena explains is very misleading because many people don't realize that they don't qualify for goverment health coverage).

I went to the pharmacy for the first time today to get Vitamin C and in hopes of Vick’s Vapo-Rub. They actually have Vick’s (or “Vick,” as the pharmacist called it) here in Buenos Aires, but the pharmacy was sold out, and they were selling Vitamin C supplements for $25 USD. I thought this was a little much so I went to the pharmacy next door and bought Vitamin C for 25 pesos. Sometimes Buenos Aires is strangely predictable. I realized after I had popped the first pill that they were not chewable as I had assumed, but rather “efervescente” or intended for combination with water a la Alka-Seltzer. I chugged water as Vitamin C and baking soda exploded in my mouth. I am now burping a lot and listening to the “December” George Winston album that we always play in the house at Christmastime to get me a little more in the winter mood.

Martes - Jueves

So Martes morning I tried mate (two syllables) for the first time. Mate is the Argentine national drink and is made by steeping leaves from the yerba mate plant in hot water and sipping through a little silver straw from a hollowed out gourd:

I had heard that it was an acquired taste, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Florencia, the adult education director, gave me some of hers, and it was basically like very strong, bitter green tea. I asked if it had caffeine and they said it had “mateina” which is apparently stronger. BUT, lots of antioxidants, and then Florencia and someone else told a joke about a doctor and a gaucho singing the benefits of mate together. Sweet.

Also at the office on Tuesday, Cintia excused herself from her desk and told me she had to go to a meeting with a coworker. She and Alejandro, one of the head exhibition mounters, then went into this corner, whipped out the day’s Clarin and started jabbing at it and shouting stories to each other. The day before, their football team, Chacarita, had won 1-0 and earned itself a spot in division 1 for the first time in 5 years. Alejandro explained that Chacarita isn’t a huge team like Boca or River, but now it will play against them. And that there are plenty of crazy Chacarita fans who were waiting for this, like the 2,000 who filled plaza San Martin near the stadium celebrating.

Tuesday night for we went to Andres von Buch’s apartment, which was beautiful and overlooked the city. I recognized a lot of contemporary art. He and his family were extremely nice, as well as several 18 to 23-year-old friends of their daughter whom we got to know a little and will hopefully be seeing more of. They were an interesting group. The first girl I talked to was an art history major at the University of Buenos Aires, UBA, and painted, one girl wanted to perform on Broadway, and another boy was German and spoke English with a Scottish accent because he’d gone to a Scottish school in Buenos Aires.

Paloma and I talked with two more girls about how they went to Vail to work at ski resorts during one vacation with the idea of bringing money back because the dollar is so much stronger than the Argentine peso (today 1 USD = 3.78 ARS), a sort of societized version of the immigration we studied in ER&M, and also about their opinion of the upcoming elections. The girls think they are a joke. One of them said that going into politics in the university is looked down upon as dirty, and she described Peronism as a movement with a name only and without any fixed values. We were surprised at how down to earth they were considering they looked like they had walked out of Argentine Gossip Girl.

I'm also wondering how impossible the political change that the girls praised the US for actually is in Argentina. I read an editorial in the Buenos Aires Herald, the English language newspaper, about how literally every party leader (because for the upcoming elections you don’t vote for individuals, but for parties who then get to pack the legislature. Neat, right?) was a puppet, which was particularly disheartening.

We also got the sense from a conversation that evening between Andres and Chris’s boss that they ran half of Latin America. We are definitely still in the Yale bubble in Buenos Aires….Paloma and I are looking for volunteer organizations. There’s a neat microfinance group in the city and if that doesn’t work out, we’re going to try for an elementary school in the barrio next to ours, Once. Once (like the number) is a working-class neighborhood that is known for its Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants, wholesale textiles, and the center of Buenos Aires’s large Jewish community.

Tuesday was also Chris’s birthday!

Two noteworthy things happened on Wednesday. The first was that Fernando, another of the exhibition mounters, brought Cintia some watercolors that he had just finished in the workshop. They were very delicately beautiful. He had done them from hunters’ photographs of just-shot rabbits and a lion, and everyone crowded around and talked about how they made you think about the relationship between sleep and death, and Maraní, the head exposition coordinator, talked about a stain of paint becoming an animal. It was just a lovely moment.

The second thing on Wednesday: POWER JUMP. Elena and Paloma had gone on Monday and loved it, and I went with Paloma on Wednesday night and had a semi-religious experience. Imagine a class of thirty people on personal mini-trampolines doing aerobics in time to blasting Spanish and English pop hits and a shouting instructor. During difficult moves the whole group whoops and hollers, and the front wall of the exercise room is a giant mirror which just quadruples the fun. It is a great workout. I return tonight.

Yesterday morning before work I looked around in the bookstores on Corrientes street which Barbara, Chris’s boss’s daughter, had recommended to me. One of them, Galeria Gandhi, had a great music selection as well and sort of reminded me of Waterloo. I liked the English-language music the staff had recommended so I talked with the guy at the counter and he recommended this CD of Juan Ravioli’s, to which I am now enjoying. Ravioli (only funny to me, apparently) is from Buenos Aires and Paris 1980 is his band—the CD was released in 2006. Gandhi boy made a Ravioli/Nick Drake lyrics comparison that I most certainly did not understand, but I did had a whole conversation with him in castellano without him switching to English!

Lunes

Today at Malba I translated and edited the labels for the Escuelismo exhibit. It was nice to have a project that I will see the results of on June 17th! I also got a brochure from last month’s Manuel Álvarez Bravo exhibit which I’m sad to have missed. Álvarez Bravo is the most influential Latin American photographer of the twentieth century who was known for archetypal portraits of Mexican beauty. One of the photographs in the exhibit I had chosen to do a writeup of during photo class this semester (ART 136…take it) because I liked it so much:

Qué chiquito es el mundo

Dos pares de piernas

Trabajadores del mundo

This one was not in the exhibit, but…..Manuel Álvarez Bravo + Frida Kahlo.

I walked back to my bus stop at sunset today. The homes on the way (Palermo Viejo) are beautiful.

Avenida del Libertador where I catch the 102

Tonight the men cooked again and it was wonderful. They are now playing chess. We are all camped out in 602 (our room is 303) because there is wireless here.

I must share this picture of Nikos, me, Elena, and Nico trying to look somber in the Recoleta cemetery.

Tomorrow we eat dinner at the apartamento of Andres Von Buch, a Pierson alum who is supposed to be a ricosuave.

Also: http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/harrypotterandthehalfbloodprince/

Trying a video

San Telmo street musicians from last night:

Lunfardo

In trying to learn Buenos Aires slang we have had many discussions about American slang. Nico, Chris, and I came to this conclusion:

Dodgy = a place
Skeevy = a person
Sketchy = everything.

San Telmo

We spent today in San Telmo. I rode the Subte for the first time—much more simple to understand than the buses, and very pretty and old-fashioned—and we got off and ate at an absolutely delicious restaurant called Café San Juan.

I understand that I need to find some new superlatives for the food here…we really are spoiled by last year’s restaurant recommendations, but it just goes to show how much better your experience is if you use any sort of guide. Casey Blue and I both had pumpkin-stuffed gnocchi, which is big here, cooked in shrimp sauce. It was divine and I felt like Violet Beauregard from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I was so full afterward. Instead of turning into a giant blueberry I would turn into a giant gnocchi. Somehow, the table managed to finish off both of our dishes:


Luckily we did lots of walking afterward, up a street called La Defensa that was filled with booths for the Sunday antiques market, stores, and street musicians.

store that made me think of Mom

store that made me think of Dad

Nico and I share a love for antique stores. This made me appreciate how slowly Granddad and I went in the Paris flea market.

I’m hesitant to buy things yet, and it was much easier just to be looking. It took us about two hours to make it all the way to the Plaza de Mayo, the city’s center, where we took the subway back home.

Casa Rosada! Evita’s balcony. There’s an Eva Peron museum and I’m going to go.

Elena, Nico and I had a tiny space in our stomachs by that point so we had ice cream for dinner because we’d been wanting to try some for a while. The place we went to was specifically for gelato, but I've heard that ice cream in Buenos Aires is similar to gelato because it’s lighter and fluffier. Or that is porteños making an "everything is better here" judgement—apparently the soccer players faster, the streets wider, the women prettier, etc. The ice cream we had was excellent, anyway, and it was on nearby Corrientes Street so we walked by the marquees for several shows. Corrientes is the Broadway of Buenos Aires—theaters here are actually designated “Corrientes” and “Off-Corrientes”—and Elena and I really want to see a show sometime this summer. August: Osage County, which won this year's Tony for best play, is showing, but en castellano, of course.

Note: Castellano actually refers to a dialect of Spanish, the most common spoken in the world, but porteños use the term instead of “español” to describe their language. With their accent (ella = “ey sha”) it is pronounced “casteshano.”

some typical porteños out and about today

Today was just nice because we had time to wander around a really interesting and historic part of the city and soak it in. Plus, it’s neat how people we know from different parts of our lives in the US join the group sometimes.

Casey Blue

Today we were also with another 2012 Yalie named Katharine who is doing the same program and a family friend of Paloma’s high school volleyball teammate who is visiting friends in the city. It was great meeting both of them.

me, Christine, Paloma, Elena, Katharine, Nico, and Dan

I felt like we were a big family trying to stay together in Disneyland at some points—the streets were packed. But I’m definitely looking forward to doing similar exploring this week now that I have the Malba routine a little more down. Besos.

Week One

Goal is to post more frequently, but here is week one recap! I started my internship on Monday.


This involved going to the museum and meeting Cintia, my boss, for coffee (“café” here means little cups of espresso. A Café Americano is not a watered down coffee like it is in the US, but a bigger one. Typical.) in the café, introducing myself and hearing about her awesome life. Cintia runs Registry and Documentation for Malba, which means maintaining the archive of information on all works in the permanent collection and their history—when they were on loan, which exhibitions they were in, etc. I know from helping translate her resume, Wednesday’s job, that she travels with them as Malba’s courier when they are exhibited elsewhere. She’s accompanied works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Argentine painter Xul Solar to the Tate Modern in London, the MFA Houston, and museums in São Paulo and Mexico City.

Visiones y Revelaciones by Xul Solar of Buenos Aires. The museum has several important pieces of his.

Cintia also manages Malba’s involvement in art fairs like the recent ArtBA in Buenos Aires at which the museum bought 5 pieces, teaches art history at a university, and organizes other exhibitions in the city like a Marcel Duchamp one that was just shown at Fundación Proa, the museum in La Boca I mentioned. She is also beautiful and the nicest person ever.

I feel bad that my Spanish is a little less than what Cintia had expected, but hopefully in a few weeks I will be up to speed. She does make a big and very polite deal about how I am the first Yale intern who is native to the US (not “latinoamericanas que estudian en Yale”) and thus will be able to help them with English translations. My first job is to go through the archive and look up each painting, quickly familiarize myself with it—read some of the Spanish blurb in the catalog about the artist—and then edit the English version of the information. The changes I make are always subtle, like “espadrille” to “hemp” for material on an installation piece, and “Deals of Women” to “Dealings of Women” for a title, but those things matter especially when the art is accompanied by so little text. There are about 400 paintings in Malba’s permanent collection, the majority Latin American art from 1900 to the present, and I look them up in two catalogs, one published before and one after a big buying period in 2004 which increased the collection’s size by 30%.

We touched on some Malba's pieces in Ms. Russell’s AP Class (the Scully survey course I took first semester just covered prehistory to Renaissance) and certainly the movements that inspired them, such as post-impressionism,

Jose Cuneo, Caserío de Cagnes. I saw this and all of the following on Monday.

cubism,

Emilio Pettoruti, La canción del pueblo

social realism,

Antonio Berni, Manifestación

op-art,

Julio Le Parc, Desplazamientos 2

and FRIDA KAHLO.

Autorretrato con Chango y Loro

I saw this! There is a critique in one of the catalogs about how Frida is more of a Mexican popular artist than what you can call a “fine artist.” I think that is rubbish. Frida will always be a hero of mine.

Cintia gave me a tour of the museum on Monday that included the permanent collection on the second floor and the temporary exhibition on the ground floor. The third floor is currently closed for installations.

Malba is gorgeous. I am beyond lucky that I get to go there every day.

I work in the basement level with many of the education and registration offices and the storage room/conservation lab for all of the permanent paintings that aren’t on exhibit and the temporary works waiting to be shown. There were a few of what looked like giant toys when Cintia took me in that are going in the next temporary exhibit called Escuelismo. This refers to Argentine art of the 1990s, which responded to general national turmoil by reinterpreting figures from elementary school age. It opens on June 19th.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Malba can be found at http://www.malba.org.ar/web/en/files/ANUARIO_ingles.pdf or at http://www.malba.org.ar/web/home_eng.html.

To get to Malba I have to take the bus, or colectivo. There are roughly 400 numbered bus routes that run through Buenos Aires. After a week of consistent failure riding the bus I have learned a few things:

1. There are sometimes routes-within-routes, for example, several buses labeled “37” that all have different destinations.
2. Catch the bus on the correct side of the road.
3. You need to pay for the bus in coins. There is currently a mass coin shortage in the city such that a two peso note is less valuable than a one peso coin, because most bus rides cost $1,20 ARS. See http://www.slate.com/id/2205635/. I had to go to the national bank to change my peso notes for monedas (coins) because they are required by law to provide that service. The line when I left was out the door.
4. When you get on the bus, you tell the driver the price of your ride and he enters it into the ticket machine. If you’re only going a few blocks, the ride may be as low as 90 centavos but if you tell the bus driver anything lower than 1,20 he will probably glare at you and not believe you.
5. The bus doesn’t stop at every stop. If you want off you have to press a little red button at the back of the bus or yell “Bajo! Bajo!”
6. When the bus stops, it doesn’t actually stop. It slows, and you have to jump off without hurting yourself.

Just imagine that I messed up each one of these to learn it correctly. It’s been a great week with the Buenos Aires public transportation system, but I didn't have as big of an adventure as Nikos, another intern, whose subway broke down when they were in the tunnel and the passengers had to get out and walk along the tracks and up the escape ladder. I feel like that’s what always happens in horror movies before the people get smashed or killed by noxious sewage or something. I asked Nicos what was stopping another subway from bulldozing them all.
“Nothing.”
“Did you think you were going to die?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
Apparently other than that, the Subte runs great.

This week included a lot of settling in other than starting our internships. We cooked two dinners in our kitchenette, one quesadillas and guacamole and the other salad and couscous (thank you Mom for the recipe! I used mangos and raisins and Paloma and I both ate it for lunch the next day). We got our gym memberships, which involved a medical test in which we had to lay down and get eight plastic clamps attached to us check for heart palpitations. It’s actually called the “Sport Club” instead of the gym, and it features such workout classes as “Musculación" and "Power Jump" on individual trampolines. The ladies among us can’t wait to try these out.

We’ve made nice leeway into the restaurant and club recommendations passed on by last year’s group. Eating out is almost as cheap as going to the grocery store. So far we’ve enjoyed some traditional Argentine food at Las Cholitas and Cumaná and sushi at La Dominga in Palermo. I’m going to try to mention restaurant names as much as possible here for future reference. We also went to our first discoteca—which is my beloved Mexican creeping in…here they’re called boliches—on Wednesday night at Asia de Cuba in Puerto Madero.

Also studying in Buenos Aires this summer are Casey Blue James who I met in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration this semester and Sophie Elsner from home, both of whom I was lucky enough to see this week! I had a great lunch and walk around Palermo with Sophie on Saturday and Casey Blue came out with us on Wednesday and Saturday nights. It was great to catch up with Sophie about school and Buenos Aires because she’s been here since February and knows her way around. It was also very interesting comparing our school’s attitudes toward study abroad. Very few Yale kids do it during the semester, whereas that’s very normal for Brown. Sophie has had a great time here so far and has gotten me excited about exploring other parts of the city, which I haven’t had time to do this week, and about spending time with her in her remaining month.

Two other exciting events this week were the dinner tango show that Alex, Ani, and Tina took us to on Friday night and the Argentina-Colombia 2010 World Cup Qualifying Futbol match today. Argentina won 1-0! The tango show was at an old restaurant called El Querandí with an elevated wooden stage on which the dancers reenacted the history of tango, doing different versions of the dance in costumes from different decades. It was absolutely beautiful. I wish I could move like that and know that it is hopeless, but nevertheless Nico and I asked Tina for a good place to take lessons and she’s going to hook us up later this week.

I also just listened to the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me podcast from when they came to Austin the night before I left for Argentina. It is hilarious. I urge everyone from Austin to go to Wait Wait in the iTunes store and at least listen to the first few minutes of the May 30th podcast when Peter Segel says he’s announcing from Bass Concert Hall…it warms my heart. Anyway, love and miss all of you and props for reading this far.

City Tour

Today, during the tour arranged by our in-country program contacts Ani and Alex, we learned that Buenos Aires's European feel is due to the huge amount of Western European immigration (of people and ideas) into the city. Eighty-five percent of porteños are of Western European descent, mostly Spanish and Italian, and only fifteen percent are native to Argentina. The center of the city was planned after Paris, and thus has several Parisian parks and a grid street system. Porteños also love commemorating their heroes and revolutions. There was an equestrian statue or monument around every corner, and the widest road in Buenos Aires and the world (except for maybe one in China, says Tina our tour guide), is named Avenida 9 de Julio after Argentina’s independence from Spain.

The city is huge—3 million people downtown, 13 in the metropolitan area, a third of Argentina’s population—and therefore has very diverse neighborhoods. Driving we were able to visit a few and even get out and walk around. We began with lunch at the famous Café Tortoni, pictured above. I ate my first Argentinean steak! It was delicious. Everyone thought so, including Elena who was a vegetarian before today. Then we all had flan with dulce de leche, Argentina’s national sweet (score) and coffee, also pictured. Usually lunch is from 1-3 and dinner is from 8:30-10 (!). Our stomachs still start grumbling around 6 because everyone’s used to the dining hall’s 5:00-7:00 hours.

We drove through the Microcentro (or "centro"), the center of business activity and home of the pink executive building where Juan and Eva Peron addressed the crowds, then got off in San Telmo, an ex-aristocratic neighborhood that was vacated due to disease in the 1800s and then became tenement housing. One of these homes recently became an archeological site and we went inside and saw the many levels, the water collection system, and elaborate tunnels beneath—it was fascinating.

We then went to La Boca, the first port in the city and home to lots of immigrants and their famous fútbol team, the Boca Juniors Club. Tina said the people there will tell you first they are from La Boca, then they identify with the Boca Juniors, and thirdly, they are Argentinean. Although La Boca is a very poor area, it’s beautiful because the corrugated tin homes are brightly painted. Color stories: apparently the Boca Juniors got their blue and yellow colors from the flag of the next ship of immigrants coming into dock—turned out to be Sweden—and residents used extra paint from every ship for their exterior walls, choosing new colors based on what was available when their paint ran out. There is also a neat contemporary art museum there that I want to come back to.

The Argentine flag is on the right.


shadow of our group standing above the La Boca harbor

We passed through Puerto Madero, the second port that was abandoned until recently privatized by the government and that is currently undergoing massive development—very ritzy—and Puerto Nuevo, the port currently in use. We then visited Recoleta cemetery which was absolutely beautiful. The different tombs, houses of glass, stone, and sculpture, are arranged in city blocks with trees and public spaces in the center. They cut a very strange silhouette against the apartment buildings of the surrounding Retiro neighborhood. We saw the graves of Eva Peron and Jorge Luis Borges’s family. People had filled the iron slats of Evita’s tomb’s door with flowers.

"Familia Duarte" refers to Evita's family, who are all buried there together.

Our last stop was Palermo, the wealthy neighborhood to where many aristocrats fled when San Telmo became diseased. It includes a a media hub, Palermo Hollywood, a boutiquey area, Palermo Soho, Palermo Viejo where Borges and Chi Guevara both lived, most of the Embassies and ambassadors, and Malba, the museum at which I’m interning! Palermo is gorgeous—not in a huge houses way, but very nice large apartment buildings and public spaces and gardens—and last year’s group highly recommended the dining, shopping, and nightlife in that area.

street tango outside Recoleta

I hope you have enjoyed this summary of Buenos Aires neighborhoods. Gracias a Tina. I will have more personal stories that sound less like the guidebook soon, but I wanted to get all of this information in.