San Telmo

Sunday we zipped down to San Telmo, one of the oldest parts of Buenos Aires, south of the Plaza de Mayo. We were in San Telmo briefly on our first day, with our Andando teacher Tatiana. It feels like a far more intimate neighborhood than most where we have spent out time. The street are narrower, cobblestones persist, and absent are the high walls and utterly fortified apartments and private mansions of Recoleta and Palermo.

Although all the guidebooks urge a visit here on the weekend, I suspect it would be more enjoyable on a quiet weekday afternoon. Today (like most weekend afternoons, I have read) it was packed, for a half mile along Av. Defense. Antique/tshatshke stalls filled Plaza Dorrego. Magicians and mimes and tango dancers filled the streets (not to mention a man with an outfit that made it look like there was a heavy wind pushing up his coat and tie). We managed to buy little (save for a piece of quartz and some excellent ice cream) and enjoyed the slow walk toward the center of town. We did take a brief detour to see casa minima -- a ten-foot-wide house of a freedman, who was given this tiny plot of street frontage by his former owner.

P.S. Translation of the words on the above photograph: "The organ is nostalgia that refuses to die."