Recoleta Cemetary: The Beverly Hills of Death

Miki left us to return to work in Chicago and Elisa headed back to school during the day, so that left me and George to explore the city together. Our first stop was the Recoleta Cemetary, which George dubbed the Beverly Hills of Death. It's where Buenos Aires' deceased elite make their homes, and really is prime real estate, an extravegant city of the dead complete with apartments (moseleums), boulevards, blocks and streetlights. And if a family can't continue to pay rent on their space, they sell it to someone else and move their ancestors out of their marble resting places (to be burried who knows where.) There is a saying here in BsAs that its cheaper to live extravegantly than to die and be burried at Recoleta.

Now Darin would find this ostentatious display of wealth quite disgusting, but George and I prefered to think of the decadence as a tribute, not to those who died, but to the incredibly talented workemen and architects who built this place (none of whom whom would have rated a burial here.)

That interpretation seemed fitting as we made our pilgrimage (with the hordes of the rest of the tourists) to visit the comparatively utilitarian resting place of Evita, chamipion of Argentina's poor and working class. The anniversary of her death (which, strangely, Argentines celebrate instead of celebrating her birth) had been only 2 days before, so the moselum was positvely decked out with flowers. All in all . . . fascinating.

A Quest to Find Montenegrins in Argentina

One of Miki's main goals in coming to Buenos Aires was to meet one of the Montenegrins (or descendents of the Montenegrins) who apparently immigrated en masse at the beginning of the 20th century. (Miki's family is from Montenegro.) She emailed the listserve of a Montenegrin affinity group and arranged an ill-fated meeting at a cafe in Palermo. No one showed. But some people did email her to tell her they would be singing in the choir at a Russian Orthodox Church on Sunday morning. So the day Miki left, we trekked to San Telmo and ascended into a church with brilliant blue onion domes, hoping to spot one of Argentina's elusive Montenegrin specimans.

I had never been to an Christian Orthodox service of any kind and was both a little nervous and incredibly curious as we walked through the elaborately painted lobby and in up to the main sanctuary (is it called a santuary in Christianity?). We were handed skirts to put on over our jeans and when we were properly garbed, we entered - and gaped at our fantastically painted surroundings. Within 30 seconds, a man in has mid 30's approached us. Was she Miki? Was I her friend? (I guess we stood out.) It was the Montenegrin man Miki had been emailing with. Mission accomplished! They arranged to meet after the service (he was in the choir).

The sounds that echoes through the halls and the domes were a mix between choral music and the deep baritone of the priest which strangely resembled the chanting of the Jewish Kippur liturgy. For Miki, the experience was surreal as well . . . she's in the choir at her Serbian Orthodox Church in Chicago, and she walked in to hear identical music - just in Spanish, with occasional phrases of old Slavonic thrown in for good measure. Not exactly on hte regular tourist itinerary, but definitely one of the coolest things I've seen in Buenos Aires.

A Night Out in Buenos Aires

In Potosi, Bolivia, Nate and I had a hard time finding anything open past 11:30. In Sucre, everything shut down by 2, and in Cuzco, if you were out til 4:30 you had a really late and crazy night. But in Buenos Aires, the evening doesn't really start until 2 and if you are home before 7 AM, it means you have made a conscious decision to leave early. I really have no idea how anyone gets any work done during the day, since the portenos (people from BsAs) have got to sleep sometime.


So here is a typical evening here: we see the sights during the day, until about 8 pm. Then comes the only period where most of the city is quiet: 8 to 12 am. So we head off to tango classes, where we try desperately (and positively fail) to move as gracefully as the locals. Around midnight we head to dinner (where there may or may not be live music playing), which usually consists of impossibly inexpensive grass-fed beef. Then we linger drinking vino tinto (red wine) from Argentina's western province of Mendoza, waiting to digest the food and bide our time until the dance clubs get going.

When the magical hour of 2 AM rolls around, we're already sufficiently primped to head out to dance the night away in one of Buenos Aire's incredibly happening neighborhoods. We try to keep up with the Portenos, but inevitably bow out, exhausted and happy, at an embarassingly early 5:30 AM. Good thing I'm only here for 2 weeks. I couldn't keep this up much longer.

The Apartment: An Ode to Cake and Juanes.

We'd stayed in San Ignacio to view the wonders of the mission at night, so we rented an apartment. It was the best idea ever. It had a complete kitchen, so we bought a bottle of wine, yerba mate (Argentina's incredibly bitter national drink), and cake mix. After 2 months, I can't tell you how cathartic it was to bake. It was a vanilla cake, and we topped it with Nutella, imported from the states by a generous George. It was DELICIOUS (or maybe we were just really hungry).

We positively snarfed it up (a very nutritious dinner, I know) and then proceeded to dance Salsa in the kitchen until 3 AM, courtesy of George's discman (with headphones playing full volume, since we didnt' have speakers) and the pirated Juanes CDs I bought in Bolivia for 10 Bolivianos ($1.50 USD) each. A Dios Le Pido (This I ask from God) was on repeat most of the night as Miki, Elisa and I took turns trying to help George keep the salsa beat and avoid our feet while getting the steps right. When it came to teaching rhythm, even God wasn't much help (our dear George still has a few things to learn), but between the cake fresh out the oven and crooning of Juanes, it was divine.

San Ignacio

After Iguazu, Elisa, Miki, George and I headed to las missiones - the ruins of the Jesuit missions that give the department of Missiones its name: in the 1500's the Jesuits built these missions as havens for the indigenous people who lived in the area. They converted them to Catholicism, but also allowed them to live with their families, continue speaking their native language and retain a substantial part of their local traditions. It was far from perfect or progressive, but the Jesuits offered a life far preferable to the enslavement of Guarani pursued by the majority of the Spanish colonizers.

The four of us got of a bus, grabbed a hostel at dusk, and then headed to the ruins at San Ignacio and expected to walk through a lot of historically interesting rubble. What we found was enchanting. We walked through the walls of the Abbey and as the sun was setting the our surroundings surpassed romantic - I could imagine hundreds of people in habits scurrying through the walk ways and dramas unfolding in the courtyards. Every piece of literature I've ever read set in an Abbey swirled in my head: The Name of the Rose, Northanger Abbey, and the Redwall books to name a few. The ruins were swimming with stories - thousands of which were already on paper on somewhere, and countless more just waiting to be written.

To cap off the evening, we embarked on an tour of the grounds in the dark. Our wanderings were complemented by period choir music and fantastically dramatic (yet tasteful) lighting. If the place wasn't already magical, that more than did it.

"So Much Better than Magic Mountain": Iguazu as the Ultimate Water Ride

My friend Becca told me that I absolutely had to see Iguazu Falls, on the border between Argentina and Brazil. But I had seen Niagra and wasn't so impressed. Still Elisa needed to get out of the city for her week-long winter break, so Elisa, George, Miki (yes Miki, a high school friend bought her ticket from Chicago on a whim and headed to Buenos Aires to meet up with us!) and I got on a bus and headed North. What we found was absolutely fantastic.

We were running a little late (surprise), so we ran through the "lower circuit," a path to view the falls from the front, and kept making our way toward the sound of rushing water. We could see nothing through the dense jungle-esque forest and we joked that maybe there were just boom boxes with recordings strategically placed in the woods. And then suddenly, they were before us: multiple levels of falls, with endless torrents of water rushing into a fog of mist to meet the river, framed by rainbows and brilliant green foliage.

When we thought it couldn't get better, we headed down to the riverside for what we expected to be a leisurely boat trip to see the falls from a different angle (my idea). We didn't have rain-gear and we were told we might get a little wet, but we shrugged it off. We scrambled into a boat which soon zoomed off, headed straight for the falls . . . and then kept going. We were literally meters from where thousands of liters of water thundered into the water below - and positively SOAKED us. (Take that, Indiana Jones!) Then the boat zoomed to another set of falls and backed into them again as we squealed with glee and squinted desperately to kept the spray out of our eyes. 15 glorious minutes later, we emerged dripping and grinning, and George issued what might have been the most priceless comment of the day: "Man, that was soooooooo much better than Magic Mountain."

To top it all off, we walked along the top of the largest falls and saw what the pre-Copernican Europeans must have envisioned when they thought of world's end. We danced along the catwalks and were singing vintage REM for the rest of the day.

In Borges´ Footsteps: An Afternoon in San Telmo

When Elisa went to go pick up her boyfriend George from the airport, I went with Paola (Elisa's roomate at school) and Martin (Paola's boyfriend) to go explore Buenos Aires' San Telmo neighborhood. It was Sunday, the day of the area's famous market . . . it was chock full of colonial architecture, antique and art vendors and street preformers and milling crowds. It turns out that in BsAs, they really do tango in the streets. As we wandered through the different areas, I really thought my heart would burst. The life in the streets was amazing, and I can see why Elisa is threatening not to come home.

As we walked through the streets we stumbled across tango band after tango band, each with more than 7 members, complete with fiddles, accoridans, horn players and actual full pianos that had been rolled into the streets. But the best part about the bands is that all the players were you - my age. This wasn´t just a remnant of a cultural tradition long past - its a living breathing renaissance. (Aparently during the Dirty War of the 70s and 80s most of the musicians were disappeared, so there is a whole generation of Tango missing, but now the country´s youth has taken it up as their own.) Our favorite band featured a front man with a deep traditional passionate voice, a goatee and a shock of dyed red hair. It was fabulous.




And as you walk through the streets there is also cafe after cafe (think Prague or Paris or Vienna), in ways that make you want to sit down and write great deep literature. Practically any recommendation says that Borges wrote in this cafe, or this novel was written in that neighborhood. And all I could think was, I have so much to read and so much to see. Can´t I extend my ticket and just stay a little longer?? I called United. I am now coming home August 4th, so that I get and extra weekend in Buenos Aires.