Scenes from Ruthie's Art Opening

A Different Kind of Cattle Show at La Rural

I spent Tuesday afternoon at La Rural, observing a different kind of meat market from the usual agricultural shows that have been held there for a century. This was the Salón del Mercado Inmobiliario -- a real estate market show, where all the big property developers in Buenos Aires showed their wares, hoping to entice investors and tenants. I was invited to observe and help out at the booth of Basta de Demoler, the only real activist preservation group in town which, as its name indicates, tries to stop demolition of historic buildings in the center of the city. It they who were instrumental in getting Buenos Aires listed on the World Monument Fund "Watch" list. It was not clear what they hoped to accomplish here, but they were able to speak with a series of city and national ministers who were on hand to open the exhibition and brag about all the good they were doing for historic preservation.

The wares were neatly divided into two standard fares: the high-rose apartment building in Buenos Aires and the "countries" in the north delta area -- Tigre and beyond, where the grandest homes and country clubs are. Since the 1990s, Buenos Aires has had its own gated community boom, expertly analyzed by Nora Libertun (and which I hope to tour with her in a few weeks) which seems to be continuing. My Spanish teacher, Tatiana, grew up visiting these places on weekends (the "countries" used to really be "the country," i.e. where families from Buenos Aires might have a small cottage to escape to on weekends) and her description of what they have become sounds remarkably like wealthy suburbs across the U.S.

It was a standard trade show in many ways, with each stand trying to out do the next. The common denominator was using sex to sell real estate (apologies to Marjorie Garber). Each place -- booth doesn't do justice to the 15-foot high constructions each real estate company put together -- made sure to feature beautiful young women in clothing more appropriate to a fashion show, or worse. My favorite was the putting green, staffed by some helpful young women.

A few random observations

--most of the buses are equipped with whistles (not referee whistles, but more like kids' whistles that can make all kinds of tones) which they use as standard horns, or as a way to greet their fellow bus drives as they pass. Makes the ride a little more interesting.

--for the William Safire Memorial Language column

--tiempo is both "time" as well as "weather." This is very confusing for me.

--"country" refers not to the countryside (that would be "campo") but the suburban enclaves (often gated) outside of Buenos Aires. See

--the two big rivals (way, way bigger than Red Sox vs. Yankees) played to a tie on Sunday: Boca Juniors and River (pronounced just like that flowing body of water, even though the team's stadium sits next to the Rio de la Plata).

--The "docentes" -- the non-teaching school staff was on strike today so Jonah and Aviva had no school. The Jardin, for some unknown reason, was not affected.

--While Jonah, Aviva, and Eve were off at violin/viola lessons Ruthie and I walked to the Jumbo and bought our favorite fish -- salmon -- and came home and made a very lovely dinner. "We'll have to remember this and do it again," she said. Agreed.

Sunday

Well, after spending the morning waking up, blogging, playing hide-and-go-seek in our apartment (which is actually quite possible if you are a small person who can fit into the bottom of closets -- that's not me, by the way) we finally got out in order to see the museum of science. We hoped on the 15 bus and zipped down to Parque Centenario, which is a huge circular park in the Caballito neighborhood. We had a nice lunch at a packed restaurant -- seemed like the family Sunday lunch kind of place. Then we roamed through the artisan fair that runs on weekends, as well as the antiques fair and the book stalls. And before you knew it it was 4 pm and we all looked at each other and said, "Let's head back and watch the big football game -- Boca vs. River." This is like Yankees vs. Red Sox, if the whole world were Boston and New York (which is true for some people), and everyone took sides.

Jonah and I watched the first half in a local cafe, giving us the benefit of quadaphonic (youngsters, we'll tell you about that phrase from the 70s) cheers and howls as River missed a free kick after a questionable foul. But in the end, all was well and peaceful in Buenos Aires: both teams played well and ended with a 1-1 tie.

An Afternoon at the Rose Garden

I am woefully behind on narrating our Buenos Aires life, so I will catch up in no particular chronological order.

Yesterday, we had a lazy day of hanging out, going to violin and viola lessons, and reading. But at the end of the day we finally got out and went to the park for the neighborhood festival. Everyone time I go to Parque de Tres de Febrero I feel happier. It has such a good feeling, filled with people playing soccer in some corner, tons of people picnicking, rollerblading, biking, running, drinking mate (everywhere!).

The one section of the park that is kept up impeccably (in part by the use of guards who whistle at you if you step on the grass) is the Rosedal. It is, as I have described before a formal set of rose gardens. It was quiet lovely when we arrived in August, but, of course, the roses were not in bloom. But yesterday may have been the peak. It is a truly glorious rose garden, which runs along the lake, where we have taken paddle boats. Add to this lovely scene some roasted peanuts and cotton candy, and we were happy as can be.

Colonia del Sacramento

We spent Friday at a World Heritage Site -- Colonia de Sacramento, in Uruguay. It was a short, one-hour rapido ferry ride from Puerto Madero over to Uruguay. From the ferry we strolled near the waterside through the city gates and into a wonderful, quiet little village. (On weekends it is far more crowded with tourists from Buenos Aires -- especially this Sunday, which is Dia del Madre). We walked (and tripped) along the cobblestone streets, climbed to the top of the lighthouse (where it wasn't hard to see the skyscrapers of Puerto Madero on the distant horizon) and had lunch on the water. Eve has new, intense pains in her back, so she paid for a room for three hours to rest (which made the hotel owner wonder what kind of illicit activity was planned). I immediately imagined returning here for a few days, just to read and write -- I suspect it would be the perfect place to finish writing a book, or fail to finish writing a book.

I always have mixed feelings about these kind of heritage sites. On the one hand, you do feel like you walk back in time. But it feels like it is made for tourists....and nothing else. There are old buildings, tourists, and tourist shops. Here it is all very low key, and it was easy to wander down empty streets (the benefit of coming during the week). But I was just as happy to come across a classic car show on the modern town square, just after we left the historic center (as a plaque on the ground noted -- "here begins historic Colonia!"). I saw my childhood car -- the Peugeot 404 -- souped up with crash bars and new headlights and racing stickers, and enjoyed the lively crowd enjoying the low-rent racing car show. I prefer -- at least today -- layers of history in an old place, where people continue to live, work, and play on centuries' old sites.

Club Atletico

Yesterday I made my way down to a place I seem to spend a lot of time -- underneath the Autopista. There, on Paseo Colon is an important archaeological site -- Club Atletico, where hundreds and probably more, were held, tortured and eventually murdered. The building -- a polite supply warehouse -- was converted into a clandestine detention center in 1976 and operated for just under a year. Beginning in 2002, archaeologist began digging out the foundation of the building, demolished to make way for the dictatorship's highway. I came with Valeria Duran, a student working on a dissertation related to the dictatorship years, Maria Antonio Sanchez,a scholar and public historian who worked with Valeria on a fascinating exhibition a few years ago, entitled "the chemistry of memory," and my artist friend Carolina Andreeti (who did her own installation underneath another section of the highway).

It was a surreal experience, walking down metal stairs deep into what had been the basement of a large building, while cars and trucks roared overheard, up and down the on ramps of the highway. By chance, a woman who was kidnapped and brought to "club atletico" (the name is, of course, one of those sick jokes the police used, just as at Auschwitz, different sections were called "Mexico" and "Canada), but eventually escaped. She pointed out the torture cells, and the infirmary, and the places where prisoners could hear the sounds of passing crowds above (including celebratory crowds walking up Paseo Colon from La Boca after a Boca Juniors soccer match).

We then walked a block away, to the storage facility for items retrieved from the site. These include a ping pong ball (the survivors recalled the guards playing ping pong above them), hats lined with swastikas, and pieces of walls with faint words carved into them -- including one that says "Help me, Lord."

There is so much more to be explored here, but the group is hamstrung by lack of money, as well as by limitations of the site. They cannot dig too close to the supports for the highway. But the biggest problem is that the mayor, Macri, is a right-winger who has little sympathy for their work. The organization that controls the site is independent, so he can't kill the effort outright. But he can starve them. The same is happened at Parque de la Memoria, where they are unable to open a major exhibition and meeting building until they get money from the city to build an electrical substation.

Both Eve and I were a little disturbed by the relentless focus at ESMA on exactly what had physically been changed in the building. It was similar at Atletico. But this only made me realize how much this is a place at the start of its life as an historic site. It is all still raw, in progress, under discovery.

Tucuman

I spent much of last week in San Miguel de Tucuman (better known as simply Tucuman), the capital city of the smallest province in the republic. This is popularly known as the "garden of the republic" because of its long history of sugar, lemon, and orange production. Still today, a huge amount of sugarcane is grown and processed here, in the shadow of a mountain range that towers up above fertile plains. It also has the distinction of being the "Philadelphia of Argentina" (my phrase, not one widely used here!), aka the city of independence. It was here in 1816 that the Congreso de Tucuman met to issue its declaration of independence from the Spanish crown. It was so important, they even named the last stop on our subway line for the "Congreso de Tucuman."

I was invited to the University of Tucuman by Raul Ajmat to give two lectures, one on The City's End and other on historic preservation policies and practices in the United States. I also had a series of meetings with the various faculties of the architecture school -- urban planning, history of architecture, preservation -- where I learned about how their programs work and had some fascinating discussions about preservation practice in Tucuman. The university, on a rather dusty campus on the outskirts of the city, serves close to 50,000 students (although I never saw more than a couple of dozen in any one place) -- it is the only national university in the northwest provinces. The architecture school alone has 3000 students who spent six years (right out of high school) getting an architecture degree.

I was treated wonderfully, welcomed heartily, and even given coverage in the two local papers. I also had a chance to talk to visit the city's sites and talk with people about memory of the dictatorship years. Things are a bit different in Tucuman. Because Tucuman was at the center of fighting between the guerillas and the military, there was greater sympathy for the military -- even several people active in human rights efforts today said at that first they were pleased about the military takeover. Remarkably, the military governor from 1976 to 1977, Antonio Domingo Bussi, was elected governor twice in the decade after the fall of the dictatorship despite it being quite clear that he directed the torture and kidnapping. It was only last year (after the lifting of an amnesty law) that Bussi was sentenced for his crimes. But in Argentina, after a certain age you can request house arrest. So, he lives now under house arrest in a country estate, while the forensic analysis of bodies continues, and new prosecutions planned.

The gateway Bussi put up on the edge of Tucuman still stands. One half is still visible: Cradle of Independence. The other words have been taken down: Grave of the Resistance.

A few random observations

--Everyone here smokes. Yes, an exaggeration. But compared to the U.S., it seems like everyone.

--No one eats on the Subte, the bus, or even walking down the street. They look at us with shock whenever we do this.

--People love to go out to dinner and socialize....but as Eve has hypothesized, this is not such a big food country, at least in terms of diversity. Most restaurants have a fairly limited set of options, and ethnic diversity is not so extensive. So many restaurants with varying decor and prices all have the same basic menu: some simple salads, a whole set of varying meat options (usually parilla al carbon -- a coal grill), and pasta.

--there was no kol nidre appeal (yes, Leslie, it's true). Remarkable.

--I was especially struck by the "al chet"s written by the shul for Yom Kippur: "for selling inferior quality merchandise" and "for believing that interpreting the laws of Torah will lead to the destruction of Judaism."

--I loved these two Spanish phrases in the list of sins: "murmuracion" is gossip. And for all those academics out there: the sin of using "palabras pretenciosas": pretentious words. Let's all work on that this year, okay?

70 years young

Eve can't believe her mother is 70! (She still remembers when she was a high school senior and the family celebrated her 40th birthday). But Carol Weinbaum has hit 70, in good health and good cheer, and I would say her well-deserved share of loving friends and family.

With some cute guy at a soda fountain in St. Louis:

Mercedes Sosa

The great Argentine singer and songwriter Mercedes Sosa died at the hospital two blocks from our apartment. You can read about her here:

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/BreakingNews/View/13549

I only vaguely knew of her growing up; Eve knew her music quite well in college. But here she is a national hero, for her music and activism during the 1970s. Her declining health (she was in the hospital for several weeks) was the topic of many a conversation. In Tucuman (the region where she was born, and where I was last week) everyone kept checking their cellphones for updates on her condition.

The celebration of UNESCO naming Tango as an an exemplary element of world cultural heritage, which we were going to attend, was cancelled in her honor.

Sukkot

We have just returned from day 2 of Sukkot. It was, needless to say, a smaller crowd than we saw for Yom Kippur and especially Neilah (for which there was standing room only). But it was lovely, as in the place of rotten branches and leaves (which Ruthie and I lovingly collected from the nearby park), the shul brought in a field of myrtle, adding a wonderful smell to the holiday. Eve and I had an aliyah yesterday and today another kind old man gave each of the children a miniature torah in anticipation of Simchat Torah.

Yesterday, we had the family of Ruthie's friend, Lighuen, over for a light dinner and some sukkah-appreciation. Yes, we managed to get those PVC tubes to stand, cobbled together some skah (without actually ripping down a beautiful palm tree frond from Parque de Tres Febrero, although I really wanted to) and added some colorful creations by the kids, and had ourselves a real live, eighth-floor sukkah. The wind has blown down much of today, but that only seems to reinforce the transitory nature of the holiday. Religious rationalization, no doubt.

Two hours later:

Me and the kids just returned from our big park, where we had a lively game of dodgeball, climbed trees (whose name I don't know) with branches that sprawl out like spaghetti a hundred feet from the trunk, fed the ducks and their ducklings, and saw the first blooming roses in the Rosedal. It is a lovely park, packed on weekends, with a great feeling about it.

We are now preparing for the wedding of the long-anticipated wedding of Sheepie and Big Bird (nighttime stuffed creatures). Fortunately, we already have a chuppah assembled in the form of our sukkah.