Blogs from Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America - page 372

We have settled into teaching a little bit, although this will be the first week where we both have to teach about 20 hours of classes, which I am sure will be a little stressful. However one of the benefits of working in the same job is that we are able to swap lessons pretty regularly, and because almost all of our students are intermediate level business people, we can even recycle a lot of our old lessons. One thing that has been tricky though is that there was a subway strike last week and so the 1 million or so people that take the subway everyday were all cramming into buses, taking their cars or hunting desperately for free cabs, which made getting from one class to another somewhat difficult. This is sort of par ... read more

"¡Un pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!" So I went to my first rally in a foreign country today. President Nestor Kirchner, elected without a popluar mandate when previous presidential candidate Menem (running for re-election) realized he was going to loose so badly he dropped out, decided to re-invent the ancient tradition of public address in Peronism. In the Plaza de Mayo, where sixty years ago Evita Peron stood and heard the people´s plee for her candidacy for vice president, Nestor Kirchner and his wife Christine spoke to the people in a rally to demonstrate popular support for the president. I´m not sure how many hundred thousand people made the venture into downtown Buenos Aires for the rally, but it was indeed a crowd. As an American it´s such an inviting site to see peaceful gatherings of ... read more

This big ole house I live in is quiet. Everyone is out doing their own thing and I am left here with Alices trusty Italian Mac iBook G4. (One thing about this Italian Mac....it has some crAzy buttons on it....for instance...this...§....along with crazy buttons, I dont know where some of my American buttons are like the apostraphe. Please, I know many of you brood over my mispellings and unintended word use....do not dwell on my extremely faulty punctuation. You know what they say....."When in Rome..." (ha! Alice is from Rome...this computer is from Rome...get it?) Another little side note: Whenever I hear either myself say the expression "When in Rome..." , which is surprisingly a lot, or when someone else uses it I cant help but think of my Father. Sometimes he goes to embarressing lengths ... read more

Tonight I went to River Stadium to watch the Argentine national team play the Argentine under 20 team, both of which are playing in their respective World Cups in June. The stadium holds 65,000 people... it was decently full... that means that the people filling half of the station represent the number of individuals "dissappeared" by the Argentine government in the last military dictatorship. What is most creepy about this is that it wasn´t like an impersonal bomb or attack that killed large numbers of people all at once, it was a systematic execution of individuals after torturing them for days, months, even years. The precision and personal connection needed to conduct such an act is stunning. On the way back from the stadium tonight, I saw my first hookers in BsAs. We cut through a ... read more

Today was our second "Class on Wheels" and the focus was the growth of the tourism industry in Buenos Aires, so we travelled around BsAs for several hours visiting all the top tourist sites and learning about how the industry is growing. I have to admit it was nice to have the chance to go to all the touristy spots, like La Boca´s El Caminito, and not feel like tourist but rather a sociologist. I didn´t feel as guilty for taking pictures then. Our first stop was a bookstore that was formally a theater built in 1910 during Argentina´s Golden Age. It was really pretty impressive to walk into a simple store front fascade and see a gigantic fresco on the rounded ceiling and a cafe behind the curtains on the stage. After the bookstore we ... read more