The Unknown Districts

We responded to a house sitting request on couchsurfing.com whilst we were holed up in the Catalinas Suites hotel in the Buenos Aires ‘microcenter’. We figured we could slow down, reflect and catch up on our woeful record of recent blogging. We had not written a thing for over a month, and it was time to catch up and also sit down and actually plan the rest of our trip.

Francesca and I waited almost a week for a response whilst we went to Tango shows and celebrated our relative academic (Francesca got a distinction on her dissertation) and healthy (I quit smoking for a year now) achievements. Finally a message! The couple who wanted a house sitter replied – there would already be a Russian girl staying in the large house looking after the dog they had, but we could also stop there if we wanted. They would be gone from the 9th August until the 4th September. Cool! Plenty of time to catch up on our blog and make travel plans.

On the 7th August we jumped in a cab and headed over to their ‘large house’. Before leaving the hotel I settled the bill, but forget to check the USD equivalent to make sure the invoice was correct. Luckily, on retrospection everything was in order, but nevertheless a rookie mistake I will not repeat, I hope.

We arrived at Avellaneda, a district named after President Nicolás Avellaneda; whose excellent economic record certainly trumped his human rights one. He oversaw the government policy of The Conquest of the Desert, which essentially was a military campaign to pacify groups of indigenous people in Patagonia and get them to submit to the Argentine will. Those who defied the army were killed in a huge genocide.

Our taxi driver dropped us off warning us that this area was peligroso, or dangerous. It looked a little run down, but we knocked on the door and were greeted by our house sitting couple. Their dog was cool – a huge grey Weimaraner who probably should live on a farm (they are gun dogs), but who we fed and walked around the block. These dogs need a lot of care and attention, and when they greet you, they can be rough. Tomas was an OK dog though – he was house trained, but still had not been taught to leave the trash alone, etc. He was a bit of a handful, but we will both miss him when we are gone.

We managed to spend most of our time alternately blogging or making travel plans per country – and we saved a bunch of money by house sitting. My fried breakfasts, pasta and empanadas all got a good workout and my expertise level rose to that of ‘amazing’ – as per Francesca.

After feeling a little stir crazy in the house, and only having been out of the area once to go to the movies (it was Francesca’s first Star Trek experience), we decided to go to a walking tour of the lesser known Caballito area. This was a tour we had missed a few weeks before due to us getting on the wrong bus.

This time, however, we had it all planned out. We knew where we were going, and we felt like locals anyway, having been in Buenos Aires for 6 weeks already! We got to the Acoyte metro (or Subte) station and we had enough time for a continental breakfast. After some croissants, toast and tea we saw the lady with her walking tour board standing outside. El Otro Porteno is a walking tour company run by locals that specializes in bringing people off the beaten track. We met our guide Elisa who lives in Caballito and told us she started doing the tours here because her friends asked her about the area, and so she did a lot of research and took history and art classes to be able to show others her neighborhood.

There was only one other person with us on the walking tour, a German girl who said she was from London studying at the Met in dietetics. The tour started at an odd time; 9.15am, which is pretty early for a tourist walking tour. We soon got on our way, however, and we walked down Avenida Rivadavia (named after Bernardino Rivadavia, the first President of Argentina – everything is either named after a person or a date in South America, making it confusing that all towns have the same street names). We stopped along the way to note a colorful plaque on the floor outside the local college. The plaque commemorates the people who were murdered by the dictatorship in the famous forced disappearances. The ones on the plaque were college kids and professors who once worked at the college. We continued until we reached Parque Rivadavia, where there is a cluster of market kiosks, mostly selling comics and books. This tradition started when our guide was a child and, with her mother, would come to the area, along with lots of other kids who would then trade comics and other books. Now this book fair feeds the neighboring art college, and as a testament to it, perhaps, they have drawn lots of murals on the adjoining wall – all inspired by classic books such as Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland and Don Quixote.

Our guide periodically showed us some old photographs of the areas we were in, mostly from the 19th Century. It is always amazing to me to see how much better life was back then in South America before all the dictators took power – the men all wearing suits, the ladies look like ladies and the buildings look new and regal, not dilapidated and disgustingly dirty. In fact, I read the other day that revolutionary Simon Bolivar’s last words were:

“America is ungovernable. The man who serves a revolution plows the sea. This nation (he meant South America as a whole as he was trying to oust Spain and create a united South America) will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants.”

I guess this could apply to any country in the world, but South America really has a special breed of tyrant, and the nations here have fallen pretty hard into third world status. Indeed, in the middle of the park, Elisa pointed out the monument to Simon Bolivar. He is mounted on his horse, sword aloft, but we could not get near it due to the park being roped off for maintenance. She also told us about the local church minister who spent his time trying to get a white marble statue of a naked lady (representing a maiden drawing water from a pylon) removed or covered-up. I figured the priest would have been better off trying to help the homeless people who now cover this area; living among the stray dogs and the dog shit everywhere. Why is the Catholic Church so obsessed with sex? I guess because they never get any…

We wondered down into the main area of Caballito then. Elisa told us that this area is where all the rich folk had their summer houses back in the 18th Century – where . During the yellow fever outbreak (1871) that Francesca wrote about, many people built houses in Recoleta and Belgrano, creating those neighborhoods. Caballito already existed as holiday homes for the rich.

Some of the older buildings survived too, such as the original structure for the underground train station, and the Mercado del Progreso, a British built market, shipped in pieces from London. The subway in Buenos Aires is the oldest in Latin America, and was built by the British in 1913 with the lowest rate of mechanical failure, and it was not replaced until March 2013 (100 years). A real feat of British engineering.

We crossed the busy roads and entered the market. Elisa said this is where she buys her groceries from. It is amazing that the market place is so old – the original art deco structure shipped from London is still standing inside. What really separated this from other markets we had seen in South America was how the produce was actually something we might buy. Normally it is either arts and crafts (too touristy), weird local produce (too complicated) or just gone bad (too third world). This market actually had good, cheap produce that you can eat! They were a bit cagey about photographs in here – it is a business place, not a place for tourists to gawk and get in the way - but we got some good shots.

Our guide told us that the back of the market was once a stream that the people used to use to wash their produce, back in the times of slavery. Buenos Aires was a complete swampland back then, and the summer houses were dotted around farmland. As these farmers drove their cattle through the swamp, many died leaving behind only skeletons. Slowly and over time, these skeletons became roads, along with the litter and general waste of the populous. It was this that helped cause the yellow fever outbreak, as well as the infected rivers and streams.

We saw a new foodstuff here too, the matambre. This is a monster piece of meat that reminded me a little of the chivito in Uruguay. Eggs, carrots, spices and onions all wrapped in lots of meat.

After leaving the colorful market we headed up the road to a peluquero. A peluquero is a traditional gaucho grocery store cum tavern. Originally it was like a general purpose store like in the Wild West movies. This evolved into a place where gauchos could hang out and drink. Elisa told us stories about how the men would drink whiskey and get drunk and challenge each other to duels outside after long bouts of drinking. The idea was to use your knife not to kill your opponent (if this happened it was ruled an accidental death), but to scar his face. Nice.

What was special about this peluquero was the fact that it was still open regularly, old school style, and it had a hairdresser attached to it where only men can get hair cuts, and all the equipment is a living museum. All the equipment is really old, but all still works, and they are still open for business.

Another surprising fact we learned here was that the gauchos often stage competitions with each other where they would sing maudlin songs, or simply poetically talk over music whilst challenging or ridiculing their opponent. It sounded like a rap battle from 8 mile to Francesca and I, and some gaucho fans say that these peluqueroes sowed the seeds of tango itself.

As the place was closed, we could not stop to soak up any atmosphere or drinks, so we headed over and down the road to the English district that Francesca an I had heard about somewhere before. Our guide told us that this area was called the English district because people thought that the train companies had built the area for their management level employees. Apparently this is a fallacy, and the area was built for a long defunct Argentine bank’s employees. The names on all the buildings and the architectural style all point to Italian developers, yet the listings for the houses in this area also all say English district!

It is a beautiful area though, and really reminded me of Maida Vale in London – lots of big mansions, eclectically placed together, but mostly in neoclassical style.

We walked around for awhile and then Elisa told us the next stage of the tour was a short bus journey away. We all hopped on the bus and went to another part of the area to visit the Basílica de San Carlos Borromeo y María Auxiliadora (Basilica of Mary Help of San Carlos) where the current pope was baptized. From the outside I was wondering what was so special about the church other than the pope claim to fame. Built in 1910 the church was made a basilica in 1942 for reasons passing understanding. The front doors were pretty grand and hinted at the beauty inside.

Once we went inside we were treated to a pretty sight – lots of marble, golden chandeliers made from Morano glass and huge stained glass windows all from Italy. The pillars were colored red and white and there was a huge organ at the back which is the showpiece of the church – it was built with acoustics in mind. We learnt that the church takes a siesta between 12 noon and about 4pm (the reason the tour starts so early!), and the famous tango singer Carlos Gardel sang here in the choir in his childhood.

Francesca’s favorite part of the church was the orange and pink marble which we found on the ground floor. This church is wonderfully decorated and really odd for being so off the tourist trail. We were then shown the baptism room (which they now keep,locked since the pope made the church famous). A tall story about the pope that our guide told us was that when he was baptized, he was offered the cloak that you are given by the master of ceremonies and he told the master of ceremonies that he did not need such material things, embarrassing the master. Yeah, right, so a talking baby was so humble that he was an asshole to the guy trying to baptize him, huh? The church does nothing to dissuade these kind of magical fairy tales, of course, even whilst denouncing witchcraft and condoms. Morons.

Our penultimate stop was a famous café called Las Violetas, or the violets, where many people come to have a coffee and hang out with friends. They were filming an interview when we were in there, and the camera swung our way, so maybe we might be on television somewhere in the world? This café was far superior to the other more famous Café Tortoni which gets most of the tourist traffic. Las Violetas is an Art Nouveau inspired building – plenty of light, flowers, marble and more wonderful stained glass windows. The cakes and pan dulce, or sweet breads looked amazing – but we were trying to save money and not gain more weight so we gave them a miss. After a quick stop here, we made for our final visit of the day, La Catedral!

This place was a tango milonga that Francesca and I had wanted to visit weeks before, but never got around to going. A milonga is basically a nightclub that people go to, normally until 5am or 6am in the morning, where men and women dance tango all night. For some of these people tango is more than a passion, it is there raison d’etre.

La Catedral is held in a grimy building that once performed as a grain silo, dairy factory and also meat processing plant. Nowadays it is covered in the most eclectic and original artworks that provide an amazing atmosphere in which the tangoheads come to dance. We did not get to see it at night during a full on milonga, but seeing the artwork and all the decorations in the cold light of day was an amazing experience, especially juxtaposed against the ordered and classical church we had just visited.

My favorite part of La Catedral was a chair I found that had a toilet seat on it. Open it up and someone had written hola, or hello on the inside! Funny.

That was the end of our walking tour, and we left on the Subte (underground) to go to change money in Calle Florida (Florida Street), before heading back to our house sit.

Until next time.