Buenos Aires -- day two
It's 5 am and I'm perched precariously on the end of the bed because it's the only place that will reach the power socket. Our room overlooks La Mancion, a beautiful Beaux Arts house now used for banquets, separated by the walled garden and pool area. I can see men in uniform being busy with vacuum cleaners in the semi-darkness. Jumby is sleeping soundly next to me. A story in the Daily Telegraph links sleep depravation to obesity, so after reading that I shut my laptop and tried very hard to shut my eyes and go back to sleep, but to no avail; I'm still insomniac and now, inevitably, fat too.
Yesterday we embraced "turiste norteamericano" full on -- backpack, camera around neck, snapping pictures of interesting old men on the edge of fountains, cool buildings, taxi drivers, ancient magnolia trees, cemetaries, bridges, you name it. To hell with trying to look chic while taking in the city. Buenos Aires is breathtaking. Apparently at the beginning of the twentieth century when it opened its doors to an influx of foreigners the city planners decided that the city needed to be more classically European and erudite to attract the kind of people they wanted. Hence it is laid out very much like Paris, with avenues of trees leading to great sculptures of men on horses, or elaborate fountains, plazas and mini arcs de triomphes, grand boulevards with wide, tree-lined medians and stretches of grass, and a lot of extraordinarily varied architecture. It's hard not to fall in love with the city; it's Paris meets Frontierland. "I would come back here" says Jumby, catching a breath after shooting pictures maniacally like a paparazzo. "I could live here." It would be an easy place to live -- great lawns of parkland, old shady trees, young people lying in the sun, smart ladies in their chic clothes walking small dogs, even the homeless have a wild, artistic quality to them. ("It's scary to be in a city where even the bums look interesting" I say to J and he nods as if he thought the same thing.)
One day, especially a Monday, is not enough to see very much of the city at all. We tried to pack too much in, I'm sure, and seemed to get frustratingly tiny tastes of different areas instead of soaking up one barrio. We leapt frenetically from Retiro to Recolletta, to Palermo and Puerto Madero and back again, not really knowing where we were. The world flashed by down Avenue Libertador, the wide, fast-moving street to the east of the city - the Japanese Gardens, the Zoological Gardens, the breathtaking floralis generica, an enormous metal sculpture that opens and closes, like a real flower, with the sun.
We lunched at Dora, an old-fashioned restaurant (the kind with really experienced waiters that serve you using a spoon and fork nimbly in one hand and don't tell you their name and that they'll "be your server today" thank God) which serves mostly fish, with business men, old ladies with well-behaved grandchildren, and a chic family (who seemed to order plate after plate of steaming, sweet-smelling delicacies from the sea, eating all of them family-style). J tasted the best seafood stew he'd ever had - full of pimento and thyme, preceded by small glass bowls of hearts palm and tomato, lettuce and onion salad. Great bread too. (Ten years ago Lawrence Bender's then girlfriend, a lovely french woman said to me "You can always tell how good a restaurant is going to be by its bread").
Sabine had given me an address for La Casa de Las Botas on Avenue Paraguay, a funny little store front with dark green plants in plastic pots outside, in the classic way we've seen so much in this city. Inside the bootmaker, who speaks absolutely and resolutely no English, measured my foot by drawing around it with a biro on a little lined notebook, my calfs, my ankles and declares that I'll be receiving new riding boots "para la jumping" mid-May via DHL. The walls were covered from ceiling to floor of riders jumping increasingly bigger fences, all signed to La Casa de Las Botas, with a few dressage riders dotted in between. Maybe this will bring good luck, to be in such esteemed company. The Argentines do not ride the American way -- no hunter jumper posing with your bottom sticking out over the jumps for them. "Look Jumby," I say, the smell of leather intoxicating me "if I lived here my leg would be almost perfect".
Fruits and vegetables, flowers too, look the way they should, healthy and fresh, but not perfect and waxed. Like London, street vendors sell rows and rows of peaches and nectarines, grapes, lettuce and huge tomatoes. Roses, crysanthemum, lilies, poke out of layers of walled vases in fat bunches. You forget you're here for only one day and are tempted to take armfuls home.
Annoyingly, J is beating me at Scrabble. I take hours with each turn, searching with increased desperation for the perfect high-scoring word. He takes no more than 45 seconds and beats me every time, and always with words that he cannot define. "That's not the point" I want to scream. For me, it's the words, for him, it's strategy. But guess who keeps on winning?
I know I haven't done this city justice. I'm going to keep trying, though. Off to Bariloche this morning, and then a two hour drive to Junin and the Estancia Huechahue. It's such a long way away from home!
Posted by misswhistle
at 01:20 PST