Yesterday marked one week here and I’ve been having a great time and am loving this city more and more. Most of my time here has been spent walking around getting the know the city, reading, and hanging out with the friends I’ve made. It’s been mostly pretty relaxing.

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.