We’ve been in BA for longer than any other big city – and
we’ve certainly done a lot here, in addition to all the steak. Our cultural excursions ran the gamut from
high to low, and from mass market to quirky.
Some highlights:
Last night, we saw the Boca Juniors, one of the most storied
soccer teams in the world, defeat Lanús 3-1 in a match so energizing and
exciting, we didn’t really mind the cold and the rain. Fantastic experience, nothing at all like a
sporting event in the US. The only thing
I can compare it to was a soccer game that Yo and I went to in Greece on our
last world tour, 23 years ago.
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| Real Boca fans don't mind the rain |
On the other end of the spectrum, also yesterday, we caught a
concert at Teatro Colón, one of the city’s early 20th Century
architectural treasures, and supposedly one of the top five or so concert halls
in the world for acoustics. I’m not the
best person to judge, but the acoustics were beautifully soft, as well as quite
clear. We went for a free Sunday morning
concert, and saw one of their in-house orchestras (Yo knew the concert master
from her violin course) play Beethoven’s 4th and 8th
symphonies, directed by 8 different conductors who are graduating from their
training program. Interesting crowd –
the 3,000 person hall was packed with all sorts of Porteños, probably a lot
more diverse than what you’d get from a paying crowd.
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| Interior of Teatro Colon |
We saw Fuerza Bruta, a “theater piece” in which the audience
is standing up in a nightclub-like space, watching and interacting with
performers who are running, flying, and even swimming all around. Fuerza Bruta has been playing on the road in
NY for a few years, near my office in Union Square. But this is the original. It was loud, even louder than the soccer
game. And we go wet, although not as wet
as at the soccer game. Ruby didn’t care
for it so much, but the rest of us liked it.
I saw three new movies (in English!) in big new
multiplexes. Oscar and I caught
Spiderman 2 in 3D during one of the violin training days. Ruby, Yo and I saw Divergent, which is very
big with the middle school girl set, both in NY and BA. And Yo and I got out for a couple of hours on
our own to see Fading Gigolo, the new movie by John Turturro. We’ve learned not to try to take Oscar to
anything resembling a Woody Allen movie, which is too bad, since a friend of
his was in it.
Yo and I got out (again) to go to MALBA, BA’s museum of
Modern Latin American Art. It was a
small, but worthwhile collection. And it
was nice to get out to a museum for a little while without O&R complaining
about it.
We went on an insider street art tour, during which we
learned about the street art movement in BA (and learned what street art is,
and how it differs from graffiti, etc.) It
was a fascinating way to see some parts of the city we wouldn’t have seen
otherwise, as well as an interesting filter through which to learn about the
politics and economics of the past 25 years.
And the art was pretty impressive, although in my opinion, both Santiago
and Valparaiso have BA beat when it comes to quality street art.
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| Street art abounds in BA |
BA Jewish Museum. I
always like to try and see synagogues when we travel – it’s always interesting
to see something so personal and familiar in a foreign context. BA has a large and active Jewish community
(there are 80+ synagogues in BA), and the Jewish Museum is attached to one of
the main conservative shuls. Although
there were some tragic terrorist attacks in the 90s, and many Jews have
emigrated to the US and Israel, the community is not a fading relic like many
Jewish communities around the world (like in much of Europe). It actually didn’t seem very different from a
conservative shul in the US. The kids
liked how the Hebrew hard “H” or “Ch” is transliterated into Spanish as
“J”. So, “Pesaj”, “Januka” and “Jala”
instead of “Pesach,” “Chanukah” and “Challah.”
Recoleta Cemetery. It’s
interesting that the top tourist attraction in BA is a graveyard. We’re just a few blocks from the famed
Recoleta Cemetery, which is sort of a “living” museum of BA history. Lots of the prominent families in the city
have crypts here. I found the actual operations
of the cemetery more interesting than the history. All of the crypts go underground and in many,
you can see through the doors right down to the shelved coffins. While there are no more crypts being built,
there is a secondary market – and with more supply than demand, prices are
coming down. Apparently, fewer Porteños
are interested in spending time and money on their families’ final resting
places. For about $60,000, you can buy a
decent 3-bedroom apartment in a middle class neighborhood, or a crypt for your
family in Recoleta. The whole thing was
a bit creepy, and I was ready to leave after an hour or so.
We even went to a Tango parlor to see a professional
show. Musicians, singers, and of course,
dancers. Cabaret shows aren’t really my
thing, and while I can’t say I’m completely smitten with Tango the way some
visitors to BA are, I did enjoy it. I
can see why Porteños are proud of the Tango heritage, even if most of them do
not actually know how to dance it.
One day, when Yo was at her training, I took the kids to the
Buenos Aires Zoo, which they would tell you was one of the real
highlights. It was pretty nice, a
compact urban zoo, more like the Central Park Zoo than the Bronx Zoo. There were some unusual (for us) South
American giant rodents, Capybaras, I think, wandering around in the open. They are the size of medium dogs, and people
were posing for pictures and feeding them.
For me, the best thing about the Zoo was seeing how utterly absorbed the
kids were – they had so much fun in the couple of hours we spent there. Reminded me that they really are still kids,
for now.
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| White Tigers! |
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