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Published: April 12th 2010
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Life gets off to a slow start in this part of the world and Sunday is a day where life is leisurely.
If you are a young person its likely that you only got home from going out around 6am so sleep until midday or more is common.
So around 3pm we went to the San Martin Plaza to have a look at the markets. This plaza is one of the large ones, there is a huge bus interchange area here as well as government buildings.
On Sunday there is a craft market. These markets are on each Sunday from midday until 10pm.
The stalls are all set up by the council and the stall holders are of the alternative type, more dreadlocks here than at a Rastafarian festival. The stall holders given the well set up stalls sell products that are only handmade and there is everything from pottery to beads to glassware to leather and jewellery. Outside of the set up stalls there is an area for the bootleg DVDs, the junk from China etc and a huge pet market.
On all the grassy areas families and groups of people are sitting and eating food from
the vendors, enjoying mate which is brought from home complete with little thermos, and just hanging around enjoying each others company. Some Sundays there is dancing and a band.
We ate a filled bread product. It was a soda bread but you can also get a yeast bread variety which is filled and baked with meat and cheese, yummy and filling, and costs about 5 pesos.
We took a yellow Este bus to and from home, cheap and easy transport and frequent.
As luck would have it there was a Folklorica Festival on 3 blocks from the house in "the woods" a huge park area nearby. This was a 2 day night time festival with multiple stages and areas, like a music festival anywhere complete with food vendors and mass humanity. ]I think this festival was supported by the Buenos Aires province celebrating old and new folk music. There was an area set up for people to dance and for dancing displays, an outdoor stage, and huge ampitheatre stage and some other areas that had huge screens which were showing the music from the ampitheatre.
Jasmine took me along, me with my 30 words of Spanish
and her 100 words of English, so not a lot of conversation happening. She was brave and very nice to do this, Hannah stayed home and worked on her lesson plans.
So we watched couples dancing, this was in pairs and involved anyone who wanted to join in from the crowd. Very stylised movements, arm raised, twirling in circles, much posturing, and foot tapping, very elegant and sexy with the men equally able to dance with grace and poise. Later on my way back to the house i called into this area and there was traditional dancing of one of the ethinic groups, i suspect from the peoples up North near the border with Bolivia.
We watched 2 bands play live on an outdoor stage with couples dancing again out the front and also one couple on the stage. One of the bands had a girl lead singer who really had the crowd going, much arm raising and dancing as well as singing. The display dancing couple as well as people in the crowd also danced this particular dance which involved a single hankie held by each dancer with twirling and swirling and seductively draping of the dance
partner with hankie.
We then went off to one of the big screens and watched 2 bands who were playing in the ampitheatre.
Instruments used were nylon strung guitars, flutes wood and transverse normal variety, clarinets, large drums single beaten with two sticks, button accordians, pan flutes, and mandolins and ukelele type of small stringed guitars. As usual there was a political message attached to some of the songs, normal folk festival stuff.
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Anita
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Hi from N.Z. Great to see you are having a good time - that's what life is about at this stage! We are now on broadband - finally, so are very much enjoying the photos coz they can be loaded so quickly. Girls LOVE the pictures of all the animals. Big HELLO to Hannah and you from all of us here.