Don’t Cry for Me Argentina – A Backward Glance

December 7, 2023 by

         

What world is this, the place I had come to? 

There it was before me. 

Buenos Aries, an eclectic cocktail of fast-moving, seductive, chaotic, exuberant; a clamourous nexus of place unrestricted by considerations of time and place. Adorable and maddening, sensuous and scatty, surprising and subtle, difficult and endlessly charming.

New versus old, speed versus slow, familiarity versus discovery; all laying rise to be termed the “Paris of South America”: a fitting sobriquet. 

Everything was pitched in a higher key.

Buenos Aries is a city of both disparate tones and Epicurean textures, gratifying my sense of beauty and craving for the external finish of life, yet and at the same time, presenting a sharp meagerness of destitution. 

“Ah, the multiplicity of its appeals – the perpetual surprise of its contrasts and resemblances.” – Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

It’s quite a mess. I mean, for one thing, the city thinks it’s European: Neapolitan balconies, Moorish courtyards, English mansions, Gaudi-inspired domes, New York skyscrapers, French parks and cobble stone streets that hobble the best of us. 

But who cares? Give me chaotic anytime. I prefer my cities a little on the crazy side. After all, the city has the highest proportion of psychoanalysts per head of population on the planet — three times the rate of New York. 

It’s said that Argentinians could commit suicide by jumping off their own egos. 

A century ago, it was the capital of the sixth richest country in the world, but middle age brought one crisis after another — until eventually the whole place is pretty well reduced to a sad Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

But Buenos Aires has the humanity to plant trees. Lots of them. And cafes. 


Buenos Aries has cafes the way Rome has churches. 

Here cafes are sanctuaries and they are on most every street, with battered espresso machines that look as if they were imported from Italy in 1932.

Buenos Aires takes its time waking up.

We are often the first to breakfast – 11 a.m. An hour regarded synchronous with sunrise. Sitting in my pew nursing a café cortado and a medialuna de jamon y queso is about as close to heaven as I was ever going to get. 


Walking my trillion steps a day, I happily endure cars honking, people shouting, music blaring. The streets are filled with kamikaze drivers hurling their vehicles through intersections, jammed with zooming taxis and groaning buses. Sidewalks are a contact sport. As well as hopping over dog poop. 

There are couples making out in parks, in front of statues, on sidewalks and on street corners, more than any other city I have ever been in. PDA is at an all time high here: it’s a town for extroverts.  

Buenos Aires is a city that rarely sleeps. 

I was never sure when porteños slept, because they seemed to be awake at almost any hour of the night. 

You can get a great meal at one in the morning and not have waiters stand over you urging you to leave. And in Buenos Aries, you must never be in a hurry.  

You can’t start the evenings festivities until late…like really late. We’re talking 2 AM. with some places staying open until 7 AM. You will see 3 year olds with their families exiting a restaurant at 1:30 in the morning and 80 year old couples strolling casually down Corrientes Avenue with ice cream at midnight. There will be people singing and laughing in the streets, trying to make their way back home after a night on the town. Most of them passing under my bedroom window.

“Bad wine” and “Argentina” don’t belong in the same sentence.

It’s a town where I can forget my sorry self and enjoy that trifecta of local passions: the whip-quick moves of sultry tango, robust wine, and succulent grass-fed pampas steaks the size of a hat you can cut with a spoon. 

All I know is that an Argentinian Malbec is never a mistake and often cheaper than water in restaurants. 


In Buenos Aires, there is no food without meat. 

Argentina is one of five countries in the world that has more cows than people. Meat-coma inducing carnivores will be in their element. Vegans and vegetarians, turn away now.

Argentina is unapologetically carnivorous, and tucking into an oversized steak is a point of national pride. I’m convinced that Argentinians subsist exclusively off of a diet of beef and carbs. 

It Takes Two to Tango

Dark, troubled, elegant, sexy, and fiendishly difficult to learn, it is one of the only dances in the world not meant to express joy. It originally dramatized the seductive moves thought to have been between a prostitute and her pimp. The lyrics are all about love, misery and death, deploying faces of melodramatic suffering. The pleasure of tango is its licence to be miserable; operating perfectly with my temperament. 

Nod thoughtfully. 


I’m staying in trending Palermo Soho, mimicking New York’s Soho district. It’s a nightlife epicenter, as well as its buzz-worthy cocktail bars, apartment buildings, shops, tree-lined boulevards, cobbled streets, grandiose neocolonial houses, and lively cafés-cum-art galleries. It’s indisputably the city’s busiest, most desirable neighborhood.

And the murals….


Buenos Aires stakes claim to many of “the biggest”, “the first”, “the highest”, “the longest”, “the most beautiful”…

Like the famous Avenida 9 de Julio, the worlds widest avenue. It has an astonishing 16 lanes; a boulevard that makes the Champs-Elysées look like a country lane. The entire avenue is bumper to bumper with snarling traffic during rush hour. I barely managed to cross it in one go.


Known as the bookstore capital of the world, Buenos Aires has an unbelievable 734 shops across the city – that’s 25 bookstores for every 100,000 residents. 

As a passionate bibliophile, I had to visit and was transfixed by the majestic El Ateneo, often referred to as the world’s most beautiful bookshop. As the famed Argentinean writer, Jorge Borges once said, ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library’ andthe El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookshop, housing over 120,000 books, is certainly that kind of paradise. 

This theater-turned-cinema was converted into a bookstore in the early 2000s. Much of the interior, including the ornate carvings and frescoed ceiling, remain intact. Bookshelves replaced the rows of seats and the theater boxes were left for customers to curl up with a book. Dark red curtains frame the stage, home to a quaint café to work on your caffeine level. 


Then there is the Feria de San Telmo – the largest street market in South America.



They also have the highest percentage of pets per capita in the world. Dogs are particularly popular, with 60% of households owning at least one.

Buenos Aries has the largest Japanese garden outside of Japan. 

Then we have Argentinian Jorge Bergoglio, a.k.a. Pope Francis, the first pontiff from the Americas. 
Fun fact. Before he entered the seminary, Jorge/Francis was a bouncer at a Buenos Aires nightclub. He is a man who knows how to dance the tango and its equally sensuous cousin, the milonga. He is a lifelong admirer of Jorge Luis Borges. And like virtually everyone in Argentina, he is a soccer fanatic. San Lorenzo, to be exact. 


Buenos Aires has what is considered one of the world’s most beautiful cemeteries – El Cementerio de la Recoleta, second only to Pere Lechaise in Paris. It spans four city blocks, holds no less than 6400 graves, and has as its most famous tenant, First Lady Eva Duarte de Perón. (Evita)

Eva Peron’s grave is an understated monument with a tumultuous backstory.

When President Juan Peron was ousted in a military coup three years after Eva’s death, no one was sure what to do with Evita’s perfectly embalmed body. Unfortunately, it was entrusted to Colonel Moori Koenig. As she was shuttled between various hiding places in Buenos Aires, he became enamoured with the body. Eventually, he was accused of “un-Christian” acts, and the colonel and the corpse had to be separated. Perhaps his therapist was on holiday at the time. Evita’s body was then shipped to Milan and buried under a false name. Years later, when it was returned, it was interred in Recoleta beneath thick steel plates, possibly in case Koenig came looking.

At least that’s one of the stories. 


The labrynthine pathways of tombs and mausoleums of Le Recoleta contain many strange stories. Like that of Liliana Crociati, who died during her honeymoon (in an avalanche) and for whom her parents built a vault where they reproduced her bedroom and placed her sculpture at the entrance, wearing her wedding dress with which she was buried, accompanied by her inseparable dog.


Fútbol is a religion. 

Each team’s stadium is a temple. Games are wept over. Fought over. And spark serious family issues. 
Speaking of godlike figures, Maradona sits right up there next to the Virgin Mary and the Pope. He even has his own religion – Iglesia Araconiana, complete with its own set of Ten Commandments, including naming your first son Diego and considering the ball sacred.

Watching a footy match in Argentina is an intense, life-affirming moment, treated with the sort of fervour that borders on the obsessional. This experience will not be a quiet hour and a half sitting in the stadium watching 22 people kick a ball around. 



Think 7% inflation Is bad? Try 142%. 

To save up, Argentines stuff bundles of American bills into old clothes, beneath floor boards and in bombproof safe deposit boxes past nine locked gates and five stories beneath the ground. They spend their pesos as quickly as they get them, buying everything from TVs to potato peelers in instalments, betting the value of the peso will fall. In 2017, prices had risen so much that Argentina doubled the size of its largest bank note to 1,000 pesos, then worth about $58 on the black market. Today it is worth $1.52 Canadian. 

So my breakfasts are $3-$5 and a really great meal with a very good wine is $11-$25. 

“Cambio! Cambio!” 

I think there are more money changers than pigeons on Calle Florida. Which is where I went to exchange my pristine American dollar bills for Argentinian pesos. How it works is that men and women dubbed “arbolitos”, little trees, stand on the street yelling “Cambio! Cambio!” Once you accept a rate from one of the many sellers, they lead you to so-called caves to change the money in relative privacy. Then you put the piles of bills in a wheelbarrow or stuff them down your pants. 

It’s all illegal, but police standing nearby don’t seem to mind.



“You need to get out of the city once a week or you go crazy.” – Argentinian porteños

So we went to the city of Tigre, 30km. from B.A., an hour’s train journey. The ride cost us 15 cents.

Tigre is a tropical jungle where forested islands dot the murky river waters. It’s a riverside getaway with stilt houses, old mansions, aristocratic rowing clubs and craft shops. Life revolves around the river, with islands disconnected from the mainland. Islanders rely solely on boats, navigating the shallow rivers in small vessels.



But if you ever get the opportunity to come to Argentina (or Brazil), you must go to one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world.

An UNESCO World Heritage Site, Iguazu Falls is the largest broken waterfall in the world, stretching over three kilometres. Made up of 275 individual cascades, they reach heights of 200 feet to create a stunning natural barrier between Argentina and Brazil, both visually and acoustically. We went to both the Argentinian side and the Brazilian side, as they are uniquely different. 

Not even the best of writers could describe the incomparable immensity, grandeur, powerfulness, vastness, and magnificence of Iguazu Falls. It challenges the paltry wealth of my vocabulary to even think to describe the experience. One needs to experience it. 

The sheer power and beauty offers a great deal more than sentimental adventure. Eleanor Roosevelt famously pined, “My poor Niagara!”, when she first saw the Iguazu Falls.

I left awestruck – and very, very wet. And very, very humbled. 


Te Amo Argentina!
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