Water palace

when you think about the developments that have made your life better, you have to include running water. right? so why not a palacio del aguas corrientes? why not indeed. the building is still a working building. people walk into the palace to pay their bills and complain about the service. only they sit under 50-foot stained glass windows to do it.

one little corner of the building is given over to a plumbing museum. i think this is the throne room (groan). seriously, have you ever seen so many toilets in one place? meanwhile, these water meters are so beautiful i want to start my own collection.





there are a few more pictures here.

Walking with marcia

we walked the breadth of the city, marcia and i. we didn't necessarily mean to, but we had rhythm, energy and curiosity enough that at each turn we just carried on.

we started in pretty palermo, with its two-storey buildings and big green trees. marcia and her family are staying in this part of palermo viejo, palermo soho. it's full of cute little shops and the dreaded yoga studio. mo and i are staying across the tracks in palermo hollywood. on the whole, our neighbourhood is rougher, yet gentrifying more rapidly.


we stopped at the museum of carlos gardel, the famous tango singer. i love museums organized around the cult of personality. on display was a telegram he'd sent from europe. just think: the person who typed that telegraph got it from a transmitter in europe who talked to a clerk who spoke with gardel himself!!

just beyond the gardel museum, in abasto, lies once, the jewish district. you can see it in the movie el abrazo partido. our part of once was the tailors' district, including mannequin row. we have no idea who uses these giant mannequins, nor who sells the clothes that would fit them.

once leads to monserrat and the back of the congreso we saw the other day. then lavalle opens onto the obelisk. the massive avenida 9 de julio separates monserrat from the central business district, microcentro. i love the way my little 35 mm crunches the skyline here. it's just how you feel.



san telmo, an older part of buenos aires. the sidewalks here are so narrow the buses brush your arm as they storm by.



finally, la boca, with its brightly painted storefronts. on the left is the store where i bought a football jersey for darien -- a BOCA jersey, of course. most of la boca is not tarted up for tourists. it's a working-class district and looks it.


of all the visual pleasures this day afforded, perhaps none was as exquisite as seeing marcia herself: watching her face as she talks, witnessing the way she moves through space. i got to see her think, and laugh, and inquire, and tell... we haven't had this much time together since before the twins were born in 2002.

Life in BA

little crises notwithstanding, daily life falls pleasantly here. i tend to wake between 8 and 8:30. i come down from the loft and open the wall of windows to the jumble of courtyards, balconies and roofs beyond. since i brought my little travel espresso maker, i have coffee to sip during the morning quiet, which is when i read, write and blog.

mo wakes up a couple hours later and does her morning thing. she shuffles out to the balcony for her first cigarette of the day. she sits for a bit, waking. then it's her turn to plug in and go online, to cultivate her facebook presence and look about her. the mornings pass almost without notice here. it's so cool and quiet in our apartment that it's hard to remember there's a world beyond.

around 11 we are ready to go. some days we meet up with marcia and lee; other days, we're on our own. we choose a destination or a route or a general vicinity of the city, and off we go, exploring, photographing, meandering, wondering. i travel light: a wallet, a camera, and loose change in case we take the bus. a map, which we rarely use. lunch is a cafe en route, anywhere between 1 and 3. especially when we're with marcia or lee, we come back to the neighbourhood in the late afternoon, as we're losing the light (it gets dark about 6:30 these days). that's the time of day when i go for a run, we download our pictures from the day, one or both of us showers.

we've adapted surprisingly easily to BA meals, so around 8:30 we start talking about where to go for dinner; we usually head out around 9. admittedly, this is still early for portenos, but only a week ago i thought dinnertime would never arrive. we walk past tantalizing restaurants in our neighbourhood, all lit up by 8:30 and waiting for the trade. everyone throws open their doors to the street. this restaurant is dark and red, with candles on every walnut table; the next, chic black and white; bio, the neighbourhood vegetarian joint, crisp lime green. waiters stand at the back of the restaurant, or at the door, or sometimes at a table outside, waiting. their shifts won't begin for a while yet.

at 10:30, as we are walking home, the neighbourhood is hopping. restaurants are full. arguments, passion and gossip flow as freely as the wine. to walk the street is to make your way through restaurant after restaurant, cafe tables spilling as they do onto city sidewalks. there are no ropes, no fences, no bollards to demarcate the end of one restaurant and the beginning of another. this restaurant ends where its tables end. the next set of tables, clearly in a different idiom, belongs to the next restaurant.

no one here eats breakfast. i can't quite go that far, my anglo-teutonic roots screaming for 3 square a day, but drinkable yogurt is plentiful here and cheap, and not as sweet as the churros you'd get in a cafe. it works. last night we skipped the restaurant meal in favour of a picnic at home: grilled cheese, apples, fresh peppers, and chocolate from canmore. tea. things in the mercado are not so refrigerated as they are at home. eggs, cheese and salamis breathe on the outside of the glass enclosures. the gruff greengrocer inside the market selects your mandarins for you, corrects your pronunciation of "verde," "rojo," "manzana." a loaf of bread, the most expensive thing we bought, costs a canadian dollar and a half. milk is nearly free.

there's rhythm to this city, and passion, and silences. great love. gusto. fear. primitive streetworks, lovely parks, viciously beautiful women, men who kiss each other, unbreachable class divisions, communism. life.

Meanwhile, back on the home front

the saga of the roof continues. this note from our housesitter:

On Monday night at 11:30 PM we had quite a downpour and that is when
the drips started to come in through the living room ceiling - in the
middle. This means that somehow the water is coming in one place and
pooling between your upper storey floor and the main storey ceiling
and dripping out along the beam in the middle of the living room. As
the rain got worse the little mop buckets were no longer adequate. At
2:30 AM that night I ran out to the alley in the rain, dressed in my
PJs, and grabbed your rubbermaid garbage can and used that and the 2
mop buckets to catch the drops. They remain there today in case the
rain returns.

In the morning on Tuesday I looked around for your roofing company
contact. I called "Martin" the "Vice President of
Installations" at 604-789-9446 in Delta BC and gave him shit for not
fixing your roof and asked that he send a crew immediately to patch
the roof. He relayed the message to "Rodney" in Calgary at
1-866-867-1857 who phoned me back and assured me that "Peter" in
Edmonton at 425-345-4864 would patch the roof that morning (Wednesday)
and he would call when he was "nearby". This he did. I jumped in the
Mobile Urban Planning Command Centre at work and sped over here to let
Peter in and supervise the patch job. The rain stopped around this
time and the jury is out on whether this patch has actually stopped
the leak. Things dried out and the ceiling actually looks quite good
- thank goodness it is cedar and not plaster or gyproc because then it
would be rather unpleasant. The rubbermaid can has a good 5 inches of
water in it. All things being what they are (spring and more rain
coming) I encouraged Peter to come back and put the new roof on. He
was non committal.

i know: you're wondering what on earth is the mobile urban planning command centre and how can i get one? but pull back from your fantasies for just a second a commiserate with us. five inches of rain in our living room!

i'm going out for a walk in the buenos aires sun.

BA streets: congreso

this city is so very, very beautiful your heart aches to be present in it. every street you walk has something going on. every building is made for gazing. you look, and you see, and then you look again, and realize you've seen nothing. that carving above the door is a scowling face; the one over there is smiling. that statue is emerging from a sheaf of wheat. that mural 30 storeys in the air is made of gold. it's a city that resists being photographed, and begs for it.



today we walked from the plaza de mayo to the congreso. from the plaza de mayo you can see the building from which evita addressed her admiring crowds. the plaza is still the hub for all kinds of political activity. today the protest was about soldiers who fought in the falklands war on the mainland. the government of argentina does not recognize those battles even though apparently the british made several forays onto argentine soil. the veterans want recognition. last week, casino workers were demonstrating for better working conditions. but of course the ground zero of politics here is las madres de la plaza de mayo. every thursday afternoon, still, the mothers of the disappeared march through the square wearing their signature white scarves, protesting the deaths of their children. las madres are old now, and the movement has many elements to it, some of which have disbanded the thursday marches. i simply can't get over the sheer bald fact of mothers marching to commemorate their children's deaths. it is as forceful in its simplicity as the disappearances were bald.

not far away from the plaza we happened upon la casa de las madres. it's a big building with a bookstore in the front, a cafe down the middle, and a meandering open area at the back, with offices, bulletin boards, a high-ceilinged dance floor/meeting room, and stairs to a second floor. there were three people staffing one of the offices. a laser-printed sign on the office door opposite read "bienvenidas comandantes." hanging on the walls and presented around the hallways were artistic renditions of las madres: a huge blow-up photograph of three smiling grandmothers in white scarves; a bronze statue of a woman giving birth to death, politics and defiance; a garish painting. most moving of all were three huge display boards on which were pasted 3x5 inch photographs of the disappeared. the photographs were black and white, and frayed with age. the people in them sported 1970s moustaches and early 80s farrah fawcett dos. one board had 180 photos, the next 260, and the largest, 440: 880 of the 30,000 people who were disappeared. to hear activist groups tell the story, disappearances still take place. the scale is much, much smaller, but nearly every group that demonstrates at the plaza de mayo tells a story about a member who has vanished under mysterious circumstances.

back outside, on avenida de mayo, we came across a police station. like so many other BA buildings, its architecture is exquisite. but i didn't feel comfortable taking a picture of it. the military and the local police officers worked hand in hand to effect the disappearances. this means that you just never know what you are looking at. were people tortured in there? killed? you look, and you see, and then you look again, and realize you've seen nothing.

Perfect uruguay day

we woke up next to the ocean. we drove around the coast. we picnicked on the beach. we shopped at artisan markets. and at the end of the day, we saw sea lions. words don't do it justice, but the pictures are pretty good.

oh, and i learned to make a movie! you might get a little seasick watching. i understand (now) why ppl use tripods.




and then, just when i despaired of ever seeing a woman kite surf, there she was, at sunset. check out the flash:

Sixth mountain from the west

that – sixth mountain from the west – is how the city of montevideo got its name. “monte” is easy; then you’ve got your roman numerals “vi”; “de” (from); the west (“oeste”). bunched into that little anecdote is all sorts of rich stuff: the city’s spanish/portuguese colonial heritage along with the extirpation of uruguay’s indigenous population; the fact that montevideo orients itself toward the outside, principally argentina and brazil, between whom uruguay remains a buffer; that the city is all about its port; and that its heyday dates from the days when we still used roman numerals.

montevideo was troubling.

caveats: we were there only for a day, and that day was a sunday in the late fall. cities always look more desolate when shops are boarded up and no one is going about their daily business. also, liveliness is seasonal. downtown edmonton looks pretty desolate in november, and nobody raves about london in early march.

still, the obvious and in some cases egregious neglect of montevideo’s astonishing architectural inventiveness and beauty was heartbreaking. it seemed to me that everywhere you turned you could read signs of the city’s troubled economy. the troubles include an aging demographic, the 1973-1985 military dictatorship, and what is delicately referred to as “recent economic difficulties,” which i take to be code for disproportionate dependence on argentine wealth – it’s not just for political reasons that uruguay is considered the switzerland of south america.

driving into the city from the east, you first see the massive facade of newish condos facing the sea. it’s a massive wall of outward-facing life, and the living looks good. according to findlay, everybody’s grandparents live in montevideo. you are right on the ocean, which is protected public property featuring a 25 km seawall. on sunday afternoon the promenade was full of runners, dog-walkers, strollers and the elderly, and, of course, the ubiquitous dogs.

take that ring road around the point, and you come across one of the most astonishing things i’ve ever seen in a city: public housing projects right on the beach. in fact, tenements have arguably the best views in all of montevideo. i don’t object to this, of course – i think it’s fantastic – but in any other city in the world, this land would have been “redeveloped” ages ago. what has protected this? the government now is broadly socialist, and the communist party in uruguay is strong, but the military dictatorship was hardly left-wing, and it’s been years since the government’s been able to afford its erstwhile admirably generous social services. the projects appear dilapidated enough that it ain’t sociocultural love that’s keeping them alive. the message i got is that not even developers believe in montevideo. turns out there is something more chilling than gentrification.

fish-hook around to the ciudad vieja (the old city) and you can see what all those sea-viewing condos have turned their backs on: some of the most gorgeous colonial architecture in any hemisphere, in a shocking state of neglect. some of the buildings have been restored – the teatro solis in particular is stunning, the old city gates are currently being refurbished, and one of the city’s best shopping malls is in a former prison (which has nice symbolism) – but much of it droops drearily in despair. here is a picture of what i mean:




just before sundown and our ferry back to buenos aires, we happened upon a flag ceremony at the uruguayan parliament buildings. a big green military van disgorged eight soldiers in dress uniforms and one in camo to take down the flags down before sunset. the sword-bearer and the trumpet-player stopped at the middle of the top stairs and waited for the two teams of three to take down the uruguayan national flag on the left and the artigas flag on the right. the artigas flag has become a symbol of uruguayan independence, though ironically its history is bound up with regional cooperation. as kirsty told the story, the red slash across the middle stands not for the blood that has been shed in the service of uruguayan independence, but for the blood that will be shed to protect it. (wikipedia, incidentally, gives a more sedate explanation.)

anyway, back to our honour guard. the fellows on the right were having trouble unfurling the artigas flag, which had flapped itself into quite a mess. one soldier worked at it for a while, flinging the up rope this way and the down rope that way, trying to dislodge it somehow. then he flung the down rope this way and the up rope that way. still no go. the rest of the honour guard and about a dozen curious onlookers waited. he tried again. nada. the trumpet-player looked at the sword-bearer. the sword-bearer looked at the uruguayan flag contingent, whereupon the low guy on that totem pole leapt into action. he jogged across the stairs and took one of the ropes from the hapless artigas flag manager. together they flung the up rope one way and the down rope another, until they finally got the flag to fly. the helper sprinted back to his place, and the flag men seized their ropes. the sword bearer raised his sword and the trumpeter his trumpet and, to one round of “the last post,” they started lowering the flags. the song was over long before the flags were down, so we all stood in silence while they took the flags all the way down.

now, i don’t know about uruguayan customs in particular, but i know enough about flags in general to know that that point of sending in white-gloved honour guards is to avoid dropping the flag on the ground. this principle was observed in theory. in practice, though, these guys burned their flags a couple dozen times. ‘whoopsie, that’s a bit heavier than i expected,’ conveyed the face of one soldier, as he rescued his corner of the uruguayan flag from the dusty stairs. the guy at the end of the artigas flag line appeared to be daydreaming as the flag accordioned into his arms and then beyond them, down his side to the parliament steps below. two other guys on the uruguyan side might not have worked together before, their faces betraying a certain irritation with each other. the whole spectacle was like a john cleese spoof or a brechtian comedy.

once the flags were folded safely away to fly another day, the honour guard made their ceremonial walk back down the parliament steps. there, they rather unceremoniously threw the flags into the back of the van and clambered in themselves. no sooner were the van doors closed than they started taking off their fancy hats and dress sashes.

this story of montevideo is better with pictures, but i didn’t take a lot of them. if you’re interested, though, they’re here.