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?

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.