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.