the city of the dead and other stories

Sorry about the long delay in blog entries. As soon as I got to Buenos Aires I moved into an apartment with five good friends, so a lot of my time has been spent doing things that are objectively uninteresting to outsiders like dance contests and massive cheese eating marathons, but are the stuff of which fantastic friend vacations are made. I purposefully divided my vacation into two halves. The first was physically active, extrodinarily memorable, but often exhausting touristy stuff, while the second was a long vacation in a big city with a group of friends, ideal for resting and gaining back some of the weight I shed at altitude. I´m really pleased with how both halves have gone, but the second is much less ideal for blogging than the first.

But we have managed to do some classic touristy things. We´re staying in the Recolleta neighborhood so on the first day I managed to stumble to the famous cemetery there which is just down the block from us. It is strange and striking and not really like any other cemetery I have ever been to. There is no green space. Instead, it is all row upon row of mausoleums, perched next to each other like regular buildings on ordinary city blocks. I am not used to mausoleums I guess--I expected them to be all inaccessible, pyramid-like tomby stone but these are almost like little apartments. Windows, stairs, doors perfectly hung on hinges, like tiny little one bedrooms for people who have no intention of ever exiting. Several of the taller ones that peek out over the walls of the cemetery even have little round windows for better views of the street.There´s something charmingly stubborn and also creepy about a place that refuses to abaondon the strict conventions of living when confronted with death.

We also managed to see a poilitical demonstration against the city bank (seems like par for the course in currency-nervous Argentina) and the weekly march of the mothers of the disappeared. During the dirty war, the Argentinian government routinely kidnapped and killed dissentors. The mothers of people who were kidnapped still gather regularly to march and demand to know what happened to their children. I saw the march just after I had visited the cemetery, and it was such a striking contrast between people who take all the trappings of life with them and physically refuse to disappear, and people who just vanish one day without a trace, so thoroughly that their mothers must spend their remaining days asking for an accounting.

But it´s not all tourism and political strations. In fact, it´s mostly meat, which I will write about next time, because I plan to wax rhapsodic about it for many, many paragraphs.