We're loving it here. The amount of things you can do in this city seems immeasurable. I'll recount some of the highlights of what we've done during the past few days.
We've done a lot of walking around in the city, visiting museums (Centro Cultural de Borges was a favourite, especially the World Press Photo '07 exhibit), parks (we found a really pretty one yesterday, Parque de 3 Febrero, I think it was called) and neighbourhoods. Of the ones we've visited so far, Palermo's been our favourite. It's full of tree-lined streets, cool shops, a nice little weekend market, restaurants, bars and cafes. Another interesting one is La Once, around the city center, which is where a lot of immigrants live and where I saw my first Orthodox Jews ever. This is also where we had Korean food the other night and died of culinary pleasure 452 times. La Boca was pretty, but the area the tourists go to visit was very... touristy. The other parts of this neighbourhood are supposed to be really dangerous, but we had an escort whom I will write about in a minute. Recoleta's nice too, a bit fancier than the other neighbourhoods though.
We've also met a lot of people during the time we've been here. The first few days, we stayed with Patricio and now we're living with an American guy named Scott. He's really relaxed and cool and has lived in BA for about a year and a half. We went out with him last night (btw, Argentines party really late; we didn't go out until about 3 and left the club at around 6:30... oh, and guys are a lot more upfront here when it comes to picking girls up than in Sweden, but less so when Scott was dancing with us... and on that topic, guys comment on girls passing by all the time, but maybe we're just noticing it here because Alex and Charles aren't with us right now), good fun.
We also met Monica's friend Vicky who's on a university exchange from Sweden, and it's pretty interesting to hear what she has to say about Argentina and its economy, which is what she's studying. We've heard this from a lot of people, actually, that an Argentine may be starving, but will spend money on new commodities anyway. A lot of people here look well-off and BA seems really big on consumerism, but in the newspaper yesterday we read that 500,000 18-25 year olds in the greater BA area (comprised of about 9 million people, I think) are unemployed or not studying. I don't understand how this situation would ever be tenable and that people aren't more careful after the economic crises in the late 90's and 2001.
Another interesting character we've met is Roberto, the above mentioned escorter in La Boca. We were walking through a park on the way to the Caminita (the famous street with all the colourful houses) when this tall, toothless old guy started talking to us. He spoke to us about love, read us poetry he's written, as well as letters he has received from female tourists that he's talked to in the plaza; letters which he said made him feel better when he needed some cheering up. Considering his circumstances, he already seems like a very cheerful guy - several years ago (I'm not sure how long ago), his mother, wife and son died (I'm not sure if all the deaths were related, but his son was shot in La Boca) and now he's homeless. He claimed that he never takes drugs or drinks, which is probably true, because he was a really alert 66 year old, intelligent and seemingly well educated. He was really interesting to talk to, and he was kind enough to walk us from the park to the Boca Juniors football stadium and gave us the directions to the Caminita, telling us about La Boca and greeting every policeman on the way. Hopefully we'll get to see him again when we go with the others to La Boca.
Today we didn't get out of the house until 4 in the afternoon, but it's been a really excellent afternoon: my first Pride parade ever! We went to Plaza de Mayo which was full of people and rainbow flags, walked around, ate strawberries, looked at people (and there were so many fun people to look at, check out the photos under 'Marcha del orgullo'), photographed them and were interviewed for TV, we think. The parade set off an hour late, and we walked in it for about 2 hours all the way to the congressional palace, dancing behind a samba/jazz band. Soooo much fun. We then hung out at the plaza in front of the building for a while, looking at all the people again, and now we're back home, blogging and watching Amelie Poulain in order to kill some time before going out. I love this city!
