Argentina - more Buenos Aires, and a little of Uruguay!

So here's our next post on our trip to Buenos Aires!

Some of the most amazing things in Latin America are, as strange as it sounds, the cemeteries. Buenos Aires' Recoleta cemetery is very famous, and we've been fascinated by the cemeteries in Chile, particularly in Valparaiso and Punta Arenas - places which have interesting history around European immigration.  

Buenos Aires' Recoleta cemetery is famous as the resting place of Evita. Here's some pics around the cemetery: 

Eva "Evita" Perón is buried in the family tomb of her original family - Duarte

It's like a little city of the dead...

the monument to the immigrants

In Buenos Aires we met up with Struan's parents, here they are in the excellent Cafe de Los Angelitos - named ironically ("Little Angel's Cafe") by a BA Police Chief because it was a traditional gangster haunt! If you order pastries here you're in for a treat - all over BA you can find deals where you get a coffee and three pastries really cheaply. In Cafe de Los Angelitos they are huge, sticky and lovely!

Here's a few more pics of the decor in this fab cafe:

mirror in the bathroom

beautiful floor

Another Buenos Aires institution is the Teatro Colon. One of the most famous opera houses in the world, just recently refurbished and reopened! Unfortunately we were too early for the start of the 2011 season, but we did get to see the preparations for the opening show - the first time anything like it, a modern ballet, has been shown in Teatro Colon. Here's some pics:

the pit

staircase from 3 different types of European marble

Struan in the Presidential Box

It goes without saying that Buenos Aires is a fantastic city, a genuine world city fallen on slightly harder times, but nevertheless awesome. Its attractions range from the epic to the quaint.

Congress

a church that looks like a Roman temple - we said it was like Italy...

"quaint" - an old school pharmacy

A good day trip out of BA is to hop across the river to Uruguay, specifically to Colonia, an old portuguese town and now a chilled out tourist magnet. When you look at a map of South America, there are some countries that just make no sense at all. Chile of course is one of them, until you look at the geographical features that underlie the political boundaries and know a little of the history - that long thin strip of essentially coastland is explained by the line of the Andes Mountains all the way South, while the Atacama Desert in the North provides the other almost impenetrable geographical boundary (Chile only extends as far north as it does now because of the nitrates found in the desert which prompted the Pacific War and the annexation from Peru of large, previously useless, parts of that desert). 

Uruguay is another such country, in a different way: tiny with about 3.5 million people. The explanation for Uruguay is that it was originally set up as a buffer state between the huge Portuguese imperial possession, Brasil, and the jewel in the Spanish crown, Argentina.

Colonia is beautiful, not a great deal going on, just a place to relax, eat, and check out some old buildings. It's like being in some of the older towns in Portugal, where we've been a lot. Here's some pics.

We realised last post that we forgot to include any dogs, which have become something of a requirement for our blog... so here's a nice one having a scratch on a mooring rope:

You get to Colonia by ferry from the port in Buenos Aires, here's a couple of pics of the amazing sunset over BA as we approached late in the afternoon after a day in Colonia:

one of the bridges in the BA port

So back in BA there's a few other things to post before we finish. Something interesting but very sad that occurs here is the march of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Like Chile, and several other Latin American countries, Argentina has had a period of dictatorship, characterised by brutal and systematic killing of citizens with the "wrong" views, opinions and ideas. Both Chile and Argentina are well known for widespread "disappearances" - cases of people being arrested and then never seen nor heard of again, known as "Desaparecidos". Of course the vast majority were killed and their bodies destroyed or hidden and have never been found. Las Madres are a group of Argentinian mothers who many years ago set out individually looking for their "disappeared" children, then came together and created a group which has been campaigning and marching for human rights. They first met in the Plaza de Mayo, outside the central symbol of Argentinian state power, the Casa Rosada (the Pink House - equivalent of La Moneda in Chile), and have gathered there to demonstrate every Thursday for over a decade. We were fortunate enough to see them:    

Many of the Desaparecedos were apparently thrown out of helicopters into the sea by the Argentine Army, a disposal method also used by the Chilean Army under Pinochet. The strikingly similar disposal of Osama Bin Laden's body struck a chord here in Chile - one of the magazines that we read here, "The Clinic", published a front cover mock-up of OBL being thrown out of a helicopter with the caption "the USA finished with Bin Laden Chilean style"... a link to the cover is here. 

"The Clinic" is an investigative satirical magazine along the lines of Private Eye in the UK. It's named for The London Clinic where Pinochet spent much of his time while in the UK. Whether he was faking it all along, or whether this establishment actually provides miraculous medical care is the ultimate non-question at the heart of The Clinic's style and raison d'etre - after years of avoiding trial for human rights abuses by reason of ill-health, Pinochet returned to Chile. He was wheeled onto the plane in a wheelchair and walked off it on arrival...

Given the CIA backing of both the Pinochet coup and the torture and murder carried out by his regime, the continued existence of Guantanamo among other things, and the general preachy tone of the US towards Latin America, this cover of The Clinic is nothing short of genius.

Now for some lighter stuff, some food, and tango, and the compulsory BA dog walker!

lovely octopus risotto with black rice!

This has to be a fun job...

yay!

This post wraps up our summer travels. About 3 months on the road we managed to see a big chunk of Chile, and to dip into Bolivia, Argentina, and Uruguay. We're hoping to get up to Peru, or over to Easter Island, between finishing teaching and returning to the UK!

As we write we're enjoying just living in Santiago and discovering new things. We've still got plenty of things to post - including some pics from when Anna's mum was here, and our friends Paulos and Caroline, we'll also start going back through some of the photos from travels that we haven't yet posted, and of course post anything else about Santiago and Chile that comes to mind. 

We hope all is good for everyone! Chao!