The sun is
shining from a bright blue sky when we wake up at our usual pre 7pm
hour. We order breakfast, but feel unusually lazy and hang around in the
room until about 11am. By then Oswaldo has done a run to the
supermarket across the road for adapters to the crazy Argentinean 3
diagonally pronged 220v plugs that fit none of the 3 (three!) adapters I
brought, reporting intense cold outside. The promised 5C!
Warmly dressed we head for the cemetery
and stop to watch a very short harried dog-walker trying to control a
bunch of rather large dogs, one of which must be a ‘bad dog’, since it
wears a huge muzzle. They are male dogs and all try to lift their legs
to pee on the passing bushes as the walker hauls the group along, not
stopping for anyone.
At the cemetery entrance we
are quizzed by a fleece-clad (volunteer?) lady selling 8 peso maps (What
did you study? Where? Logica? Bueno) before we can move on into the
maze of graves, looking exactly like a quiet, sunny city of the dead.
Oswaldo stops to read the moving plea of an Italian dad who lost his 26
yr-old daughter, where a cat has found a nice place in the sun
,
and then we localize Evita’s grave, crammed with tourists and guides.
We wonder whether the cemetery is still being used and get our answer
when we see the cars and trolleys used to transport the coffins.
We then walk through the (fairly
indifferent) Feria Plaza Francia until we get to the Museo de Bellas
Artes, where we see interesting exhibitions of Berni and Brassaï.
It’s time for a snack and we
find a place in the sun, where Oswaldo gets a ‘Submarino’ - a glass of
hot milk into which he plunges a bar of chocolate (the Argentineans
pronounce this charmingly ‘Tchocolate’
,
while I have a tea. We both devour ‘tostadas con queso’ very thin
slices of white bread grilled with cheese, before aggressive pigeons
settling on nearby tables can get at them.
Continuing our walk towards Palermo and
the Museum of Decorative Arts, housed in a beautiful old palace, we stop
to admire the huge flower sculpture, ‘Floralis Genérica’, shimmering in
the sun from the reflecting pool beneath.
The museum holds a rather haphazard
collection of furniture and objects, in addition to a Finnish design
show in the basement. It’s odd for me to see this stuff on exhibition,
because it was all part of my world in Denmark; the blond wood, the
glassware, the Marimekko fabrics are all very familiar. I am really
surprised when I see a dress I used to own in the exhibition, and am
immediately transported back to the last time I remember wearing it, 23
and on the eve of my first wedding.
Tired now, we head back to the hotel,
where we rest before our 5pm meeting with an Argentinean philosopher and
his wife in the nearby busy La Biela café, a traditional hang-out for
Porteños. While working to express myself in my halting Spanish I watch a
group of 3 quite old women out for a treat of tea and a heap of thick
slices of toast on which they pile fluffy cream cheese. They look like
they have been friends for a long time.
Having had
some toast and ‘media lunas’ of our own, we don’t feel like eating
dinner and finish the night in the very chic Hotel Alvear bar, each with
a perfect dry martini, watching the very different scene of people
hauling Luis Vuitton luggage, and very young thin women passing with
much older wealthy looking men.
A CULTURAL WALK
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