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.
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