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Published: December 18th 2007
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EL CENTRO - BUENOS AIRES
We spent our first full day in Buenos Aires in El Centro, its downtown, which can arguably be considered a neighbourhood though, municipally speaking, it is comprised of parts of three barrios, Monserrat, Tribunales and San Nicholas.
We navigated ourselves to Centre Ville by using the Subte, the Subway, built by the British in 1913, therefore running under the wrong sides of the street. Right hand drive is the mode above ground on streets here, but the British, as we all know, insist that left hand traffic is a command from below, as it were. How so ever, the Buenos Aires Tube works efficiently and finds it way across town or down town, though seeming to go in the opposite direction than it should. Presently, we got to El Centro and promptly got out on the wrong side of the street relative to the flow of traffic; oh; never mind.
En passant, the men here dress snappy, sharp and chic, in both business and casual wear. The women show fair fashion flair; and, in a subtle Iberian sort of way, their form is fine, as befits a mature city such as this.
The manners of both genders, even in fleeting public interchanges, are impeccable: no transactions before passing the time of day; no one takes a seat while an older or pregnant person is standing. With my need to stand, I was giving permission for people to sit all day.
The ornate Roman Catholic cathedral, neoclassical, graced our entrance from the north into the heart of El Centro, Plaza de Mayo, memorializing Argentina’s independence from Spain, 25 May 1810.
From the steps of the cathedral, we surveyed the scene, beginning with Casa de Rosa in the east, all decked out in pink, office of the president, currently a woman, from the balcony of which the Perons, Evita, and Juan, addressed the people during their time in sway during the 1940’s, and from which Madonna sang, “Don’t cry” in her Evita role.
In the north eastern and southwestern corners, stand the Ministry of the Economy and the National Bank, boasting a splendidly gardened rooftop. Their occupants were key players in the saga of international loan default and economic stress of the early 2000’s. The Congressional buildings, where the people’s legislators meet, dominate the southern flank, and a Big Ben look-a-like
oversees the south western corner with it s time stood still at 12:05.
The centre of the Plaza is where the people have always come to listen, with approval when deserved, to the entreaties of their leaders. They also use the Plaza to protest repressive actions such as the state-sanctioned disappearance of thousands of activists in the nineteen seventies and eighties; a protest that continues each Thursday, staged by the mothers of those who disappeared. Today’s protest is against industrial environmental misbehaviour in the river delta that frames this city.
Before setting off on a walk around, we joined the people of the city in the celebration of their midday mass at the cathedral. It made for a peaceful pause of reflection, midst a high sensory day, taking comfort in the rituals, as they transcended our weakness in the language in which the mass was sung.
Then it was off to the expansively wide boulevards and avenues that spike away from and run parallel to the institutional core. We went west along Avenue de Mayo, foreswearing buses, as we saw but mostly did not touch a dazzling array on display in the various business places. We stopped
to view leather and silver goods of the cowboy culture from the gaucho ranches in the environs of the city. We peeked in at tango academies that are as serious an endeavour, as are places for teaching the Spanish language. We relented and made a little purchase, in the form of small leather wallets to hold our various papers and currencies. We gazed at the literati in a splendid café des artistes, inspired by the life and times of their man of letters, Jorge Luis Borge, Anglo Argentine, b.1899, d.1986. Then we stopped to take in the scene of a man walking two dozen dogs; dog walking, we are told, is an occupation in the city, In the process of absorbing that little tidbit, we literally stumbled onto the widest street in the world, Avenue 9 de Julio; and crossed all twenty-two lanes of it, heart in mouth, helped by the gendarmes, without whom, assertive traffic and all, it would not have been possible.
The two wide medians on 9 de Julio are graced with demure sculptural pieces and an architectural gem in the simple form of a white obelisk reaching some two hundred and twenty feet up. The
medians are also ablaze with the flowering of spring, for as far as traffic can be seen, which is far in either direction.
Portenos also claim their street, Rivadavia, as the longest in the world, never mind that Guinness grants Yonge Street from Toronto to Winnipeg in Canada to be so. One simply does not have this argument, over tea and chocolates with the hospitable commercial folk of a proud host city.
With the issue of the longest street held in tactical abeyance, it was time to take the subway going the wrong way home to our barrio; there to have dinner, tabled on the pavement, consisting of two huge pork steaks, for each of us, and a mess of mashed papas, with a sprig of parsley for greens; then to go ring the bell for Marta-Elena to take us in.
Vernon
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