Face it, nothing is cooler than containerized shipping!

Ok, you will have to indulge me this post. I know that not everyone loves containerized shipping. But I sure do! Always have.

One of life's genuine pleasures is realizing your irrational and pointless interests and just indulging them. Some people just like stamps, so they collect stamps. Trainspotters, they love trains I guess. Maybe butterflies, ribbons, funny hats, colored socks, maps, fancy imported chocolate. Whatever floats your boat, as long as you're reasonable about it.

So I love containerized shipping. Okay, actually not all that much. Not as much as a stamp collector loves stamps or a butterfly collector loves butterflies. But I do love going by a big port and looking at the ships and cranes, and yes, containers. And of course this is in the Buenos Aires blog because today I went by the port here.

As you might expect, this is a major port. Probably nearly all imports to this country come through this port. This is it -- no other ports of any size. I rode my bike down there today and took some pictures.

Here is one of the main gates -- there are several. This one is nice because you can see the gate, a bunch of containers lying around, and also a big passenger ship. (Of course with all these pictures, if you want to really get a sense of the port, you'll have to click on the picture to see the larger image)

Here's another shot near the main terminal. Here you can also see a train with containers loaded onto it. Multi-modal, that's the glory of containerized shipping!

I first got interested in containerized shipping in business school. I had studied economics, and I was learning about business and costs and efficiencies, and I read somewhere about containerized shipping and how it had revolutionized the industry. Then I thought about it, comparing it with the old system. With containers, you just take them off a train or truck, hoist them up with a crane and put them on a boat. On the other side of the world, another crane hoists the container onto a truck or train, and two days later it backs up into the loading dock of your local Walgreens.

Compare this to the old days, where everything was basically unloaded by hand (okay, they still had cranes, but everything was on pallets or whatever). You had zillions of beefy stevedores, lifting and hauling. It might have taken a couple days to unload a ship. And then everything was put in a warehouse by the dock, and it might have sat there for weeks or days. And everything had to be organized and accounted for, and there were really big opportunities for theft and corruption and other hanky-panky.

Ha, I'd better cut short the containerized shipping lesson. But don't forget, it's "the box that changed the world". Really -- there would be no wal-mart, no cheap imported goods, no dollar stores.

OK, back to the port. One of the beautiful things about riding a bike is that you get to see things you never would otherwise. You wouldn't take a taxi to the port to look around. And everything's so spread out it would be boring to walk it. But on the bike I get to see things like these fantastic hulking buildings, which really make the place look like some kind of fortress:

The port is huge, it stretched along about two, maybe two and a half miles. Lots and lots of containers, containers stacked up everywhere, even across the street from the waterfront. Lots of cranes too. These were about a mile from what seemed to be the main terminal:


One last thing, about another half-mile down I spotted this impressive building, half-hidden by a line of containers stacked up:The small picture doesn't do it much justice -- this building is enormous, and impressive. It really looks like some kind of outpost of the spanish empire or something. Well, Argentina was settled by more italians than spaniards (roughly 45% v. 35%), so maybe this is an example of the Argentines indulging their italian heritage. The Italians, at least in Rome, seem to make even the most ordinary government buildings, the ministry of agriculture or something, into the most ornate and impressive palaces. So maybe this is an Italian-style Customs House. I'll try to look into it.

A most totally bitchin' Noche Buena

For many of us who grew with some tension in the familia, Christmas can be a mixed blessing. It's supposed to be this time when we celebrate home and hearth and togetherness and all that, but sometimes that togetherness just isn't there. And in the US there's such a build-up that many people can't help but be disappointed.

My mother frequently had meltdowns on Christmas. I sometimes say that my least favorite sentence is "This is going to be the best Christmas ever!" A sure sign that we were in for trouble.

So I was happy to be here in Buenos Aires for the holiday season. It was very much part of the plan, actually, to skip the season in the US.

I didn't have to worry about what i would do here, because I luckily have a ready-made set of ex-pat friends, and they arranged to have Christmas dinner together. They celebrate on Christmas Eve, la Noche Buena, rather than Christmas day, La Navidad. So we had a nice christmas dinner together. I will try to write about that elsewhere.

But the fun really happened out in the street. It turns out that the way they celebrate the blessed moment of the birth of the son of God is to go out into the street and blow shit up. Okay, really they're setting off fireworks. And some of them are beautiful sparkly things that light up the sky:
The above actually has a name -- it's D'Artagnan. Our friend Mark Burton went to the Jumbo (a kind of Argentinian Wal-Mart) and bought these very posh fireworks for our entertainment. And maybe also to avoid being shown up by the neighbors. I think he did succeed in getting the most visually impressive fireworks:


The tradition is to start the show at midnight, and Mark lit the fuse pretty much on the dot. D'Artagnan burned very brightly, but alas very briefly. But we had no shortage of entertainment out on the street. Things were going off on all sides, actually. One block over was a big open intersection, a place where lots of people were setting things off:
This was just too great. One after another, guys (always guys) would go into the street and light something off. And sometimes they would just toss things out, giant firecrackers. But one person in our group thought that some of them were homemade, like small pipe bombs. And bomb was the word for some of them, seriously loud, setting off the car alarms. For about 10 minutes it did feel something like a war zone, explosions going off on all sides of you.

No question, there's something very exhilarating about that chaos and sense of destruction, something very primal. It's an instinctive male thing, to go into hyper-alertness in the middle of battle (or mock battle in this case). I'm generally as weeny as they come, neurotically avoiding conflict whenever possible, but I understand the attraction of the battle.

But fortunately it wasn't just explosions. If it were there probably wouldn't be a single female out on the street. But there was lots of prettiness as well:

Unfortunately I couldn't get a picture of the prettiest thing of all, the floating lanterns. These are some kind of paper lantern with a small candle or flame inside. The hot air from the flame makes the paper lantern float across the sky like a hot air balloon. I only saw one, but it was a very ethereal sight -- like a glowing bag made of tissue paper being carried by the wind slowly across the sky. If you are lucky enough to have a good vantage point you might be able to see 10 or 20 or more of these floating across the sky. Really lovely, a beautiful sight, if not the visceral rush of the homemade pipe bomb.

a very crowded, and very micro, microcentro

The central business district of Buenos Aires is called the MicroCentro, which I guess would translate as "the little downtown". The part of downtown is old, the new glass office towers are a half mile away or so, near the highway separating the MicroCentro from Puerto Madero. (Of which more in a later post.)

I walked around the MicroCentro today around 2:30-3pm, and it was pretty remarkable how packed the streets were with pedestrians in the mid-afternoon. The main pedestrian shopping strip is Florida. I first visited Florida on a Saturday or Sunday, and so I thought that it was mostly a tourist destination. But no, on weekdays, when people go to work, the street is so jammed with locals that it's pretty hard to spot a tourist. This is really the center of town, a place where most everyone goes from time to time.

Here's a photo of Florida -- it's not so great, I'll try to replace with a better one later. If you click to view the bigger version you can see it a bit better:


And here is the crowd on Florida crossing Corrientes, one of the main avenues:


Okay, I've lived in Manhattan for two decades, and even I find this crowd somewhat difficult to navigate. Not to mention slightly anxiety-producing.

But Florida and Corrientes are at least spacious. Other streets in the MicroCentro are so, well, Micro, but still so crowded, that even a dedicated urbanite such as myself can get stressed out. I've seen lots of old cities with narrow little streets, but I don't think I've ever seen such narrow streets with so many vehicles barreling down just inches away from the curb. You have to negotiate teeny little sidewalks, scooting by people coming your way, or having to step in the street to pass old ladies going your way, all the while with smoke-belching buses whizzing by your shoulder. I didn't get any action shots of this today, but I did get a shot of people trying to cross the street once the light changed. Even this can be trecherous:
Later I'll get some shots of the actual narrow sidewalks. It's pretty amazing, two people can just barely squeeze past each other, and the cars and buses sometimes drive with their wheels literally an inch or two away from the curb. But, amazingly, the Portenos are very blase about this. And in general, they've very blase about the crazy traffic. They're not worrying about getting hit by a bus -- it's the bus' problem to avoid them. God bless 'em, it's such a different, and no doubt healthier, approach to risk than we norteamericanos have.

Two sides of the street in my barrio

Walking down Malabia, a street in my barrio of Palermo Soho, I noticed a fancy iron gate. Most of the buildings here are nondescript apartment buildings, so I looked through the gate and saw the following gorgeous old building:


So I took a couple pictures, and thought to myself, such a lovely old building, it's nice living in an old part of town. Then I turned around and looked across the street and saw this:


And so I was nicely reminded, as if I needed reminding, that BA is constantly juxtaposing the modern and the traditional. It's part of the vitality of a great city, you build newer and bigger, but you keep the gems from the past.

Or at least you hope to. As anyone who has lived in a city knows, one person's gems are another's tear-downs.

My, what big anuncios you have!

One of the reasons I am here, and many of the expats are here, is to just get away from what seems like the out-of-control commercialism of life in the states these days. Everyone just wants more and more and more stuff, fancier and fancier stuff. Things like fifty thousand dollar kitchen make-overs, they might not be signs of the apocalypse, but they do seem like signs of a life out of balance.

But the joke's on me -- Buenos Aires is hardly the best place to get away from all this. Turns out they're crazy for "el shopping". There are a bunch of fancy shopping malls here, and people seem actually proud of them. They will ask you if you've been to this or that mall

Where you really notice this is the number and size of outdoor advertisements, or anuncios. They're all over the place, and they are not subtle:

But I guess this kind of visual clutter is part of living in a giant metropolis. Lord knows there's lots of giant ads in New York or Tokyo. But in New York they try to keep the separate at least, so you're only looking at one ad at a time. Here they show up in groups, which seems to add to the chaos. Whether it makes the ads themselves more or less effective, well, I'll leave that question to the marketers.

But the reason I bring all this up, really, is to show the following ad, which may be the biggest ad of any sort that I've ever seen. And since it's little more than a gigantic picture of the beautiful (and fierce) Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova, I'm all in favor. If we have to clutter the visual landscape with ads, this seems to me the way to do it:

Click on the picture to see a full-sized version of this foto, if you really want to get a feel for its size.

A very urban classical music concert

Today I went with a group of expats to see a classical music concert in a park. No one was sure what the park was called, but it was at "la flor", the flower, a very large metal sculpture. Apparently la flor isn't so well know, because our taxi driver wasn't quite sure where it was. It's quite a large sculpture, and nice enough, but as someone in the group said, it's not going to put Buenos Aires on the map:


It was a hot sweltering day here in BA -- around 95 degrees F -- so it was nice to spend the evening out in the park. The expats were great, there were plenty of blankets to sit on, and there was more than enough food and wine for everyone.

The orchestra is the orchestra from el Teatro Colon, the famous opera house here. It is an accomplished orchestra apparently, but they kept their music selections very mainstream -- Bizet's Carmen, Dvorak's New World Symphony, a very famous argentinian piece that escapes me, and, for the grand finale The Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner. The latter featured a little laser show, like something out of a 1978 Pink Floyd Concert.
Because Buenos Aires is a big crazy urban jumble, we appropriately weren't left alone in peace with our classical music in the park. As the concert was starting, there was this crazy thumping coming from about a quarter mile away, heavy throbbing bass, like a rave or something. But a rave it clearly wasn't, because it was too early, and somehow it ended after about a half hour. We were also only a couple hundred yards from an above ground train that went by about every 10 minutes, but that wasn't too loud. Lastly, we were only about a mile from the local airport, and every once in a while a plane came in our direction. This was loud, definitely a distraction.

But it's Buenos Aires, a gigantic urban agglomeration, and people are just used to lots of distractions, and remarkably tolerant of them. This is the lesson of big cities, after all -- we live with each other in close quarters, so we have to learn tolerance. If there's a plane going by, well, it's good we have the airport handy, people need to fly in and out. If there's a party in the park next door, well, it's good that those people, whoever they are, have a place to have a party.

Maybe i'm just being idealistic, but that seems to be the attitude here. It's certainly a different feel from the "not-in-my-backyard" gated community attitude so prevalent in the US.

Parque Chacabuco

Today I got to take a little walk around the delightfully named Parque Chacabuco. This was another example of finding buenos aires both rough around the edges and totally charming.

It's a mid-sized park with an elevated freeway running across the middle of it. There's some litter, the buildings are a little shabby, and there's a lot of dirt showing through the grass.

But just into the park i noticed a cat on the grass, then another, and then more. Turns out it's a place where they let stray cats run around and presumably feed them. (There was a sign telling the public not to feed them, so hopefully someone is.) Here's a picture of some of the cats:


There is another park near me in Palermo where they keep a bunch of feral cats. I think it's a part of the city's Italian heritage. The only other place I've ever seen domestic cats peacefully lounging around in public spaces like this is in Italy. I have to say, there is something charming and civilized about it. I do love dogs, but a bunch of wild dogs running around a park certainly would not be charming.

There are a number of brick buildings built under the freeway overpass running through the park. They're a little run-down, and there's a fair amount of graffiti. But the buildings are clearly serving the public. There is some kind of youth athletic program, probably with a gym or basketball court or something. There's also a big cheap restaurant, and what appears to be the offices of some artists association. Outside the latter is a little sculpture garden, they call it a sculpture patio. I don't know for sculpture, but these seem pretty good to me:

So, Parque Chacabuco, like so much of buenos aires, is definitely a little rough around the edges, but with a whole lot of character.

Buenos Aires -- Scruffier than you might think

I arrived in a rainy Buenos Aires at 7:30 am this morning after a long sleepless flight. And my first thought on driving was to remember previous first impressions -- this city is scruffier than you expect, every time. It's especially scruffy for being the new international "It" city.

But after a while you overlook the scruffiness, you become immune to it, just like you do in New York or in Portland or any other city. But when you first get here you notice that the air smells and it's chaotic and dirty and the traffic is bad and the drivers are nasty.

Here's a photo of some apartment blocks on the way in from the airport -- my first impression this morning:
Later in the afternoon, after a five-hour nap, i went out looking for more scruffiness. Even in this relatively fancy neighborhood I live in there's lots to be seen. Here's a sidewalk that you might see anywhere in the city:


Here's something I saw a block away -- some cool scruffiness:


This kitty photo is really firmly attached to the wall -- not just some piece of paper taped up. I This is some cool graffiti.

But then on the same walk I went further towards the parks of Palermo. Here's one example of the beautiful urban vistas you can come across:
And then I walked by this big building that appears to be a mosque, though I'm not sure. (Update -- it's definitely a mosque.) Last picture today, I promise:

Crazy traffic, crazy weather, crazy hustle and bustle. It's a real global city, half glorious european capital, half chaotic third world mega-sprawl. It's a pretty nice combination, though as a cyclist I could sure use a little less traffic. More on that another day.