tourdebuenosaires

And now, on the to big event barrios: Retiro, San Nicolas, Monserrat, Puerto Madero, La Boca, San Telmo and Constitución (not that I expect to get to them all today).

These are the barrios sweeping around the bottom of the map; they form the historic centre of B.A. and are comparable, perhaps, to arrondissement 1 – 5 in Paris.

Retiro

We arrived in Retiro via the train, so our first impression was of the Retiro Station.

This spectacular structure was built early in the 20^th century, when the Argentinians and Brits were still best of friends. It was designed by British architects and the platform area was actually manufactured in Liverpool, then shipped to B.A. to be assembled.

As you can probably tell, the interior hallway is suitably vast. Unfortunately, what you cannot really make out from this picture is the wonderful ornamentation: beautiful bronze sconces and signs, molded stone, grill work, leaded windows. It is very, very lovely.

And then there is the circular, mint green tile-clad boleteria, a marvel of art deco imagining that left us momentarily speechless.

It was the Café Retiro, however, that really took our breath(s) away. Not your everyday run-of-the-mill railway café, this place apparently sat empty and decaying for years and has only recently reopened after a lengthy restoration.

Exit by the front doors of the station and you are facing a string of parks and plazas, starting with Plaza Canada to the north (where there is a totem pole, apparently, though we didn’t see it) and culminating with the very beautiful Plaza San Martín up a small incline to the south. To reach this lovely green space you need only cross over twelve lanes of bus and truck traffic. Retiro was, at one time, the northern edge of the city. In the seventeenth century it became an area of summer homes (hence “El Retiro” – the retreat) and it still has a bit of that holiday feel about it – once you have made your way through the horrendous traffic to the parks.

In the park directly across from the station, Plaza Fuerza Aérea Agentina (formerly Plaza Británica), is further evidence of Argentina and Britain’s erstwhile chumminess, in the form of the Torre Monumental (formerly the Torre de los Inglese). This tower was presented to Argentina, in 1910, by the resident British community, in recognition of the Republic’s centennial. Both plaza and tower were renamed in 1982, after the Falkland Islands War.

In an inspired bit of juxtaposition, the tower is now overlooked by the Islas Malvinas Memorial, a minimalist, black marble monument to the 649 Argentinians who died in the war. This photo is taken from the northern edge of Plaza San Martín, looking down the slope and over the top of the memorial (the brick red stripe is the upper edge, the flag stands in front of it) toward the Torre Monumental in the distance. The cupolas of Retiro Station are just visible, behind the trees, on the left side of the photograph.

Plaza San Martín may not be the most important Plaza in Buenos Aires (that honour belongs to Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Presidential Palace) but it is unquestionably the loveliest. In fact, I would have to say it is one of the pleasantest plazas I have ever seen – and the jacarandas weren’t even in bloom! Another creation of the very talented Carlos Thays (the landscape architect who designed most of the Palermo parks), it is lushly planted with magnolias, ceibos, palms, sequoias and a great many trees I did not recognize, but it is the jacarandas – ohmygod – I just fell in love with them. They fill the parks and line streets all over this city and are truly the most beautiful tree. They have these elegantly meandering branches and translucent, bipinnate leaves that quiver in the slightest breeze, creating a canopy of ever-changing shades of green. And in the spring they are entirely covered in luminous mauve/blue blossoms. Reason enough to return to B. Aires in November.

But enough about trees. In the far distance of this photograph you can see a reddish blur. That is the ludicrously over-the-top monument to the great liberator, General José de San Martin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_de_San_Martin for those of you who want to brush up on your South American history), which Ian had the good sense not to photograph in close-up.

If you can drag yourself out of the plaza (especially difficult on a hot, hot day) you will find it is ringed a great many very impressive buildings, our favourite of which was the apartment tower Edificio Kavanagh.

When completed in 1936 (having been commissioned by Corina Kavanagh, an expat Irish woman), it was the tallest building in South America and won awards worldwide as a brilliant example of rationalist architecture.

Retiro also has its fair share of early 20^th century palaces, notably the Palacio Paz and the Palacio San Martín. As you have seen the problems inherent in trying to photograph buildings that have a 200 metre frontage, you will understand that we do not have any photos of these buildings in their entirety, but here is a representative detail shot. (I confess, I do not recall if this is Paz or San Martin.)

We understood, before our arrival in B.A., that the dialect spoken in Buenos Aires was a rather unique form of Spanish. Nonetheless we were quite surprised by how very different it was – often pretty much incomprehensible. That said, it was not until the day we were leaving B.A. for Mendoza, on the bus (hence the connection with Retiro), that we crashed, full speed, face-on into the communication barrier.

In a nutshell: we arrived at the Terminal de Omnibus an hour in advance of our departure time, to find the station thronging with people. No surprises, really, B.A. is always thronging with people and this was a Friday evening in mid-summer. Half an hour later, the crowds had increased noticeably, cramming the terminal and swarming the platforms and this seemed odd, even for B.A., but no one offered an explanation that we could understand. It was only when there was no sign of our bus, five minutes before we were scheduled to leave, that we realized there were virtually no buses arriving at all. In the hour we had been waiting, perhaps two or three had pulled into the 60-bay terminal. Appeals for information from official sources yielded nothing comprehensible; no one spoke English and no one had the time to help us understand what they were saying. The place was, by this time, in pandemonium. It took us another hour and the help of a number of kind-hearted, patient fellow-travelers to comprehend that picketing strikers (we don’t know who, exactly, but suspect the casino workers who had been wreaking havoc with traffic all month) had blocked the entrances to the station and all the buses – two hundred of them, at least – were parked on the roads out in front of the terminal and were loading passengers there. There was an extremely complex system of finding your driver and following him to your bus but, of course, our driver had come and gone long before we possessed this information. It was all a bit tense. So tense, in fact, that Ian actually uttered the words “I begin to understand why people take tours.”

So, what is it that makes Rio Platenese so different from Spanish that Ian – who has been traveling in Spanish-speaking countries, with no trouble at all, for much longer than I have known him – struggled to communicate even the simplest of ideas? (A language even the neighbouring Chileans, apparently, find difficult to understand.) Well, like Quebecois, you start with a provincial dialect from the 17^th century. This remained more or less unchanged for a couple of centuries, with the exception of the addition of some native vocabulary. Towards the end of the 19^th century there were Basque and Northern Italian influences; however the greatest changes occurred in the early 20^th century with the influx of immigrants, largely from southern Italy but also from Spain, Portugal, Greece and Poland. These working class immigrants developed an argot called Lunfardo, a language of the streets and probably, before that, the prisons, which has infused the Spanish spoken in B.A. with some regional Spanish verb conjugations, the cadences of Italian dialects and thousands of words not used anywhere else in the world. Probably the most famous of these is “Che” which translates something like “Dude”, a word used so often by Ernesto Guevara that it became his nickname.

Phew! What a lot of text. I think I better finish up here with one more picture.

As it is difficult to photograph a language, I have given you a picture of the river after which the language is named. This photo was not taken in Retiro, it was not even taken in Argentina, but it is a picture in which the muddy Rio de la Plata does look almost silver (hence its name).