The Number One Tourist Attraction in Buenos Aires

I walked into the Recoleta cemetary briefly on my first trip to Buenos Aires, and wasn't ever all that interested in going back, no doubt largely because it's just crawling with tourists. But today I was walking by with my camera, so I spent some time there. It is just nutty, and it certainly does inspire some interesting thoughts. It's very much worth a visit.

The most interesting thing about this cemetary is that it's all above ground, all mausoleums. Little houses, really. Honestly, the whole thing feels like a miniature city full of dead people in really, really fancy miniature houses:


There are lots of little streets in this city of the dead, and some grand boulevards. (Grand in a miniature sense!) This is a pretty exclusive city, so almost all of the miniature houses are pretty fancy. Most of them have fancy columns and lots of them have statuary on top. But if you're a real hot-shot, you get yourself some prime real estate at a key intersection and build a little monument to yourself. Or rather, I suppose, your family builds you a monument when the time comes:


Of course the most famous person in this cemetery is Eva Peron. In fact, all the guide books and tourists pretty much call this "the cemetery where Eva Peron is buried." Of course, we know she's not buried at all -- she's in a box in her little house. Unfortunately, I had no patience to brave the crowd and get near her house. I did take a picture of the crowd though:
Some of the little houses have managed to get run down. I suppose the families have fallen on hard times and can't manage to send someone to keep the place up. A few of them in fact had broken panes of glass in their doors, which I found pretty surprising. Even more surprising was when I looked in one of these down-and-out mausoleums and saw eight or nine coffins stacked on pretty basic shelving. It seemed really incongruous, and more than a little illicit -- there I am, looking up-close at eight or nine coffins with eight or nine dead people in them, stacked up in a little room that looked like it could be a small storage room off of someone's garage:


I got this picture by just sicking the lens of my camera through the gate with the flash on. Again, this had a slightly illicit feel, so I didn't sit there and work go get good pictures! Note the dust on these coffins, a sign of hard times if ever there were one.

Walking around this cemetery got me thinking, of course. Mostly it got me thinking about how these very few rich people built themselves little temples, even after they were dead. But then of course, they didn't build the temples, their families did. I'm sure the dead people didn't care one way or another after they were dead. But the families did. So these little miniature temples, they're not for the dead or about the dead really -- they're for the families. They're little statements of each family's status, its power, and in the end, to a large extent, its money. Forget fancy cars and vacation homes -- at least those have some utility. These, on the other hand, and pure, unadulterated conspicuous consumption. They exist only to make a statement, a public statement. About -- you know what -- money, power, status. I guess these things are important, but, sheesh, come on, these people are dead.

So, anyway, I think this was my favorite thing in the Recoleta Cemetary:

Tax Fraud

Turns out your humble correspondent was recently a participant in a very small-scale tax fraud here in Buenos Aires. An unwitting correspondent -- I was out the door before I figured out why I had just gotten a 9-peso discount on a 99-peso backback.

I have seen in a couple places some stern announcements from the government saying that it's your responsibility to insist on a receipt when you purchase things in a store, and if you don't get a receipt then there could be a penalty, and so on. I didn't really understand what this was about, but filed it in the back of my head for future reference. Now I think I know what it's about.

Like many countries, Argentina has a big Value Added Tax, VAT. This is pretty much a sales tax, but it's charged at each step along the manufacturing and sales process (I think). The final tax is paid by the consumer, and it's probably something like 20% or so. Stores are responsible for collecting this tax. So I gather, the way that stores are check on this is via their register receipts. Ten thousand pesos worth of sales, they owe, say, two thousand pesos in VAT.

When I bought my backpack, first I told the women I didn't need a bag for the backpack. (Duh, I can just carry it out.) Then she offered to cut off the tag, and I said, sure. Then she said something really fast in spanish and said she'd give it to me for 90 pesos. And i was all for that, being a big cheapskate. She opened the register, gave me 10 pesos change on my 100, and said OK, thanks! in Spanish. Then as I'm walking out the door, wondering to myself why I just got a 10 percent discount, I realized I didn't get a receipt, and then, two steps later, I realized I had participated in tax fraud.

C'est la vie. When in Rome, etc., etc.

Funny thing about the news here

I've been watching the news all the time when I'm home, and I do think I'm getting my ear for the accent finally. But I just noticed something really funny.

One thing they do here that they don't do in the US is linger, in particular when they're live on-site for something. They'll spend two, three minutes showing a demonstration or an accident scene or the crowd at the beach. And frequently when they're on-site like that, there will be really long lulls in the commentary, which would never happen on US news. But what's really interesting is that they sometimes play music. Right now, the station I'm watching has been showing a freeway accident scene for at least three minutes. And in the background, they're playing this totally menacing music, like something you would here in the background during a Terminator movie, when Sara Conner is trying to slip away but the terminator is stalking her. I just flipped to this channel and it was showing this freeway accident scene with this really threatening music playing with no voice-over, and it was pretty hilarious.

I guess this is just another way to sensationalize the news. And guess what, it works pretty well. This music certainly puts me on edge a little.

I'm not sure how common this is -- it may be a particular trick of this station. But it's kind of hilarious -- it's really end-of-the-world type of music, so very, very not-subtle.

Update: OK, this is actually a little extraordinary. It is at least ten minutes later, maybe 15, and channel 5 here has still not left the scene of this accident, and is still playing the menacing music. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that they do have some amazing video of this accident, pretty much the whole thing on rough grainy tape. And best of all it includes a very fuzzy person getting out of his or her car and vaulting over the concrete median barrier literally a fraction of a second before his or her car gets creamed. It was so close that at first I thought they were showing the person get hit by the car, but the person really just escaped -- I'd say the car missed this person by no more than 5 feet. I don't know where they got this video -- it's really grainy, like it came from some kind of government traffic monitoring video -- but it's pretty amazing, and I guess this is why they played it over and over for 10 minutes. (They actually just left the accident scene, about half-way through this paragraph.) Still, the lucky video doesn't account for the terminator-style end-of-the-world music. That's pure sensationalism, and pretty damn good sensationalism at that.

Anonymity, self-consciousness, and being an extranjero

I went for my typical ridiculously long walk today, and I got to thinking about my post from yesterday. In it, I mentioned how easily recognized I am as an extranjero, a foreigner. This got me thinking a little bit about cities, anonymity, and being an extranjero.

I think one of the attractions of big cities for me and for many people is the feeling of anonymity. You're surrounded by people, but none of them care about you at all, they're all going about their business. You lose any sense of being judged or having to meet people's standards. As long as you behave and don't stick out, you're on your own. It's a kind of freedom.

Now of course the critical phrase in the paragraph before is "don't stick out." Mind you, this isn't africa or Laos or someplace where I would obviously be from somewhere else. Sheesh, I'm 50% italian, just like the rest of this country. But damn, I am so obviously not argentinian, it kills me. I don't know what it is. I don't think it's my clothes, usually -- hell, half the clothes I have with me I bought here on previous trips. To some extent it might be my height -- I'm definitely tall here, much more so than in the US. But there are other tall people here. I was wondering about this today when I was eagerly approached by a guy with a flyer from some leather shop in the middle of Congreso, an area where almost no tourists go. But this guy pegged me immediately. All I could come up with was my hair. I definitely do not have an argentinian haircut. They're into this crazy shag look here, like something Rod Stewart was wearing in 1976. I completely don't understand it.

So being recognized as a tourist makes me feel like I've lost my anonymity. Which makes me feel self-conscious. People Are Looking at Me. But what gets me feeling most self-conscious is language. I can get myself understood just fine most of the time, but I still have trouble understanding others here, with their crazy italian-flavored spanish. And when I'm feeling particularly bad about the language barrier, I get extra self-conscious, like I am worried about having to get into a verbal interaction and feeling like a retard because I can't understand simple things that people say.

This self-consciousness, added to the perceived lack of anonymity, definitely combine to make one feel more vulnerable in a foreign country. And this came out in my reactions to the dudes I was worried about on Saturday. Mind you, I think the dudes I spotted all were trouble, potentially. But I think I definitely worried a bit more about these dudes than I needed to.

Here's the joke, though -- this vulnerability, this feeling that you've got to be on your toes, it's one of the reasons we go traveling in the first place. Home is a little too safe, a little too boring. I always said that one of the things I liked about Buenos Aires is that there is an edge. Lord knows it's no afghanistan or somalia or even Brazil, but it's definitely got more of an edge than San Diego, or New York.

Ha, this reminds me, when I moved to New York after college, one of the rationales I gave to people was that I thought it would toughen me up. So maybe I think BA will toughen me up. I could do without the self-consciousness part, though. But that's a whole other story.

Still a Tough Town

Buenos Aires is doing better eonomically than it was four or five years ago. There's been good growth in the 8-10 percent range for several years. But this is still Latin America, and this is still a little bit of a tough town.

I had two reminders of this yesterday.

The first happend while I was sitting in a lovely park downtown, Plaza San Martin, located at the end of the big pedestrian shopping street Calle Florida. This is something of a showcase park near some big government buildings, and I'm sure there are cops somewhere in the park at pretty much all times during daylight hours. I was sitting on a bench reading, and there was a dude across the way a bit, maybe forty, fifty feet on a bench facing me, off to one side just a little. I didn't notice him for a while, but then I started getting the feeling that he was looking at me. I kept my nose in my book, but every time I looked up, he seemed to be staring me down in somewhat provocative fashion. Surreptitiously I tried to see what he was about. He was late teens, early twenties, thin, but he looked tough, wiry. He was wearing some kind of soccer shirt, 3/4 length pants, and athletic shoes with of course no socks. He definitely looked like he had spent more than a couple nights sleeping outside.

It seemed like he kept staring me down, but I couldn't be sure. Then he got up and walked toward me. Fortunately, there was a couple on the bench next to me who were even more obviously tourists. They had two open bottles of water on the ground by their bench, and the dude from across the way walked up to them and asked for 'un poco de agua', a little water. The american dude was pretty big, probably an ex-football player, so he wasn't intimidated, and he just refused in sign language and english. The argentinian was pretty surprised and kept trying, but the american was having none of it. Then the argentinian took off.

This wasn't much, but I definitely had the feeling that the argentinian dude was playing some kind of macho game. In particular the stare-down seemed to be some kind of attempt at intimidation. I'm not sure what he was trying to do by asking for a drink. That was an unexpected twist.

Then later yesterday, I'm walking over to my friend Piper's to go out to dinner, and I had even put on long pants and worn real shoes! (dressed up for me these days!) So I had to walk across this road Honduras, crossing the railroad tracks:


Anyway, it's about a quarter-mile on honduras that I have to walk. And as soon as I turned the corner, I saw that there were three dudes in front of me walking abreast. These were all 20-ish dudes, one of whom wasn't wearing a shirt, which I think is the argentinian national sign for 'tough guy with nothing to lose.' My spanish teacher says these guys are called "chicos rudos", tough guys, or maybe rude boys, like the 70's britishism. These three were totally strutting, and there was no way I was going to overtake these three guys. And they were strutting *slowly*, so I had to walk way slower than I ever walk. There was a cop standing alongside the road on the way, and even still, I felt like I had to be careful once we were past him.

So neither of these situations were particularly threatening or anything, but they both reminded me of the economic disparities here, and how obviously on one side of the divide I fall. And some of the people on the other side of the economic divide, well, they can be troublesome.