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Published: December 18th 2019
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Ian checking the map
About 100 metres from 'home' We're staying in the Retiro district which of course means nothing when you choose accommodation in a new city so the first thing to do is explore. Leafy trees and elegant balconied apartments line the street with two cafes and a bar/restaurant very close by, i.e. within a hundred metres!
A small corner park over the road made us curious. It was strange, mostly concrete, more leafy trees in a neat row, a pool with running water over stones. And always people sitting on the benches often eating lunch. The outline of a former building is evident on the adjacent wall. It is the site of the former Israeli Embassy destroyed in 1992 by a suicide bombing attack. We were shocked.
Now the streets are lined with short stubby bronze bollards.
Reminders of history are never far away as we discovered again on our tour of the city the next day. Our rather faded memories of the military junta in Argentina during the 1970s and 80s were brought to life when the bus slowed enough for us to see, under a motorway overpass, numerous white crosses where a mass grave had been discovered on the site of a
detention camp.
We had been alerted to the missing thousands (30,000) earlier in the day when we visited Plaza de Mayo and saw white headscarves in pairs, surrounding the monument outside the Parliament Building. These represent the Mothers of Plaza Mayo who campaigned for their missing children. The headscarves symbolise the nappies of their children and are embroidered with names and birth dates. They still gather every Thursday.
The walk down colourful Caminito St in La Boca district was a bit more cheerful. Corrugated iron, salvaged from the nearby docks, was used to make houses by the workers. Now it is a tourist attraction with markets and artists selling their wares.
Other interesting things we learned of Argentina, education is free from kindergarten to university. Private education is available but you can't get a loan from a bank to pay the fees. The average wage is $US150 a month.
Independence from Spain (in 1816) is commemorated in the 9th July Avenue, and extremely wide avenue with a busway down the middle. It is not the widest avenue in the world, that is in Brazil. Friendly rivalry exists between Argentina and Brazil a bit like between us
and Australia I think. A lot if immigrants came from Italy and Spain and brought with them the architecture of Europe. Only one building is left that sports colonial architecture.
Football is not just serious we were told. It is deadly serious. We passed the stadium for the Boca Juniors. Why blue and yellow for them? Because someone decided they would go to the port and use the colours of the flag of the first ship that came in. It happened to be a Swedish ship so hence blue and yellow.
One more interesting site - the Recoleta Cemetery which houses the mausoleum of Eva Peron and her family. Similar to the one we saw in New Orleans there is a difference. These mausoleums have crypts and some even have glass doors so you can see the caskets stacked up inside. A bit creepy really. they called also be sold like any other real estate. One just sold for half a million dollars. This means you can clean out all the old inhabitants and bring in the new!!
The temperature is a balmy 26 degrees with a welcome breeze ensuring we don't get too hot which was
Local bar and restaurant
Dinner and 3 glasses of wine = $40. Beautiful food. just as well because we wandered back to our hotel. I felt quite good as my phone told me I had exceeded my daily target of 6000 steps by doing 11,000! I don't know where the 6000 came from in the first place. I am new to this having just activated the app. I fear living in a ship for the next 3 weeks I will hard pressed to keep this up!
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