Buenos Aires, Pt. 1

So...I had to come home for a day after going to Mendoza, because every Monday I have my 7 ½ hour long Ecology class, and every afternoon we have a quiz that can’t be rescheduled. Since we only have two real tests the whole semester, I think that the quizzes are relatively important, so I decided I’d better not miss it. It was probably good, though, because being away from home for over a week would have been a bit overwhelming anyways. I took the bus back from Mendoza and arrived in Santiago late Sunday night, and promptly went to bed since I had class at 8:30 the next morning.

I don’t know what prompted me to check the Ecología class website Monday morning when I woke up, but right as I was getting ready to leave I did, thank God! For some unexplained reason class for that morning was canceled; we didn’t have to show up until the afternoon session at 2:30. Since I was already up, I took advantage of the morning by washing my clothes, getting started packing, organizing things, etcetera. The rest of the day was pretty normal—class, then back home. I made it to bed around midnight, and had to get up at 5 to make it to my flight. One of the sweetest things about living in a city, luckily, is that I only had to pay 8 dollars for an airport transfer service to come pick me up at my house and deliver me to the airport on time. Yes please!

I got to Buenos Aires in the early afternoon, and set out on my own adventure. KellyAnne had told me roughly how her and Rosie (the friend who just moved to Buenos Aires from Santiago) had made it from the airport to the hostel, but they had taken a taxi from the airport transfer service terminal in town to the place we were staying. Thinking that didn’t sound like anything of a challenge, I decided to start off right away learning about the BA subway system…and did, just fine. Yeah for me—before living in Santiago I NEVER would have DREAMED of doing that by myself. I showed up at the hostel without any problems, and KellyAnne was there waiting for me.

Once I ate a little food and used the hostel computers to register for classes (something which I had sort of forgotten was a major priority, and best done as soon as possible since classes fill up…I decided on my schedule on the flight over) we set out into the city. The weather was swelteringly hot; possibly on the verge of deadly for a heat wimp like myself. We spent the afternoon wandering around the area of Recoleta, one of the many “comunas” of the city. We spent several hours in the Recoleta cemetery, and ancient and incredibly creepy city of the dead, where everyone is housed in above ground monuments built by the families. People basically built elaborately decorated alters for their loved ones, and the caskets are entered inside. They’re meant to be visited, and nearly all have doors and windows, and usually the caskets are shelved in plain site. All of them have crazy details, like beautiful expensive stained glass or statues modeled after the deceased. While some are in very good condition, the majority aren’t even close, some even with broken windows and dead birds inside. I don’t really know how to describe it, so I’ll put up some pictures as soon as I can. Many very famous Argentineans are “buried” there, including Eva Peron, who’s tomb we visited.

Later that afternoon we did some more wandering around the downtown area of Recoleta, but I was exhausted as I’d only gotten 5 hours of sleep and it was intensely hot, so eventually we just went back to the hostel and made dinner.

Our hostel situation was actually pretty cool; there were probably 25 or 30 other people there the entire time we were there, all of them our age and all of them except for us backpacking across South America. It was really a fun environment to hang out in, and we ended up spending the rest of the night there just talking, getting to know each other and relaxing. Being in the hostel for the whole week kind of felt like living in the dorms again, which was nice.


It’s funny, because KellyAnne and I both agreed later, after talking to them, that we feel like it really is important to live somewhere as opposed to just visiting it if you want any kind of real perspective for where you are. I mean sure, you can go look at Iguazu falls for example, which all of them had done, but none of them really understood the reasons or implications of the falls being unusually dry, which is related to politics between Brasil and Argentina. It’s certainly possible to enjoy their beauty without understanding everything at work behind controlling them, but I think it makes for an entirely different experience if you have a more holistic perspective of what you’re seeing—in Spanish there are two different words that you can use for going to visit a place – “ver,” which means “to see,” and “conocer,” which means “to know.” I’ve pretty much decided that since I now know there’s a difference between the two, it won’t really be worth my while to just “ver” things anymore.


The next day was Wednesday, and it was raining rather hard all day. We went shopping almost all day, although we didn’t really buy much—everyone in Argentina is anorexic (seriously, they have the highest rate of anorexia in the world) so we couldn’t really put on any of the clothes. That makes for a fun day of shopping…

That night we went out to a play, and it was really fun to go to a play that was obviously entirely in Spanish and to understand everything that happened. I haven’t talked much on here, I don’t think, about all of the PDA that goes on in Chile, but it’s pretty substantial. Enough so that the teacher of my “Chile, Chilenos y su Cultura” class actually spent a fair amount of time talking about the reasons behind it one day. I won’t go into all of that, but I can tell you that coming from the US it’s very shocking to see not only teenagers but also grown adults making out in pretty much any public place you can imagine—the metro, parks, street corners, restaurants, whatever. Even though I’ve been here long enough to be relatively accustomed to all of that, the extra show we ended up getting at the theater is worth mentioning. KellyAnne and I were in the second to last row in the theater (it was pretty small, so it didn’t matter) and seated in front of us was a couple probably in their mid thirties. Unfortunately distractingly for us, they spent almost the entire show loudly and passionately kissing. It was pretty ridiculous, and made it difficult to pay attention to the show at times, but also funny enough that I thought it was worth mentioning.

I don’t exactly remember what all we did the next day, although I know it included lots of walking around because by the end of the day my feet were dead. That’s pretty standard for us—just walking around the city so we can see the various “sites” that aren’t touristy or exciting at all, they’re just part of life there, until we’re so exhausted it’s almost impossible to think. In addition to walking around a lot, we went to the museum of Eva Peron’s life, which was very interesting, and went to the Plaza de Mayo in the afternoon. Every Thursday afternoon since the military dictatorship mothers and grandmothers of “the disappeared,” victims of the government’s kidnapping and murdering tendencies, have protested the losses of their children. We went to watch their protest, which was kind of a strange experience. Here were these women, most of them probably in their 70’s, marching around the Plaza square holding pictures of their children while a big crowd of tourists watched them. Not only that, but before and after they sold t-shirts, which apparently went to fund the cause of their organization which works on social justice projects nationally. It just seemed odd that something as intimate and personal as the message each of these women was sending – that she desperately wanted to know what had happened to her missing child – had kind of been reduced to a tourist attraction. I couldn’t quite decided how I felt about it—on one hand, I guess you could look at all of the people who showed up to watch them as supporters, but on the other hand I can’t say that I personally did anything to actually support them aside from being there and watching, and I don’t know if that counts or not. It was a strange experience, anyways.

Well, even though that’s only the first little bit of what I did while in Buenos Aires, it’s 11:30, I’m exhausted and I have a test tomorrow. So…that’s all you get for now. Sorry!