I’m now living in Santiago, Chile in the middle of the second week of my TEFL course (teach English as a foreign language). This is all going really well and keeping me pretty busy. I’m living in a nice spot with two really cool Colombian guys, so nothing to complain about. I went to Valparaíso this past weekend to pick up my laptop and some other stuff I’d left there and had a really great time doing it. But I’m going to talk about all of this later. This post will only talk about the last two weeks or so I spent in Argentina. I should be doing a catch-up post in a few days and then proceed as normal from there.

IguazúFalls were absolutely amazing of course. Looking back though I’m not really sure that it was the best idea to go, considering that it took me two days to get to Santiago on bus from there (although there was something totally hilarious on the way, I’ll tell you later…). I would have liked to stay that extra day in Buenos Aires as well. I spent almost a month there, but the dynamics of any place, especially a place like Buenos Aires, are always changing and compelling reasons not to leave sometimes emerge. Add to that the fact that I have every intention of going back to Iguaz’u sometime and it seems pretty clear that it was a long way to travel to see something I intend to visit in the future anyway. But what can I do now and what can I say? It was still awesome.

Coming up on it, it looks like this:

And then you see this. This panorama was taken from the top of La Garganta del Diablo, or the throat of the devil, which is the largest fall of the whole complex.

Here’s a video of it:

A little closer up:

And here is the heart of the garganta, or at least the top part of it, with a nice rainbow.

Here is the same fall from a distance:

You can see a viewpoint on that second tier waterfall on the Brazilian side (left), which I didn’t visit. I took the video and those previous photos from a platform on top of the falls and to the right. The land mass that you see on the right side of this photo is actually an island that separates the garganta from the other side of the fall complex, which is pictured below.

You can see that there are some boats going in there, which I didn’t go on. Come down here to visit and we can go together…

By the way, I didn’t go into the Brazilian side because us Americans have to pay $100 dollars and jump through some hoops in order to get a tourist visa. Sucks being so loved around the world, doesn’t it? There was one agency that I heard could take Americans without visas through but they were closed when I wanted to go. When I return I’ll be spending a lot of time in Brazil so it should make the whole business of getting the visa worthwhile.

The Biggest fall that you see in this photo is called Salto San Martín, though there are several others. And yeah, it rocks.

There are a bunch of names for all of these falls and it probably wouldn’t make the slightest difference to you if I told you.

These are the same falls from a different angle, p’oh.

There was quite a lot of wildlife running around the park, much of which I’d never seen in the wild before.

So there on the right is a caiman, which is somewhat different from a crocodile or an alligator. That¡s a tucan on the right of course. They’re both pretty bitchin’.

These are coatis. There were tons of them running around the park. They actually range all the way up to the Southwest United States and I saw quite a few when I was in Costa Rica, though these looked a little distinct.

There were a ton of butterflies around, which was pretty neat. These are my favorites among the several photos I took of them.

This pitiful looking creature wasn’t in the park but in the city Puerto Iguazú. It’s actually only the second most pitiful dog that I saw in that city and you should be thankful I didn’t photograph the first. I guess they don’t take care of the strays in Argentina like they do in Chile.

These three murals were in a plaza in Puerto Iguazú and were cut out of wood and painted. There were a few more, but these were my favorites.

They really did come to bring Jesus, silly indians.

We are the land and the land is us. And the plants and the animals they are land and the plants and the animals ate each other…

Split open that eyeball brother, yeah! Raise a fist!

I came out here with an Australian friend of mine and one of the locals was kind enough to give us a ride in his car. In the foreground is Argentina, across the river to the left is Paraguay, and across to the right is Brazil . If you follow the river that goes to the right you will end up at the falls, and if you follow the river that goes over the horizon you will find one of the largest dams in the world, or so I was told.

This is the obelisk marking the Argentinian side. There are similar ones on the Paraguayan and Brazilian sides, each with their proper colors of course.

The set of the many other photos I took up in Iguazú can be found <here>.

Yup

So Before I bussed myself on up to Iguazú I was living the life down in Buenos Aires. Still so much to say about that place…

The last night I spent there in Buenos Aires a few of us went out for Thai food, which was amazing. We sat on the floor too, just to be cool.

This is me looking sad because my bud Pete has killed an entire cow for his dinner. I only let them kill a fish for me.

“For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.”

This is Evalina, from Sweden. Ya.

I’m heartbroken that I can’t remember the name of this Israeli girl. She was really sweet though.

At the bar afterward I think Pete and I really irritated her with our ¨We’re Americans, f’ yeah!¨type talking.

Evalina was cool with it though. She’ll laugh at just about anything. (just kiddin’… Errr, now laugh…)

This is Pete and I. I know you’re probably thinking that it’s about the gayest photo ever. I don’t even know why I posted it.

At the end of the night we went home in this cab because we thought it would be funny, and somehow managed to live. Hilarious! I didn’t take any of these last photos by the way. They’re Pete’s, and his flickr is <here>. (if you click on this link you’ll notice that Pete doesn’t have that flickr account any longer, which also is why the preceding photos don’t work.  These issues may be corrected in the future.)

A couple of days prior to that I went ice skating with some friends of mine.

Several more went than are pictured here, but these are the cool ones. (Don’t really mean that… Respect.) But here we have two Israelis, Two Argentians, a German, and a gringo. See if you can tell who is from where! I don’t want to give any hints, but Laura and Andrea are in there, and they were two of the better friends I made in Buenos Aires.

You might notice that the quality of this photo is substantially better than the rest. That is because Randall is behind the lens with his badass camera that is bigger than your head. (Unless you are reading this Vik, your head is a bit over-sized for being such a short fellow). Randall traveled all the way to Argentina from the States and should be coming to visit in Chile, where I will be helping him find a boat to New Zealand (or so we plan). His photos are really amazing, and he has photographed some really interesting events such as one of the uprisings in Oaxaca, Mexico. I highly recommend that you check them out. His flickr is <here>.

The story moves on…

Here we have Gorge from Chile and some Swiss guy whose name I have forgotten. Lost his email too on accident. Both are really cool guys. Gorge and I should be hanging out some here in Chile. Andrea was with us at this time, and we later went up to here apartment and had matte with her parents. The Swiss dude couldn’t come because he was just starting work in the restaurant we’re sitting in here. He’s actually been traveling all over South America and working whatever jobs he manages to get.

We passed this house on the way that’s supposed to be haunted and that’s supposed to be me being scared by that face on the wall. The truth is though that I don’t get scared at anything at all, so it’s totally a set-up.

Andrea and her family live on the top floor of an apartment complex and this is the view from the top. This was really one of the more genuine experiences that I had in Argentina. We stayed for a couple of hours just talking and passing around the guitar playing and singing songs while taking matte. Nobody from outside the Southern Cone of South America but me.

So you look at all these pictures and you think that it’s all good times and babes and kicks and that it’s easy to be in a place like this. Maybe you could do it too? No! You can’t. This is what they do to unwary tourists who don’t watch themselves in Buenos Aires. Not kiddin’.

Really though, these signs are all over the city. Didn’t they know that someone would do this?

All the other photos I took in Buenos Aires that weren’t of buildings are <here>.

This is right by the capitol, on the opposite side of the park.

A Lamppost and the steeple of a really cool building near the capitol.

And finally here is the capitol itself .

In your face!

\

From the rear!

Reflection of the dome from a neighboring building.

In a city with so much amazing architecture that buildings that would stand out anywhere else become lost to the background, this is one of my favorites. It’s called El Palacio de Agua, or the Water Palace . It is so called, because it is actually the water utility building for the city. An odd use for such an amazing building. Unfortunately none of these pictures does it any justice; really just needs to be seen in person.

Sportin’ the flag.

The front.

Here is a statue with a pigeon sitting on its head. Respect.

This is a memorial plaza built beside the Israeli embassy, which was targeted in a suicide bomb attack in 1992. The sign says, “In this place 29 people died, please respect their memories.”

This is the Bauen Hotel . It is being run by the workers and there are no bosses. There’s a whole movement of worker collectives running businesses that failed after the economic collapse in 2001. There is a really great documentary in English about the movement called The Take that I highly recommend watching (notice that the name links to the film’s web site). I went inside to check it out and things were pretty lively and it had a really nice atmosphere.

I took a ton of photos of buildings and stuff like that in Buenos Aires. They are all <here>.

Alright, I’ll update youz folks on coming back to Santiago, my class, my trip to Valparaí­so and everything else in a few days.

Then on Thursday I’m hoping to head south to Mar del Plata and then come back the next evening.  I’m going to take a train, which I’m excited about because I’ve never been on one before.  Mar del Plata is the beach here that all the porteños go to, so swimming and everything else should be good.

Then I’m going to go to Iguazú Falls on Sunday or Monday, and from there back to Santiago, where it’s back to work for awhile.

I have a couple other things that I would like to point you all in the direction of. First, I would highly recommend reading a short article called “The Day Seattle Stood Still.”  If you love Seattle and you don’t know about the general strike of 1919 and its relation to other important events in our nation’s history then you need to read this.  If you don’t care about these things, then go look anyway because the author has the most hilarious name ever.

The other night when I was trying to fall asleep I was listening to a podcast that I’ve had on my ipod for a while from Bill Moyers’ PBS show Moyers on America.  The episode was called the “Net At Risk“, and if you care about the freedom of the internet, net neutrality, or media issues and aren’t already familiar with these issues in general then you have to listen to this.  It’ extremely important, but please go look for yourself.  The web site with the video and audio as well as several other resources on the subject is here.

So I did go to the Bauen Hotel today like I said, and did some other things, but I’ going to write about those tomorrow.

This is how we spend a lot of our evenings in the hostel when there’s not a lot else going on. From left to right, we have David, Javier, Jonatan, Lara, and myself.
This is Jonatan’s vacation beard. It’s coming off when he gets back to Israel, and he’s going to photograph the four-step process.

This is a group of us out at a club called Opera Bay. It’s the one that looks like the Sydney Opera House that I have a picture of in an older post. Our group was composed of people from Isreal, Germany, French Canada, and myself.
This is what I look like from above.

Last night David, Lara, Jonatan, and I went out for some incredible sushi, and it came out on this:
Too bad David wasn’t fast enough to get the last piece.
Sucker.

This is Juanito, who works at the hostel and speaks several languages fluently but I’m sure is unintelligible in any of them, and Kathia, who is from Brazil and speaks three languages very well. They are both super sweet.

So those are the photo highlights. Here is the link to the set of the rest of these photos

I’m planning on going to go to the Bauen Hotel tomorrow, which is very special and I’ll write about it later. Chau.

Here is me, Cecilia, Lara, David, and Andrea having coffee at one of the many street cafes here. They don’t have mochas here but we managed to procure all the ingredients and made our own.

I’ve gone to a number of the bars and clubs around town which have been really fun, except that this being the height of the tourist season they seem to be a little different from normal.

During this time of year the city is overwhelmed by tourists and the porteños, as the citizens of Buenos Aires call themselves (though the people in Valparaíso call themselves the same as well), vacate the city to vacation on the beaches in Uruguay and to the south in Mar de Plata. I might not be exaggerating when I say there are more Israelis and Brazilians here than Argentinians. There are a good number of Europeans as well and what seem to be only a handful of Americans and Canadians.

So far most of my pictures have been of buildings and stuff; I also took a lot in the famous cemetery here, which I’ll show little further down in this post. I expect that I’ll be spending less time with the camera from now on, because though it may encourage you to look at your environment in a different light I also feel that it can separate and alienate you from your surroundings in a certain manner. I’ll be taking some more of the same kinds of photos but I plan on taking more pictures of the more interesting aspects of the life here when I do carry my camera with me.

One interesting example that I’d like to photograph; the city has come up with a rather novel solution to the problems of homelessness and the cleanliness of the streets. They created a company run by the homeless citizens that is in charge of keeping the streets clean and the government has bought them vehicles, streetcleaners, trash and recycling bins, and all sorts of equipment for the task. So every evening an army of people come out and start cleaning up the streets and sorting through the trash for recyclables to sell. It’s a pretty neat sight, and I think that through this a lot of formerly homeless people have found housing, or a least a source of reliable income.

Another interesting thing is that the local businesses here take care of the homeless people and actively give them the leftover food that would otherwise be thrown out at the end of the day. This is of course quite a contrast to the US where many people, poor and better-off alike, used to collect the immense amounts of perfectly edible food that groceries and restaurants threw away, although today most businesses have made this impossible by changing the way that they dispose of their waste, making it unfit for consumption or otherwise inaccessible to collectors.

So these pictures are all from Recoleta, a really nice and expensive neighborhood here with a lot of museums. The Cementario de la Recoleta is by far is the major attraction here. It is where the wealthy elite buried their dead in the most lavish conditions; I’m sure the pictures will speak better than I can.

This is a palace. I can’t remember it’s name but I’ll come back in here and fix that when I figure it out.

Just one really cool building in Recoleta.

The church next to Cementario de la Recoleta.

and the same church from the inside.

All the rest of these pictures can be seen in my set of architecture and cityscape pictures here.

The Cementario de la Recoleta is truly a city of the dead.

This is the entrance to the cemetery.

And this is the main walkway as seen from from the entrance.

One of the grander tombs.

A pretty typical view in the cemetery

This is more like an “alley” here, I like the flowers and that wooden structure going over the walkway.

This statue of a woman and her dog is pretty cool.

Close up of her face.

Here is a peak inside of of the tombs. Most of them do not look like this inside, with so many coffins, but instead have shrines.

Another cool statue.



There are quite a lot of cats here, which are fed by old ladies.

It only makes sense that there would be some pyramids here.

I took a ton of photos in the cemetery, the full set of you you can see here.

The first thing that we did was go to the Sunday fair in San Telmo, which occupies this one street for several kilometers along with a few squares. This was pretty cool. Otherwise, during the nights we’ve either been going out or playing cards while drinking wine. Certainly fun but not too exciting, but what more can you expect during the middle of the week? During the last two days I’ve been walking around the city getting to know it and taking pictures. Otherwise, I’ve been eating pretty well and healthily. I’m trying to eat five or six small meals during the day, which I did more or less successfully for the first time today, and I did notice that I felt better and more energetic than usual. I also started jogging today down at Puerto Madero next to the ecological reserve, which I plan on doing every evening here.

I’ve taken a lot of photos so far but almost all of them are of buildings. Here are some of the better ones. I’m dividing these photos by neighborhood, and I’ll try to add the names and locations to the buildings later that I don’t know now. I’m probably wrong about putting some of these building within certain neighborhoods that are near the borders. But what can I do?

The Microcentro is the downtown of the city, or the financial district. There are a couple of nice pedestrian malls here and a lot of shopping and stuff.

The Obelisk, which is one of Buenos Aires’ defining landmarks, is here, on the intersection of two of the cities main roads, one of which is supposed to be the widest in the world.

View at dusk from Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest road in the world

This is a view of the obelisk from Plaza de Mayo

The variety of architecture in the city is really amazing.

A residence in Plaza Lavalle

I believe that this is on the same plaza

Also on the same plaza, I believe this is the national theater, or at least just a theater

This is a cool, old school theater

This is one of the pedestrian malls at night. Galerias Pacifico which you see in this photo is  most beautiful mall that I have ever seen. I thought I was cool, and I hate malls.

A view of the mall from the inside

This is the mural on the dome at the mall’s center

This is el cabildo, or like the town tall, on Plaza de Mayo

La Casa Rosada, also on the same plaza. This is the Argentine white house. Obviously it’s under renovation in this photo, as are a ton of the other older buildings here right now. Madonna actually convinced the old President of Argentina, Carlos Menem (major neoliberal sellout, to let her use the balcony for that musical Evita. After that, Menem presided over the economic collapse of the country.

Another view view of la Casa Rosada…

Some massive building, I think i­t is an apartment building, that stands almost on its own between the Microcentro and Puerto Madero

The same building during the day

This Correos, or the post office, on Plaza Roma, in between el microcentro and Puerto Madero
This is also in Plaza Roma.

No, this is not Missouri, it’s on the Rio Plata.

I’m not sure what this building is, but it’s cool.

This is El Torre de los Ingleses. I really like the tower behind it also.

Puerto Madero is the old port for Buenos Aires, which now has been completely gentrified and must cost a mint to live in. It does have a really nice atmosphere though.

There is a modern bridge that cuts through the middle of Puerto Madero.

What is really cool is that it turns on it’s axis like so to allow boats to pass.

There are two old ships docked here. The other is bigger and cooler looking.

I think this thing is like an events center, resaurant, nightclub of sorts called Opera Bay. Yes, it’s named that because it looks like the Sydney Opera House.

They’re constructing a lot of condos on the far side of the port.
All of the old warehouses have been converted to mixed commercial and residential. I’m not sure what the use of these wooden things hanging from the windows is but I like them.

La Boca is one of the neighborhoods that was originally populated by immigrants, and tango has its origins here. It is really poor now and pretty run down except for a couple of streets that are completely overpopulated with tourists. The poorer areas have really old and cool looking buildings in decay, and the poorest areas have the same old and cool building pretty much falling apart with shanties build all around them. It certainly puts a face on the economic collapse as well as the economic disparity here. It’s supposed to be really dangerous here, especially at night, though I felt safe walking through these neighborhoods. Since I was by myself I thought it would be stupid to have my camera out though, which is why I don’t have any pictures of this here.

This is Caminito, the entrance to the tourist trap here and the birthplace of tango

El Caminito as well…

This is the side of Estadio Boca Juniors, which is home to one of the more popular futb0l teams here in Argentina.

A cool apartment building here in a reasonably decent area.

A pedestrian ferry across La Boca.

So there are quite a few more pics that I have taken. If you care to see them the complete set is on flickr here

I’ll be headed to some new neighborhoods and doing some other things in the next couple of days and I’ll try keep this thing updated. My friends that I’ve met and I are planning on ice skating tomorrow somewhere out in the Province, which here basically means outside of the city limits since the city exists within a rather large province of the same name.

After we arrived in Mendoza at five this morning I found a bus for Buenos Aires that left at seven.  I’ve heard this trip is pretty bland and to some extent it is, but it wasn’t quite so boring as I had expected.  The landscape of the Argentine pampas is exceedingly flat, like I’ve only seen before in South Texas.  However it is green and covered in farmland and pasture and has a lot of streams and small lakes beading through it.  I saw a lot of ducks, birds of prey, and surprisingly some flamingos.  Really, this part of Argentina is absolutely indistinguishable from the agrarian areas of the US Midwest and some areas on the West.  It looks the same down the the modern grain silos and the signs for what pesticide is sprayed or what GMO crop is used in the fields.  If you’re interested in this sort of thing here is a link to an article concerning the genenically modified soy crop in Argentina:  Argentina Soya-fication.

I’m really looking forward to exploring the city tomorrow.  Goodnight.