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Published: September 6th 2006
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Last week Laurence and I managed to get out and explore some of the city’s amazing parks and plazas. This was a great opportunity for me to see some of the city’s best examples of urban design since it would be these public spaces that I would be studying during my time here. To be honest, I still haven’t quite figured out just how I’ll be ‘studying’ these places but I’m sure it will come to me over a coffee or mate. We began by taking the subway to the Plaza San Martin, supposedly one on BA’s best urban parks/plazas. The description was not far off and the plaza proved to be a very inviting place and somewhere that I could envision spending my time in. It included your typical statue depicting Saint Martin in all his glory, ignoring how and what he had done to the indigenous populations to earn his title. The plaza spread away from this ceremonial centre and became transformed into what felt like a park by its many mature trees and shaded walkways, playground and dog park. This dog park is vital in a city where everyone seems to house enormous dogs like Rotties, Dobermen and
Great Danes in tiny apartments, as a result there is dog shit everywhere! That said, the land mines that cover the sidewalks seem to disappear in the morning after a bizarre occurrence that cleans the sidewalks during the night, thank god for city workers.
The Plaza then leads you to one of Buenos Aires’ only vantage points that runs along a short ridge overlooking the port and the Rio de la Plata (River Plate). Coming from a city like Vancouver where one can view and admire the city from many vantage points, it is great to have a place where you can get above the city of Buenos Aires. Provided by this height along the ridge, the plaza takes advantage of its geography with a wonderful grassed slope that runs down towards a memorial of the Falklands war. This memorial has an eternal flame and a wall with the names of all the Argentine soldiers that were killed during this conflict and is guarded by two armed soldiers at all times. I am not sure we Canadians can understand the psychological toll, which this conflict had on the Argentine psyche. To give some perspective, when Argentina declared that they
Puerto Madero
Fancy restaurants,ohhh la la were going to battle the British for the Falklands, people flooded the Plaza de Mayo in a joyous celebration of Argentinean sovereignty. Their loss to the British was a monumental defeat that affected the nation greatly during a time when the military formed the national government. The Plaza San Martin is a great urban plaza and one that I hope to spend many afternoons in, enjoying the scenery and flavour of Buenos Aires and, hopefully conducting some research that will shed light on why this plaza is so welcoming and successful.
We continued our day by heading towards the Puerto Madero, a new development that reminds me a lot of Yaletown in Vancouver. It is a recent residential and commercial re-development of the former port lands that run parallel to the Puerto Madero. Former shipping warehouses have been converted into high-end apartments on the top with exclusive and expensive restaurants on the ground floor, which look out onto the historic port. Sound familiar? We walked up and down this development and eventually settled on a nice restaurant for lunch. I would be interested to visit this place at night and see what type of activities and what crowds fill
Puerto Madero
Check out those old cranes. The place really feels like Vancouver's Yaletown. the boardwalk after sunset.
Our day finished off with a beer in the Plaza Dorrego, in the San Telmo neighbourhood south of the Plaza de Mayo. The plaza had a real hippie vibe with vendors selling all sorts of gimmicky junk like mate gourds, argentine flags and maps, Che Guevara posters and the typical hippie beaded necklaces. Overall the plaza was not terribly interesting or exceptional and my perception of the plaza wasn't helped by the fact that we appeared to have been taken by the waiter who definitely charged us the tourist price for two pints of beer. I’ll have to come back on another occasion. After leaving the Plaza Dorrego, we walked back towards the Plaza de Mayo where we hoped to catch our train on the subway line ‘D’ that would wisk us home in fifteen minutes, what we found was a huge political rally that was beginning to fill the Plaza de Mayo and which had shut down all the subway entrance nearby.
It turns out that a Senator by the name of Blumberg had planned the rally. Blumberg, whose son had been murdered under suspicious circumstances, and a member of the right-wing opposition
party, had organized the rally as a protest for increased security in the Greater Buenos Aires region and the country as a whole. The rally was a great example of the Plaza de Mayo’s role in the city as a public space, whose location adjacent to the national parliament (Casa Rosada or Pink House) made it an ideal place to protest against the government. It was in fact this exact phenomenon that had led me to Buenos Aires and my interest in the plazas of Buenos Aires.
Throughout the crowd were photos of children who had been killed under suspicious circumstances, which included accusations that the local police were involved in some way and that their murders had gone, unpunished. Laurence, acting as my interpreter helped to question a couple of people on the reasons for such a protest. The answers varied from one commentator who suggested that it was a political act that signalled that Blumberg was going to attempt to lead the opposition in the next election, to others who were passionate in their conviction that both the police and courts were corrupted and that it was these institutions that were responsible for the terrorizing of Argentina’s
Puerto Madero
Check out those old cranes. The place really feels like Vancouver's Yaletown. citizens. I am too far removed from the political economy of Argentina to completely understand what was exactly going on but it was a great example and demonstration of the nature and role, which the Plaza de Mayo plays in civic and national politics. The next morning I read in the local paper, El Clarin, that the rally had drawn between 40,000 and 50,000 people. Security was definitely an issue that had captured the interest of the nation and one that would surely play a major role in Argentina’s next presidential elections.
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Mama Lisa
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Wow! Vous ne perdez vraiment pas de temps et j'adore te lire Jason; tous ces petits détails sur les endroits que nous verrons en décembre. Mais il y a aussi le côté politique qui me semble fascinant. Essaie de nous donner plus d'informations selon ce que tu ressens vis-à-vis les Argentins. Ce qui ne m'a pas surpris non plus c'est ce petit côté propret de Laurence. J'imagine qu'elle a dû faire tout un ménage. La comparaison que tu as faite avec Paris tient-ell aussi pour les automobilitstes i.e. les Argentins sont-ils aussi "nerveux" que les Parisiens lorsqu'ils sont dans le traffic? Continue d'écrire:j'adore :`j'ai l'impression d'être avec vous ( ais pas comme chaperon...)