We went to see an exhibition at MALBA (the art museum in the swanky neighbourhood of Palermo Chico/ Barrio Norte) which was to celebrate 100 years since the birth of Horatio Coppola who took a lot of great cityscapes in the thirties, like this one...

One of the things that was striking about the pictures was the way that things haven't really changed, except in the North of the city where the skyscrapering has continued



In the poorer barrios in the south, La Boca or Barracas for example, there has been very little development so they still look like the same places... In the 30's there was a huge rush to develop the downtown area in BA and a lot of the commercial buildings date from then so they look the same and in places like Villa Crespo, our neck of the woods it's a strange mix of 1910 Spanish colonial and 1970 concrete with bars that haven't changed since they were built.


Oh, and my photo? That's what they brought to us in the cafe at MALBA when we asked for a couple of coffees. We've been advised to try the food there too but we'll be doing that tomorrow I think.  ¶ 1:43 PM 1 comments

  After the last post, I was thinking about other things that frighten me. And one of them is this...

Carlos Gardel is a national icon here, his grinning face is everywhere and his voice (which is pretty good) is often to be heard on the subte. But the scary thing is this... look at these two pictures...

George Formby...

I tried to explain George Formby to an Argentine... that was difficult. Try it sometime, well not necessarily to an Argentine, you could pick any nationality.
  ¶ 2:24 PM 0 comments

  John:
So this week has seen the coldest day of the winter so far (a chilly -0.9C in downtown BA, at 4am, for 10 minutes) and the warmest (27C today, and there were still some people wearing scarves!!!). And there we were yesterday, sitting in the plush boardroom at a big utility company, me and my five advanced students. The class was about fear and risk and used things like bungee jumping and BASE jumping as a topic.

So I asked the class what had frightened them most in their lives.
Pablo:"When I thought I lost my son at the beach."
David: "When my kid fell out of his bed (the top bunk)."
Lidia:"When my daughter fell ill."
Mariolano: "When I thought I had lost my daughter when she was two."

Then Guillermo put an end to the conversation
"When I was, how do you say when someone gets in your car and has a gun?" (Carjacked, I said) "Yes, when I was carjacked and made to get into the trunk of my car and hit with the gun."

Base jumping didn't seem nearly so frightening after that.
  ¶ 2:23 AM 0 comments

  This picture is very similar to the view we used to have from a certain pharmaceutical company...

It's one year ago that we 'parted company' (and I'm not allowed to talk about it, or make any derogatory remarks about the company... and as Mothers everywhere have said, 'if you can't say something nice, don't say anything')

You know, I've never really gotten over it... at nights I still wake up thinking about the FDA and starting at 7am and 'Weeelllll you kneeoooww Jaaahhhhnnnn'.... why did I throw it all away?

...erm, not really. :-)
  ¶ 12:32 PM 1 comments

  "If you look on your right you can see the wool factory. On your left is the marshalling yard for the city's sanitation department."

We took the guided city tour of Colonia in Spanish but unless our grasp of the language is getting worse this is what she said...

That's a little unfair, the city of Colonia is pretty old (1650s) and very pretty. The tour, however, took us to the suburbs and past the aforementioned attractions (which reminded us of western Ireland).

Colonia, and this part of the world, were subject to Portugese then Spanish rule, then Portugese again, then Spanish, then... you get the picture.

The city is on a peninsula, 40km across the Rio La Plata and a world away from BA. On the north (Uruguay) side of the river there are beaches and peace and quiet. The city has a 'centro historico' where the guide cheerfully pointed out the differences between Spanish and Portugese styles..

The Portugese streets have one, central drainage ditch, the Spanish have two, one on either side (makes me wonder what used to happen at the border in Europe). The Portugese houses have tiled sloped roofs whereas the Spanish have flat roofs. The strange thing is that there are dozens of them side by side.

Even in the off season it has the feel of the Bunratty folk park, with Candombe drummers and dancers (candombe is a folk dance of Uruguay) and (shudder) mime artists... called the gaucho mimes... it must be hell in the summer.

But the beaches... mmm I can just picture relaxing with some mate and watching the yachts on the river.  ¶ 3:49 PM 1 comments

  Today is Amy's fifth birthday, she's having a disco party at 'Rough and Tumbles' Auntie Lizzie wishes she could be there to join in the dancing....

So... all together... you know the tune...

Cumpleaños feliz, Cumpleaños feliz, Cumpleaños a Amy, Cumpleaños feliz.

XX

ps Hope you like your present :)
  ¶ 2:27 PM 0 comments

  We got an email last week from Felipe, one of the people we met back in May at a party in La Plata. It was an invite to a gig his band were playing. Felipe plays the Cajon, his girlfriend dances flamenco (she also teaches and choreographs). The attached flyer said reserving was a good idea so we did.

Good job too because it was standing room only. The bar (Bar Bukowski) is in the middle of a block of crumbling buildings in La Plata, inside we had trouble working out what the building used to be... the roof was newer than the rest of the building, but even so the original ceilings were over 15 feet high, all of the doorways seemed narrow, but that was just because the doors were soooo tall.

We arrived early, thanks to a speedy bus, and were greeted like old friends, and with some relief because the chap who'd taken the reservation was very curious who 'Liz y John' were.

The group were phenomenal. If your only experience of flamenco is castanets and Morecombe and Wise (The Movie) then you're missing out. It's one of the most rhythmically accomplished passionate types of music there is. And these guys really went for it. One guitarist, two singers, one of whom played the cajon, Felipe playing the other cajon. They made a hell of a racket. The cajon is a box which does duty as a snare drum, bass drum and effects box... the stage was bouncing up and down as the singers alternated and the music got frantic.

Then the dancers turned up... Traditional dresses, stern faces... lots of stamping (which is pretty much like calling tap dancing shuffling your feet a bit). The crowd loved it... I can't wait for the next one.
  ¶ 8:27 PM 1 comments

  When Liz started teaching, she remarked to me one day that her groups at one place were really keen but that they had said to her 'Just wait until August'. Well now we can see what they mean.

The last two weeks were the winter holidays here in BA and the attendance at some of the classes has dropped off a little. These are the classes in the morning, the ones that start at 8am. I think that BA is time shifted compared to London. I mean, in London, at 6am there's a fair amount of business, people are heading to work early and so forth... here it feels like that at 8. When we're out in the evening and we say we have to leave early because we have to work in the morning sometimes people say 'so? So do I.' and it's only when they say that what they mean is they have to be at work at 10 that we figure it out.

So you start work at 10, an hour and a half for lunch (in a cafe/bar/restaurant), finish work at 6 or 7. Dinner at 9 or 10, in bed by 1am. Easy. And this is why the peak TV programs start at 10 not 7.

It would be easier to get used to if we didn't have to start at 8... because we don't really have the option of cancelling just because we don't want to get up. I'm not whining, I like walking through the city early in the morning.

The picture by the way, is a cupola (cúpula) opposite one of the institutes where I work. There are hundreds all over the city centre.  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments

  Liz : 2.55 p.m. on Sunday saw John and I puffing our way across the Plaza Libertad in central Buenos Aires (not a pretty sight). We'd misjudged the Sunday buses and arrived at the grand old opera house, the Teatro Colon (Columbus), with minutes to spare for our guided tour.
The outing had been organised by the B.A. Flickr (photo) group- the 'safari' set. The other set, the 'fiesteros', to which we also belong, meet weekly in pubs to be silly and drink beer, or usually the other way round. In fact there's a big cross-over between the two groups and amongst them some great photographers...very inspirational to novices like me.
The tour lasted roughly an hour and a half, with lots of photo ops and a good deal of Spanish dates for me to decipher (no doubt with a confused expression on my face). After that we walked across town to the Recoleta Cultural Centre and strolled through the free photo exhibition going on there at the moment, the Festival de la Luz.
Retiring to a cafe a while later I tried a Submarino, the Argentine winter warmer: a glass of hot milk with a chocolate bar submerged in it...yum :)  ¶ 3:06 PM 1 comments

 
Or is it Irish John... who knows...

We went to San Antonio De Areco today, a little town (see the posts about Carmelo... it's similar) about 100Km from BA. They needed our IDs to let us buy tickets but they put my name in as... I wonder, is John Irish the sort of name that would be suitable for a TV detective in the 70s?

San Antonio is very pretty, all old buildings, follow the flickr link for more pictures if you want to see. There's a river and it's a popular spot for summer picnics and asados, so popular that next to each of the fifty or so concrete picnic tables there is a concrete 'H' about half a metre high where you can put two asados (barbeques). Along the dirt road there are a few bars (all closed today, it's the depths of winter, 15C) which advertise that they sell charcoal, wine and they rent out asados and horses... the horses are, I'm pretty sure, for riding and not for the asados.

The town has a small Irish background. I asked one restauranteur if his family was Irish and he said no (he looked just like the old swimming pool attendant in Thurles, Noel) and his friend said it was just beacause he was old. But later on two of the waitresses where we had lunch said their grandfathers were Irish. And in the small town square (which has a great mix of trees, from olives to cypress to to palms) there's a plaque commemorating a visit by Mary Robisnon, the Irish President, in 1995.

On the way back there were no free seats on the bus so John Irish had to sit on the steps... until enough people got off after which he got to use the comfy chair (semi cama, half beds, these seats are three abreast on the buses, so they're a third wider than UK coach seats, and they recline like La-Z-boy armchairs... it's a good job they're so comfortable because come January we'll be taking 20 hour and longer trips).   ¶ 11:21 PM 1 comments

  One of the news channels here which seems to specialise in the more tabloid stories.

When they have the headlines they fill the screen with white lettering on a red background, maybe ten words, and they play what can only be described a oompah music while a breathlessly excited announcer adds a bit of info.

And here, in case you don't read the Spanish.

Drunk driver almost causes a tragedy. Batman is the only witness.
  ¶ 12:49 PM 0 comments