Last day in Buenos Aires, and it feels, for the first time, like some form of winter could actually be coming. (Maybe because this is also our first day of rain.) The city, by the way, is lovely in the rain.
Wait! Sun has come out! (Forget about some form of winter! And loveliness in the rain! Actually its still raining, but brightly sunny too, and lovely.)
I am at the wonderful Malba today – the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – where I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to see works by artists previously known (by me, I mean)–Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Fernando Botero–and artists previously unknown (I confess to a terrible ignorance here) – like Alejandro Xul Soler (above).
The bad news: the guards won’t let me take little photographs to draw elephants in. (For fine art with elephants, search prior posts.)
The good news: the cafe honors the city-wide tradition of serving a little plate of unordered treats with your order of coffee. Ah.
As one of my daughters has noted, one of the great pleasures of getting coffee or tea at a cafe in Buenos Aires are all the little dishes.
This is only one of the great pleasures. The cafes are pleasant in and of themselves, with tables both inside and out, with leafy trees usually somewhere in view, if not directly overhead, with internet service and quiet and nice smells, and, above all, a sense, the minute you enter, of time stretching out before and all around you.
Of course, you do kind of need time if you are going to a typical B.A. cafe. The experience is not susceptible of rushing. Waiters typically take some appreciable fraction of an hour to note of your little fidgeting movements, or large body, at one of their tables. (This is not a complaint. Serving staff is almost invariably kind, and while they do not seem to notice little subdued bleeps of “we’re here,” they also, on the reverse side, never make signs that it’s time for you to go. It seems pretty certain, in other words, that one coffee could allow you to maintain a station in a cafe for several hours.)
Eventually, then, the order is made and one is, eventually, brought all the little dishes– a cup of coffee, a small container of sugar, a glass of water. If you are ordering tea, a small ceramic pot, and pitcher of milk. And then, the coup de grace, a little plate of some abbreviated treat–itty-bitty cream puffs, bite-sized cookies, smidgeons of brownie. (At one cafe, even side dishes holding a small scoop of ice cream.)
The treat is not something ordered by you; it just appears, as if the stimulus of caffeine demands a side of sugar for true absorption.
The best thing about the treats–well, the best thing is that they are incredibly delicious. And always a bit of a surprise. And free. And did I say delicious?
But the next next next best thing is that they are that exact size understood by any diet-conscious person to contain absolutely zero calories. Amazing.
One of the hard things for me in traveling in Argentina/Uruquay is the prevalence of a cash economy. Effectivo (the real stuff) is what people want.
When I had young children in my house, and hired sitters, and took the kids to farmer’s markets for outings (okay, okay, there was also a playground there), and was late for everything (thus needing cabs), I used to carry a fair amount of cash. But I have slowly morphed into a New Yorker who buys groceries online and pays for even subway fares, much less taxis, by credit card.
The transition to cash is especially confusing when moving from country to country, especially given the various unclear fees that are attached to whatever transactions produce effective cash. Here in Uruguay, for example, one can get either dollars or Uruguayan pesos from the ATM machine, or if one finds a store that will take credit cards, one can charge in either dollars or pesos. But here’s the rub–are you converting from dollars to pesos back to dollars? And so multiplying fees? Or, by using dollars, are you skipping the 3% that most U.S. banks charge as a commission for transactions in a foreign currency and also skipping any other exchange fees?
Then, there’s the whole issue of the exchange rate that the particular establishment is offering in terms of the translation of price. In one Uruguayan restaurant, for example, one could pay in cash only, but in Uruguayan pesos, Argentine pesos or dollars. There, for some reason (an old menu?), the Argentine peso was valued at significantly more as against the dollar than in Argentina itself.
One would like to think that this confusion would make one pause before spending any money at all. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be effectivo, for that.
“`
This wonderfully sweet hotel in Colonia del Sacarmento, Uruguay, really knows how to take a decorating theme and run…errr…fly with it.
Even down to the soap.
There is, however, one important sub-type missing.
We are in the Barquebus where, unfortunately, we are not allowed on deck. I should explain that the Barquebus is a large ferry that travels from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay, and has, as its main seating area, a few hundred well-upholstered seats, four large screen TVs, a small cafeteria and a large duty free shop, which is currently being visited by nearly all of the passengers, other than us, and some children who are drumming on their serving trays.
I don’t much like boats. I say this with a stomach full of ginger, intended to combat sea-sickness.
Correction: boats are passable with a strong breeze in one’s face, or, at least, some kind of outside air.
But a boat with sealed windows and drumming children (did I mention the occasional wailing child? Oh yes, and the one who has made an accordion from a plastic bottle) is definitely not my preferred lugar.
The children are in fact very well-behaved. It’s just that I am on a boat, without a steady breeze in my face, and now that every one’s off shopping, the TVs just say “Phillips” in a completely dark screen.
On the good side, there’s a lot of impromptu percussion.
(P.S. The above is a drawing of a woman on the boat drinking matte. Matte, loaded with matteine, which appears to be very similar to the rhyming caffeine, is incredibly popular here, with men and women carrying thermoses of hot water everywhere to quickly refill their bowl of stimulating herb.)
Taking Buquebus Ferry to Uruquay today from B.A. Sounds pretty exciting. I anticipate/hope that it is only a monster ferry in my clumsy rendition of it above. Happy Sunday.
And then there are those trips where some of your best memories are of the times you broke the plumbing.
I shouldn’t call them”best” memories–how about most unforgettable memories?
(BTW, this is not one of those trips. I repeat, from my couch in a rented apartment in Buenos Aires where we paid a significant damage deposit, this is not one of those trips.)
It really isn’t, actually. I don’t think you can “break” a pipe that’s not joined at all but simply aligned (more or less) with the pipe beneath it, with a big gap in-between, and yes, we have aligned them again.
Of course, there was that restaurant bathroom in Paris where I actually did tear the faucet off of the sink and water would not stop gushing straight up into the air. Onto the floor. Out the door. (How was I supposed to know that you weren’t supposed to push on the tap so hard?)
And I’m absolutely not going to go into any incidents in Mexico, except to say how lucky we were that none of the other people staying at the same house were home that day, and never lose heart.
But here, today, in this rented apartment in Buenos Aires, everything is just fine.
I am on a brief trip to Buenos Aires.
As is almost always the case of my trips, my first day or so was spent bemoaning my wrong clothing. (Packing, see prior posts, does not come easily to me.)
Fortunately, hardly anyone helped me pack this time. This means that my mistakes require a lot of self-castigation, which, I hope, will cut short the bemoaning period. (It took almost an entire trip to Italy to get over the absence of a certain sweater my husband had grudgingly labeled, as I packed, as possibly good with a kilt.)
(Okay, my husband did give one piece of wrong advice this time too, about a certain very light black sweater, but neither of us thought of blazers–suit jackets!–so I won’t go into that.)
The point is here we are, my daughters and I, walking around a really very lovely place on a nearly perfect day, and I am silently (more or less) bemoaning my non-packing of a blazer–I have a zillion blazers!–and the Argentines are so formal, so stylish, and the weather so changeable, so blazer-worthy!
Then we go to Recolleta Cemetery. It is an odd tourist attraction–a stone garden of mausoleums–aisles and aisles of stone vaults, some incredibly grand–well, all once incredibly grand–some now decaying, bits of window broken, cobwebbed, others shinily reflective, the interior lace over their coffins unfrayed, their interior photos still glossy.
Statues of angels and soldiers, sleeping lions, busts of the dead. Some have bromeliads (a kind of fern) growing from their ears or torsos, others expressions you had to know to love. Cats, that all look related to each other–black and white, flat-nosed, long-haired, mangey–lounge about the pillared entrance.
All so over-the-top and Goreyesque to someone not used to mortuary art that we felt a little giddy,till we happened upon one small old bald man, in a dusty black blazer/suit jacket, carrying a bouquet of white carnations, the long stems wrapped in plastic. He walked stiffly, with a quietly stately totter from side to side. We followed him, at a distance. (This sounds kind of awful but we’d been following a lot of people at Recolleta, since we had not bothered to get a map and felt we should make an effort to find Eva Peron’s tomb.)
We did feel guilty after a while, and stopped following the old man, but then saw him pull out some keys, so circled back slowly. He had opened one mausoleum down a side aisle, and taken out a crystal vase of white chrysanthemums, almost exactly like the ones he was carrying only slightly, very slightly, wilted. He sat them up on a tomb on the other side of the aisle, and slowly set to work, taking out the old flowers, stripping leaves off the stems of the new, arranging them in the vase. He worked for a long time. We walked on. One tourist, braver than I–she wore flowered leggings–asked to take his picture. He smiled, but didn’t speak.
I just couldn’t take his photograph; for one thing, I was in tears, so instead, in my notebook, did the not- very-good drawings of him below; the bromeliad angel, above.
ManicDDaily 
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