The most fantastically ugly building ever!

Oh, man, you're in the right place for aesthetic enlightenment. Previously I brought you pictures of containerized shipping, now I have a bunch of pictures of a remarkably ugly building! Isn't blogging great?

Actually I'm sort of fascinated by this building, which is about a mile from my apartment. It looms over Santa Fe, a big thoroughfare. And from a distance, it's incredibly ugly, not to mention sort of menacing:


(Now with all these pictures, if you want to appreciate the true ugliness, or magnificence, of this building, you'll have to click to see the larger pictures.) Anyway, as you can sort of see from the little pic here, it's a big dirty building with a whole bunch of creepy antennas on the roof. Almost like some kind of malevolent control center. But it's way, way worse from behind:
This just looks like the headquarters of the secret police or something. Maybe a prison, though all that telecom on the roof gives it a much more ominous character, like there's a bunch of people in there spying on all of us.

Anyway, I've been seeing this building from a distance for a long time, and it always creeped me out, and I always thought it was incredibly ugly. So naturally, I rode my bike over there to take some pictures of it.

As I got closer, it became more clear that this is an apartment building. It's in a residential area, lots of terraces. And it's big -- really big, forty, forty-five stories. And actually, coming closer, you could see that it had some style (at least from the front side -- the back side is an atrocity, no matter how you look at it).


I rode up to the entrance, and, lo and behold, this is a fancy building. It's got its own little plaza, set back from the street a little, a sure sign of upscale aspirations here in buenos aires.

More interesting up close is the concrete work on this building. As you can see from the above, the many vertical columns on this building are sculpted concrete, kind of interesting, actually. I walked up to the plaza, and before I got sushed away by a security guard took a few pictures. The one below shows that not only does the building have concrete columns, it also has a kind of concrete facade, horizontal concrete slabs connecting the vertical columns, all set in front of the building about a foot or so.
This is no slapped-together fancy apartment building, this concrete facade was clearly carefully considered, and must have taken a lot of effort to build. So in a way, this building really is fantastic, it's serious architecture. I believe this use of concrete qualifies this building as an example of "brutalism", a fantastically-named school of architecture that was popular in the fifties and sixties, and maybe into the seventies. BA has a few other examples of Brutalism. Makes sense to me. Brutalism in its day was thought to be very progressive and visionary, and argentina aspires to that. But on the other hand, it's also a kind of cold expression of raw power, and lord knows certain elements in argentina have aspired (and achieved) and continue to aspire to that.


I love this building because I think it does show both the positive and negative sides of this architectural style. Certainly it's cold and dreary from some angles, and also has a very menacing side. But from another perspective it does have a certain powerful elegance, some kind of combination of beauty and strength. I like the detail in this last picture, the way the concrete columns fold over the top of the building. This shows a certain aesthetic integrity. Lord knows it wasn't essential to make the top of this 45-story monstrosity elegant, but they did, and I think that does demonstrate at least some kind of commitment to excellence, some ambition.

Still, from a distance, it does look like the secret police headquarters. So I guess that's maybe where Brutalism really stumbles.

My new college

Ha, this is a one-joke posting. After quite a bit of riding around out in the Afueras, I was sitting have una gaseosa (a soda) at a gas station by the highway, and I found myself facing the following sign:

You might need to click to see the bigger picture, but it's a giant billboard for the Universidad de Moron, with an accent over the second "o". Of course, I think, ha-ha-ha, university of moron. Very funny, I've got to enroll there.

But I guess the second joke, speaking of morons, was on me. Because my next thought was, hey, doesn't "moron" (with accent) mean "brown"? Like, the color. So, what, University of Brown? That's even weirder than University of Moron. But, like I said, speaking of morons, moron is not brown -- maron is brown. Moron with an accent is just a name, it's not a spanish word.

Moron, without an accent, well, my spanish dictionary says it's an "idiota". So I wasn't so far off.

Cycling in the Afueras

I haven't been writing about my bike rides in Buenos Aires yet, mostly because I just haven't gotten many good pictures. But since I've been doing so little else of interest, cycling it is.

Pretty much every Sunday since I arrived I've taken a long ride, usually out of the city limits. This is absolutely the most interesting thing I've been doing. I think by the time I leave I will have seen more of the Buenos Aires metropolitan area than most people who've lived here their whole lives.

Partly this is because I tend to go into not-so-great neighborhoods. Make no mistake about it, the best way to visit, er, economically challenged areas is on a bike. You probably wouldn't walk through many of these places, except maybe with a local guide. Sure, you can drive through, but you won't get much of a feel for the place. But on a bike, you just zip right through. You're going slow enough to notice everything, and you're out in the open, getting all the sights, sounds, and, indeed, smells of these neighborhoods. I think it's important for us spoiled rich first-worlders to recognize that an awful lot of people have to live in places that smell bad, that literally smell like shit. Actual shit, from open sewage.

There's not really that much open sewage in the BA area that I've seen, but there's a bit of it. Lord knows there are some really skanky small bodies of water. More on that in a later post.

So, on to yesterday's ride, and some pictures. I went through a not-so-bad area yesterday, directly to the west. I went out of the city on Juan B. Justo, a big artery with few lights and lots and lots of lanes, whose name never fails to remind me of Johnny B. Goode. (I guess it would translate to Johnny B. Just, or Johnny B. Fair.) It's about five, six, seven miles to the city limits from here. (The city itself is small -- under 3 million people-- whereas the metro area is 13 million.)

Heading away from the city limits, I found this nice wide road, a kind of strip not all that dissimilar to what I remember from Tucson, although quite a bit shabbier:


If you don't see the shabbiness, maybe this picture of the same road will make it a little more clear. Note that the shuttered store is called D'Agostino's, like the grocery chain in NYC. I've seen at least one other shuttered D'Agostino's, it must have been a chain that went under.After another 5 or 6 miles, I crossed over another freeway, and ended up in a sort of Villa. The Villas are what you might call the slums. Some of them are genuine shanty-towns, without real roads and with most of the houses looking quite home-made. But most of them are just kind of ramshackle. It's funny, the fancy Portenos, residents of BA, are very wary of the Villas, but really they don't seem so bad to me. People are relatively well-dressed, there are stores and other signs of organized public life around, and there are lots of not-so-terrible cars, some almost looking relatively new. On the other hand, as happened to me yesterday, you might have a car pull out of a driveway, sputtering and coughing, and taking 30 seconds or so to get up to enough speed to pass a a bicycle. So, let's be clear, these are not great neighborhoods. I would not walk through them alone, pretty much any time, and certainly not after dark. But cycling through is interesting, and really I sense no hostility at all from the locals.

It's hard to get pictures of these areas -- you don't want to be seen gawking at other people's poverty. This Villa I was in yesterday wasn't so bad, and it got better quick, there were some kind of nice houses. And, goddammit, they had the coolest telephone poles I've ever seen:

Hard to see in the little pic, but these are pretty massive. Way more sturdy than the houses in this neighborhod, for sure.

About another 4 or 5 miles on I came across some not-so-fabulous public art, of all things. It's a weirdly primitive statue of a Gaucho. If you want to see its true unfabulousness, you'll have to click through to see the bigger pic.
This statue was weirdly out of place, at a random 3-way intersection in a very uninteresting, kind of shabby area. The next pic gives a little context. Note all the graffiti on the building in the background.

I think this last picture gives a false impression of the Afueras. One of the most interesting things about the suburbs of BA is that they're quite urban -- there's no space anywhere. House is built next to house, sharing walls, no yards to speak of , for a long, long way. Very dense, really urban density. For a coffee-drinking male cyclist, this means one thing above all else -- no where to pee! No matter where you are, you look around and there's someone on foot nearby who's going to see you whip it out. Man, yesterday I had to hold it in for four hours!

Anyway, back to a slightly more urban area, I came across the Showcenter, a kind of entertainment complex. Check out these faux-futuristic signs, which look like they're from the early apollo age, though they're probably circa 1970 or so. I found the signs hilarious, because they're so impossible to read, and they've got this fantastically weird and distracting blue and white background. I thought at first that it was just faded paint, but no, all the signs were done the same way. To really see, you'll have to click through to the big pic.

So, coming upon the thing, it too, like much of the Afueras, is pretty shabby. Old and faded, and not all that great when it was new, for sure. It has a little of that Coney Island faded glory feel, though you get the feeling that this was significantly less glorious than Coney Island, even in its best days.
So, yeah, the Afueras del Oeste, the western suburbs, are hardly anything to put in your documentary for the Travel Channel. But, really, this is where most of the people in the BA metropolitan area live, semi-urban outlying areas, not really dangerous, but not so nice either. So for that reason, I find it fascinating. This is a place where lots and lots and lots of people live, and this is how they live. It's a good thing to experience a little, and I'm really glad I've got the bike and the skills to cruise through all of it.

And sometimes you do see some beautiful things. Not a quarter mile from the shabby Showcenter was this lovely hospital:
I don't know what kind of hospital it was, but maybe something long-term, psychiatric or otherwise -- you could see what looked like patients and their families sitting on benches on the grounds. Really lovely.

Watch your step, part 2

Buenos Aires is a really great walking town, but as noted earlier you have to watch your step. In addition to certain excretory hazards, what you really have to watch for is the cars, and even worse the buses.

The main problem is corners -- drivers here try to avoid slowing down at corners, so the cut them really, really tight. You're waiting to cross the street, and a bus barrels around the corner, inches away. When you first get here it's really startling, and even after having been here a long time I'm still surprised at how fast they take corners.

Another thing they do, especially in the incredibly narrow streets of the MicroCentro, is drive inches away from the curb. This can be scary. Sidewalks are really narrow down there, and you can just barely get by someone walking in the opposite direction. So you are at risk of falling off the curb, but meanwhile there's a car or a bus barreling along inches away from the curb.

Seriously, I wonder if people get killed. Meanwhile, if you come to BA -- watch your step!

New Year's Eve

Interestingly, New Year's Eve was more calm on the street than Christmas Eve. I asked someone about this, and she said that here in BA people typically spend Christmas Eve with their friends, and New Year's Eve with their family. So, weirdly, NewYear's Eve is the family holiday.

But still there was some good action in the street. There were some fireworks -- nothing hugely explosive like on Christmas, more pretty fireworks like the following:


Less fun, but more ethereally beautiful, are the paper lanterns that they light and launch. We saw one flying overhead on Christmas, but people were lighting lots of them on New Year's Eve. The following pic doesn't really show the lantern, but it shows how many people were standing around out on the street at 12:10 or so on January 1:


The next picture shows the paper lantern being lit. These are really simple devices -- just paper, with some sort of very lightweight frame, something that lets them place a small candle in the center. So they light the candle, and the lantern basically turns into a hot air balloon -- the hot air from the candle burning is enough to launch the lantern. The lantern lifts up very gently, and then rises to about, oh, 50-75 feet, and kind of floats along on the breeze. It's really quite lovely. I tried to get pictures of the lanterns floating overhead, but they were too small and blurry. So here's a picture of people lighting and preparing to launch a lantern:


Now, you might think, sounds risky -- a candle in the middle of a paper lantern. How is it that the paper doesn't just catch on fire. Well, guess what -- sometimes it does. But since this is Argentina, and they have a definitely more blase' attitude about risk than the gringos, no one gets too worried. In fact they seem to enjoy the spectacle:


This last picture is good to see in the larger size -- you can see how much everyone is enjoying the spectacle. As always, click on the small pic to see a larger one.

In all, it was quite the lovely spectacle, people lighting and launching these paper lanterns. Much sweeter than the homemade pipe bombs that people were lighting and tossing into the street on Christmas Eve!

Watch your step!

I haven't been posting as frequently as I would like, and I realize it's because I keep waiting for good pictures to use. But every post doesn't require pictures. And in fact here's one where pictures would probably be, let's say, unwelcome. Because what I want to talk about here, briefly, is dog shit.

Let's just say there's lots of it here. And so, watch your step. My second day here this trip I totally skidded on a big pile. It wasn't pretty. And at least two or three times since, even though I'm keeping an eye out, I've had to look for a puddle to rinse off the bottom of my flip flop. Hard to believe it, but I guess New York was just like this not that long ago. And Paris and London and wherever else. But eventually people in these cities got used to picking up their dog's "solid waste."

It's just another kind of pollution, I guess. The richer a country gets, the more it starts cleaning up after itself. And eventually that includes the dog crap. Visitors to BA be warned -- Argentina is not that rich yet.

Cat Update -- Cat in a Tree!

I've taken to going over to the Jardines Botanicos, the botanical gardens nearby, to enjoy the natural beauty, and more importantly to hang around with the cats. Yesterday I was over there, crouched over petting a cat by the fence, when a guy on the other side of the fence spots me as a manly cat lover, and tells me that there's a cat stuck in a tree down a little ways. So I put on my cat-rescuing hero cap and went to investigate.

And sure enough, there she was, a cat in a tree:


As might be expected, Kitty was none too happy about her predicament, and she was being pretty vocal. Unfortunately, kitty was pretty far up in the tree, maybe 12-15 feet? But, the tree was quite close to the fence, which is pretty tall but has a rail running across the top:

You can't really see her in the picture, but kitty's in the Y in this tree. You can tell how high the fence is from the pic, though -- it wasn't something you could just climb up on. So I dragged over a garbage can and hoisted myself up, standing on the little rail at the top of the fence, leaning against the tree.

I could just reach up with 1 arm to the kitty. Kitty's kind of freaked out, but glad to see me. I ended up petting the cat for a long time, trying to get her to calm down, to earn her trust. I'm not sure how I can get her down to the ground -- it will be hard enough just to get myself down from atop this fence, let alone get down with a freaked out cat. But I'm thinking that if I get the cat, some passer-by with some courage will take the cat from me.

So I try to get the cat with the 1 arm, but, alas, Kitty is having none of it. I tried to grab her under the belly and lift, but she dug her claws into the tree like her life depended on it. Passers-by were stopping occasionally to look at the spectacle, and to give me advice in spanish that for the most part I couldn't understand.

I stood on the fence about 8 or 10 minutes, a long time to be perched up 7 or 8 feet off the ground on a teeny railing. I could have used force and just ripped the cat from the tree, but lord knows what the cat would have done to me, and for sure having a snarling scratching cat in my hand would dramatically increase my chances of falling off of my precarious perch.

So, heroism was not to be. Kitty, I tried, but you're on your own. Before I lowered myself down, which wasn't so easy, I took one picture of the kitty from up on the fence. Here she is, looking at me, thinking, oh hell, where are you going?

I left the garbage can next to the tree, hoping that would catch the attention of people who worked in the park and they'd notice the cat.

Later in the day I did worry about the cat. And today, I went back to the park to see if she was still there, or if I could find her. And, good news, I did find her, out of the tree, hanging around on the lawn. She did look a little scared, but I hung around and pet her for a long time. It was sweet.

Parque Centenario

I love big city parks. I don't think you can have a great big city without good parks, or at least adequate parks. What makes a city great is public spaces, places where you go to be with your fellow man. For me, this is where civility is born, in public spaces.

A few days ago I went to Parque Centenario, one of the more attractive public spaces I've been to in Buenos Aires:

It's a nice park, I think it's been refurbished relatively recently. There's a pond in the middle that people stroll around, and there's even duck-feeding to be done:


And there are some fine lawns and trees and benches, which is pretty much the prescription for an urban park. These pictures were taken on december 31 -- it was a nice warm day, and there were lots of people in the park hanging around.

Parque Centenario is interesting because it's very round, with the lake more or less in the center. And there aren't any good landmarks among the surrounding buildings, so it's quite easy to get directionally disoriented. And the roundness really doesn't help when you're trying to navigate the surrounding streets on a bicycle. The roads go off at all sorts of angles, so it's hard to keep your bearings. I've gotten slightly turned around near here several times.

Just for fun, here's a snap from Google Earth of Parque Centenario. You can see the patchwork of streets running off in all directions. No grid here, that's for sure, something I'll address in a later post on cycling in BA.

Google Earth is so fun -- I'm always trying (and mostly failing) to navigate my cycling trips using Google Earth. I'll write more about this in a later post.

Cats in the Park!

Okay, cuteness alert here! There's practically no reason for this post except to show cute pictures of cats in a public park near my apartment. Except that I guess it is interesting that they have cats living in some of the parks here. Or at least in two of them.

This is the second park I've seen with a group of cats comfortably lounging around and apparently being fed. Earlier I posted one picture of the cats in Parque Chacabuco. But the Jardines Botanicos, the Botanical Gardens, right by my house has a much bigger group of cats. Here's a group of five cats all doing what cats do best -- lying around sleeping:


The cats in this park are almost an attraction. People seem to come by the park to look at the cats, and sometimes to feed them. There's a fence that runs along the sidewalk next to the park, and on any given weekend day, and sometimes weekday, you'll see one or a few people stooping down at the fence trying to pet the cats or feeding them. Here's one wondering if I've got any food for him:

As I said in my earlier post on Parque Chacabuco, there's something just charming about having these gorgeous little creatures lounging around in public parks. Certainly one aspect of that charm is that these cats are obviously fed -- they're not eating birds and mice. You sometimes see little trays of cat food left by the fence, and I think also that the people running this park may feed them in a more official capacity.

This park is just a sidewalk away from a big street, Santa Fe. Sometimes the cats go through the fence and hang out on the sidewalk, or, in this cat's case, on the benches:



And sometimes a cat is just plain cute. Click on this one to see the big picture, and look at how much this cat appears to be looking forward to a nice scratch. I did say cuteness alert, right?