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.

A very urban classical music concert

Today I went with a group of expats to see a classical music concert in a park. No one was sure what the park was called, but it was at "la flor", the flower, a very large metal sculpture. Apparently la flor isn't so well know, because our taxi driver wasn't quite sure where it was. It's quite a large sculpture, and nice enough, but as someone in the group said, it's not going to put Buenos Aires on the map:


It was a hot sweltering day here in BA -- around 95 degrees F -- so it was nice to spend the evening out in the park. The expats were great, there were plenty of blankets to sit on, and there was more than enough food and wine for everyone.

The orchestra is the orchestra from el Teatro Colon, the famous opera house here. It is an accomplished orchestra apparently, but they kept their music selections very mainstream -- Bizet's Carmen, Dvorak's New World Symphony, a very famous argentinian piece that escapes me, and, for the grand finale The Ride of the Valkyries by Wagner. The latter featured a little laser show, like something out of a 1978 Pink Floyd Concert.
Because Buenos Aires is a big crazy urban jumble, we appropriately weren't left alone in peace with our classical music in the park. As the concert was starting, there was this crazy thumping coming from about a quarter mile away, heavy throbbing bass, like a rave or something. But a rave it clearly wasn't, because it was too early, and somehow it ended after about a half hour. We were also only a couple hundred yards from an above ground train that went by about every 10 minutes, but that wasn't too loud. Lastly, we were only about a mile from the local airport, and every once in a while a plane came in our direction. This was loud, definitely a distraction.

But it's Buenos Aires, a gigantic urban agglomeration, and people are just used to lots of distractions, and remarkably tolerant of them. This is the lesson of big cities, after all -- we live with each other in close quarters, so we have to learn tolerance. If there's a plane going by, well, it's good we have the airport handy, people need to fly in and out. If there's a party in the park next door, well, it's good that those people, whoever they are, have a place to have a party.

Maybe i'm just being idealistic, but that seems to be the attitude here. It's certainly a different feel from the "not-in-my-backyard" gated community attitude so prevalent in the US.