I've been exploring the city a bit the last couple of days. Actually, that's pretty much all I've been doing. Anyway, the place is Big. There are almost 4m people living here and 12m in Gran Buenos Aires.
It's really like no other place I've ever been to, which is great. There is such an amazing eclecticism to everything here-the people themselves, the buildings, the politics, everything. The city is so alive, too; it never shuts down. I went out last night and people don't really get started until at least 1.30. Restaurants are packed well past 11.00. An eclectic city that stay up late-perfect for me.
It always looks as though the city is under attack from oversized drunken bumblebees, because this city has more taxis per capita than any other city in the world and they are all painted black and yellow. I bet 7 of ten cars here are taxis. They're cheap, too: $20 (u$s6-7) to get across almost the entire city.
Yeah, everything is pretty damn cheap here, really. Beer in grocery stores, which isn't that great of quality, but eh, is only u$s0.50 per approximately 30oz. I went to an expensive place last night and got a pint for about u$s3.50. Also food is cheap and great. Empanadas are the best things ever.
So I had been wondering why people here don't bag all their trash. They'll put most of it in plastic bags and but some they just lay beside the said bags- items such as bottles, old nasty shoes, cardboard, etc. They do that so that the trash-diggers won't have to dig through everything to get the things that they could possibly use/sell. There are a lot of them, the trash-diggers.
Until December 2001, that was unheard of. Most the people doing it used to have menial, lower-class jobs, but they could get along. The collapse totally destroyed them, the middle class took the menial jobs, and they went out on the streets.
No wonder this society is still freaked out. I went to see the Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada (Pink House- the presidential palace) today. They still have massive barracades everywhere dating from the time of the riots in December '01-January '02.
Yeah, we're lucky to be norteamericanos.
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2 comments:
Beautiful...i like the fact that the city stays up. That's one of the things that surprised me about going to big American cities...how dead they become late at night. You can't buy alcohol in Boston or DC after...11:00, i think. And i'm not saying that alcohol is necessary for community, but i think it IS necessary for a grotesquely large urban setting in which you stand no chance of meeting everybody. That's the thing...if we're gonna live in towns big enough that anonymity is a way of life, we HAVE to drink in order to interact honestly. I think all meetings of heads of state should have a required threshold blood alcohol content level. No one under 0.1 is allowed to attend. But then i guess that would heighten the potential for drunken brawls (ie, nuclear war)...so maybe diplomats should be required to be constantly dosed on Ecstacy too. Actually, that does kind of make sense. All policymakers should be on designer drugs.
Keep those stories coming...enquiring american minds want to know!
-benji
yea for empanadas! i don't quite get why we need the whole olive in the middle, though - maybe to make us slow down and not eat through a ton of them. i guess i've only eaten one so far, though - go me for not being too tempted by these delicacies! i've been fortunate enough to have many a traditional, and often times vegetarian, meal at the workshop.
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