I'll start with Buenos Aires, because that was the first place we got to when we left the US. We had an afternoon there, stayed overnight, toured the city the next morning, then flew to Ushuaia. On the way home we did something similar but in reverse.
I'd have to say we didn't like Buenos Aires. This is not because we're the sort of weenies who don't like anything different from home, or because we can't cope with not speaking the language. We liked Seoul just fine, and my Spanish is a hell of a lot better than my Korean. BA just doesn't seem to have that many attractions, or at least not many of the sort of thing we like. (To be fair, it does have a number of art museums, though the Cultural Center, the only one we visited, was small and mostly full of the sort of modern art that doesn't do much for either of us.) People who like BA talk rather about the atmosphere, the shopping and the restaurants than the architecture or the history or the museums.
As for the atmosphere, what I saw of it was mostly gray. Robert Heinlein, who visited in 1953, described it as a "charming, beautiful metropolis"; apparently the loss of a dictator to force the city to keep clean and (more probably) recent economic turmoil and hard times have not been good for its charm or its beauty. (Though presumably good for its human rights record.) The amount of litter on the streets was comparable to that in Philadelphia or New York. There are a lot of parks, but we never saw anyone using them -- instead we saw many people picnicking in the medians of the highways. They'd just park the car and open up a table.
It's a huge city, so of course there were plenty of good things too; we just couldn't seem to warm up to it. For one thing, I was delighted to find that my six years of public-school Spanish were actually of some use. I could even detect a bit of local accent: people always said "Buena' dias" or mucha' gracias" instead of pronouncing the 's' between words. The food was all right, though not wonderful, but that really may just be a matter of not being what we're used to -- except that the "lomo" or beef loin usually was pretty fatty.
There is an area by one of the ports, Puerto Madura, that has been renovated. The old shipping warehouses have been turned into apartments and restaurants. It's a nice place to stroll, and whole families of locals and tourists alike do. We took a city tour; the best part of that was the old Italian area, where the houses are painted in patches of bright colors and where the tango was invented. There was one street there that was lined with stalls selling paintings of the buildings, all very colorful, and a crowded indoor market full of small reproductions of the buildings and of mate cups with silver straws. It was all bright and cheery, originally a way of laughing at poverty -- the bright colors in patches were because the original owners could only afford odds and ends of paint.
We also liked the Cementario de la Recoleta, the "city of the dead". Instead of tombstones, there were crypts, each ten or twelve feet high, organized like tiny houses in narrow streets. In many of them we could see caskets, or steps down to a lower level, or even bouquets of flowers. Some of the crypts even had stained glass, which I couldn't quite figure out. Evita Peron's crypt had plaques proclaiming her the friend of the worker, and handmade signs saying "We still remember you, Evita - we love you." (All in Spanish of course, so open to my mistranslation.)
Outside the cemetary, they hold a craft market on weekends, where I bought a pair of silver earrings and a necklace of rhodochrosite, the "national stone", sold in shops all over the city.
From BA we flew to Ushuaia, which we did like. Much of its economy is founded on adventure travel, so it felt a bit like Bend, Oregon, or Park City, Utah, or Queenstown, New Zealand. There was one nice shopping street, then it was mostly houses and a few business -- it's also the provincial capital, so there were some government buildings as well. The Museo del Fin del Mundo wasn't as impressive as its name, but the Museo Presidio was wonderful. It's set in the old prison and was really a combination of museums. Each of several wings had a different topic: Antarctic exploration, Ushuaia history, local missionaries, prisons in general, prisoners there in particular, local art. There would be a different exhibit in each cell. It was wonderfully done.
Good thing Ushuaia does have plenty of shops; at least one family on our trip had to buy complete wardrobes when their luggage failed to arrive!
Posted by dichroic at January 7, 2004 07:03 PM