First Impressions/ Primeras Impresiones

This is a pretty incredible city, not quite as I remember it but nothing ever is. It's a great mixture of European classicism and Latin American populism: Buenos Aires is like an old woman far past her prime who still chases after younger men; you know that in her prime she was the hottest little thing around and even though her physical body has decayed she still maintains that confidence, class and style imbued by that once-masterful physical shell. In a sense it's sad to see the city living so much off its past but at the same time I can't blame her: she really is beautiful!

Everything in this city bleeds Italy and Spain (something like 90% of the people have ancestors from there) but they've still managed to infuse that Latin American...there's no word for it, it's a feeling that can only be expressed with a hand gesture that makes a forty-five degree arch from the heart downward or by ... the French phrase je ne sais quoi which seems a very appropriate description for this particular situation.

Time here runs fast only when people are walking-- everything else is sloooow: the meals; the coffee; the chats; the laying-out in the parks...life in general moves at a pace more to my liking. Then again, most countries move slower that the US. It's amazing how much Americans work and how fast life there is compared to most of the world, including our European brethren. You have no idea how many times I;ve gotten a "What?" (in a tone of utter disbelief) when I say that most Americans get two or three weeks of vacation per year. It almost makes me cry. Every single time. But back to BsAs...

I compare it a lot to New York City...not so much physically (though it is incredibly dense: the city proper is about twice as dense as San Francisco proper, and half as dense as Manhattan Island) but in how both were-- and are-- magnets for people from all over the world. Definitely on different levels because NYC is unique but let me make my case.

Both cities welcomed millions of European immigrants from the 1880s (Italian unification) to the 1940s (end of WWII). When you think of the millions of Italians that arrived in NYC know that MORE arrived in BsAs. And even MORE in Sao Paolo! From a city of about 250k in the 1880, Buenos Aires proper reached 2M by 1924 and topped 3M by the end the second World War (12x larger; compare that to NYC, which increased its population by a factor of about 6 during those same years). Then there are the Spaniards, and the Germans and the Poles and those from the collapsed Ottoman Empire and and and...you get it. Even now it continues drawing  hundreds of thousands of people from nearby Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador and throughout Latin America. There are tons of Europeans here and so few Americans. Latin America has a bad image in the States I guess.

I sense in both cities a shared culture of massive urbanism that incubates creativity. But it's not New York. People here aren't Italian-American. They're not "of German ancestry." They're not "Puerto Rican." Very simply, they're Argentines. It was hard for my American let's-hyphenate-your-culture mentality to grasp at first but now it makes much more sense than our system. Then again, they have very few blacks or Asians so I guess being Argentine is simpler if you all look the same!

And more...

Buenos Aires had the first subway system in the Southern Hemisphere and Latin America, having built the first line in 1913. Five more lines were built, the last in the late 30s (recall that "past its prime" jab from earlier?). They are woefully inadequate for a city of this expanse and population but the city is planning on adding a few more. This being Latin America, financial crises and corruption seem to eat away at infrastructure projects and they may never be built. Sure there are new parts of the city-- most notably Puerto Madero and some awesome skyscrapers in Palermo-- but by and large this city is full of buildings unless you tear one down there isn't room for something new. Coming from San Jose-- a city built mostly post-WWII-- BsAs appears a bizarro version, having been build up and out before the second war.

On a totally unrelated note:

I live in a neighborhood called Recoleta. Or Retiro. Or Barrio Norte. I'm still unsure as I think my apartment overlaps all three. But only the first two are real neighborhoods, while the third is becoming more common in usage but is not considered real...yet. Well, whatever. I live in one of them and it's really the nicest neighborhood within the city center (it's really an issue of centricity for me...I need access to trains, buses and subways as well as my bank and street food and parks). It doesn't have the hip shopping or the fancy clubs but it has the old money and the Hermes and Polo (which they actually play here...I've been watching a lot of it and it's actually pretty awesome) and blah blah blah from Paris or Geneve or some other European capital.

Anyway, the neighborhood ends abruptly to the east a few blocks from my apartment where it meets the train tracks. Further east of the tracks lies a tollway and beyond that the docks and the River Plate. Well, in part of that rail yard and below the tollway lies a famous villa miseria...basically a shanty town. So famous, in fact, I don't know its name and neither do you. It's where the kids who sing on the train for a few centavos come from. It's where the mother using a newborn for sympathy (also for a few centavitos)comes from. It's probably where some of the pickpockets come from. But whatever, what amazes me is how close such a large villa miseria is to the CBD, tourist zones and uppity neighborhoods.

My understanding is that it developed after the financial crisis of 2001 (Google it!) after some nouveau poivre (new poor, I just made it up!) took over excess land in the rail yard. The government, having gone through something like four presidents in a week, was in no position to force those people off the land so the people stayed and are in the process of turning cardboard into corrugated metal into brick and mortar. Now it's history. And my reality.

Crap, well I'm pretty much done here. As a constant analyzer of all things I've mostly enjoyed reliving these memories. And if I bored you along the way know that I bore myself myself in a few places, too! You can tell where because the writing will abruptly shift to a new topic without the obligatory transition sentence! I'm going to go back and add a few italics and correct the most obvious grammatical errors. The rest I will leave and call my "style." SL