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.