Buenos Aires

We spent three nights in Buenos Aires last week. It is a wonderful city. Busy and grand and it has everything, but it made us miss Montevideo. Most other travelers we've met rave about Buenos Aires and are lukewarm about Montevideo, but we feel the opposite. I think the reason we loved Montevideo so much is that we were there long enough to know some of its quirks and see many of its sides in different weathers and moods, and so it started to become ours. In Buenos Aires, as impressive as it was, we were just a couple more foreigners, gawking and snapping photos. The weather didn't help. It was either witheringly hot or pouring rain during our stay.

We did see some great things though. I think my favorite building, oddly enough, was the Palacio de Agua. The Palace of Water was an old water works of completely overblown Swedish design with a French mansard roof. I am not sure what it is used for now but it is well maintained.


We also went to a few museums. The Museum of the City was very weird. We were greeted by a friendly but intense newly minted Argentinian originally from India wearing a crisp uniform (Argentinians seem to go in for the crisp uniform). He informed us that while the museum has 32 rooms we were only allowed to see 2 because some time ago someone had stolen a watch and everything was closed for the investigation. Even he seemed a little incredulous about this explanation. We got a little more history at the Museum of the Casa Rosada where we saw this portrait of the beloved Eva with her husband:


We also went to a couple art museums. The huge and eclectic Museo de Bellas Artes ran the gamut from medival to modern downstairs and upstairs had an exibit of art depicting Argentina and another exhibit of Latin American artists. No photos were allowed. We also saw a Marcel Duchamp exhibit at a smaller hip museum called Proa in the colorful tourist nieghborhood of Boca, home of Diego Maradona's old futból team. We tried to go to a game. It was sold out but we did soak up a little pregame revelry.

Here is Duchamp and our attempt at Dadaism:



Here's a taste of Boca:



We visited the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral where General José de San Martín is buried. He seems to serve the same role in Argenina as Artigas served in Uruguay and perhaps as George Washington does in the U.S. Interestingly both Artigas and San Martín spent a good deal of the end of their lives exiled from the countries they became father figures of. His tomb is guarded by men in crisp uniforms and crests and by symbolic marble women and covered by a glorious dome.


Like most of the churches we have seen so far, it was full of all sorts of statues, paintings, and flourishes. My favorite was the Virgin Mary with lightning bolts shooting from her hands and Hilary´s was the small corner painting of a holy cow reading a book, or should I say, The Book.



We also visited the famous Recoleta Cemetary. Not as impressive as the Montevideo cemeteries to me. It had very few trees and a less over the top cast of characters. Its focus seemed to be on family vaults. After a while they all started to look the same. But I did manage to find the tomb of one of Todd O´Leary´s rum-running forefathers and there were a few statues worth showing.






We left Monday evening on an 18 hour bus ride to Trelew. Unfortunately the bus was not as wonderful as the ones we have experienced earlier. We were greeted with a few hours of dreadful dance music videos (and we happened to be sitting directly under the speaker), we were served some sort of cold ham roll for dinner, and the coffee was a cruel joke.


But our bus was a double decker and we had the top front seats so we had most of a day to contemplate the immense West Texas-like nature of northeastern Patagonia.

General Artigas & el Museo Naval

General José Gervasio Artigas is a very (possibly the most?) significant figure in Uruguayan history and has a remarkable mausoleum in the Plaza Independencia just at the beginning of the Ciudad Vieja.

We visted the mausoleum which is a massive structure of dark gray stone, rather threatening in appearance. Down a flight of stone stairs you enter an enormous, mostly empty room where Artigas' ashes rest in an urn, inside a large lucite box and flanked by two soldiers. Around the walls of this room are picked out in enormous high-relief letters the significant events in the life of General Artigas including his contributions to the liberty of the people of the region that is now Uruguay.


We also visited el Museo Naval which is down on the Ramblas, the road that runs along the waterfront. It´s a small white stucco building containing a lot of great images of early Montevideo and exhibits on warships, and with a scattering of cannon and anchors over the lawn. They're planning an exhibit on the Graf Spee, a German warship that was anchored in Montevideo for repairs following battle with some British warships in 1939. Uruguay was neutral but the ship had to leave within 72 hours of docking here. The German captain blew up the ship off the coast rather than letting it fall into Allied hands. He committed suicide 2 days later.