Buenos Aires and babysitting

Vic and I took a trip to Buenos Aires over the weekend while my parents watched the kids for us. BA is only a three hour flight away so we thought we would go check it out. I'm not certain that I have ever seen a city with such blatant contrasts with the possible exception of New Orleans. The city was designed by the same man that design Paris and the architecture and layout is certainly European. There were beautiful buildings, monuments, and parks all over the city. We stayed on the Plaza de General San Martin between the neighborhoods of Reculeta and the Business District. Friday night after we got in an unpacked, we headed out and walked the streets of Reculeta for a while. As Argentina has a very good collection of wines and very good shopping at hand, we were in a situation that was very well suited. Argentinians like to enjoy their wine at cafes that are conveniently placed amongst the stores. This was the strategy that we liked to employ in our shopping and I think it worked well for both of us.Like Rio, there is a large Italian population in Argentina. so for dinner Friday night we went to an Italian Restaurant that specialized in fresh pasta. The dinner was amazing especially as Vic and I were taught a new verb by the menu translation - Gratinate. As far as I am concerned, more foods should be gratinated (think potatos au gratin). We had Gratinated Scallops on the half shell for an appetizer, Vic had Gratinated Ravioli and I had gratinated capellini.

Pictures from Friday:

Our Hotel

A military building around the Plaza

Monument to General San Martin

Picture I took of Vic shopping while drinking my wine

Saturday morning we got up slowly and headed out of the hotel to Avenida de Florida. This is an eight or nine block walking avenue lined with shops and malls the entire way. It was a little bit much for me, but Vic seemed to enjoy it. We found one mall that had some stores I consider very high end (Ralph Lauren, Tiffany's, Wrangler, etc) and Vic started making the circuit while I plopped down on a chair and did some reading and drank a coffee. This is one paragraph where I have a feeling Vic's description would be more appropriate, but I'm sure you can fill in some of the blanks.

On our way back to the hotel, we came across an art gallery and decided to go in. The gallery reminded me of a clown car, only it contained an endless procession of rooms in what I thought was a little house. The gallery was filled with paintings by quite a few Argentinian Artists sprinkled with some from other South American countries and after quite a bit of browsing, Vic and I decided to price a couple of them. In the end we decided that $2000 on a 4"x4" painting was about $1980.01 more than we were interested in paying, so we left, but we felt very sophisticated while we turned them down.

Saturday night we went to a Tango Show for dinner. The show was in a very nice little theater that reminded me of a smaller version of the Saenger in New Orleans; although, I am sure Vic would contradict me on this. The show consisted of a series of dances that were meant to show how Tango has evolved over the last hundred years and was pretty interesting. Other than the surprising lack of clothes (and I didn't go into it thinking they would wear much), the thing that struck me was that Tango seems to consist of two separate dances. Above the waist, it seemed very rigid and structured. With the exception of the occasional spin or flip, the distance between the chins seemed to remain pretty constant. The dance below the waist reminded me of a cartoon where the character starts to run and his feet are just a blur before he actually starts to move. It made me dizzy just to watch their feet go that fast. To make matters worse, the women kept kicking the feet up between the guy's legs - also making me a little uncomfortable.

No pictures from shopping, but here is a tango video from Saturday night.

Sunday morning we did a three hour tour of the city with a local company. The tour was great and I wish we had done it earlier in the weekend, but I now know what areas of the town I want to spend more time in when we come back. I won't go through everything we saw on the tour, but I want to tell you about three of the stops: Plaza de Mayo, La Boca and the Cemetario de la Recoleta.

The first stop was the Plaza de Mayo. It was at this spot that Argentina was founded in 1810 when the population declared themselves free of colonial Spanish rule, and since that time, it has been the Argentinian equivalent to the reflecting pool in Washington D.C. Every protest in the country has been held in that spot. It makes since when you consider that the following building circle the square: the president's house (The Pink House), the national cathedral, the Argentinian Federal Bank, the equivalent to the IRS, the Mayor's House, and the original Spanish Governing House. It was an impressive list. Evita (and later Madonna playing the part of Evita) gave her speeches from the balcony of the Pink House.

We actually explored the national cathedral. It was interesting because it was built in so many different times and with materials provided by so many different countries. There was no central architectural or design theme. It was even marked by the countries dictatorships. Several of the paintings had been burned off by these regimes (they had since been white washed over). Unfortunately, the camera was on the wrong setting, so we don't have any pictures. We do have a video from in here as well, but it doesn't show the whole thing very well.

After leaving the Plaza de Mayo, we travelled to an antique fair and then made a brief stop at La Boca. This area of town is called The Mouth because it is at the mouth of the local river, the Rio de la Plata. This area was the original port for Buenos Aires when commerce was opened in 1790. The houses were built and decorated with materials left over from the ships, so you saw structures that were aluminum siding on the outside of wooden walls and painted a variety of colors. It was not as cramped as the French Quarter, but it had the same feel to me. It is still a very poor part of town, but they certainly were capable of catering to the tourists.

The last stop was the Cemetario de la Recoleta, one of three cemetaries in the world with above ground mausoleums. The others are the one in Paris and the one in New Orleans. Of the two that I have seen, the one in Buenos Aires is by far the most impressive. I was surprised I hadn't heard more about it until I saw it. The mausoleums were sometime two or three stories tall and went below ground two or three stories. We stopped by Eva Peron's family mausoleum. Fresh flower's still adorned it and we had to wend our way through a crowd of people to get near. After 55 years, this country still holds her in awe. At the Tango show the night before a singer started singing a song about her and the entire place joined in. It makes you wonder what would have happened if she had lived beyond the age of 33.

The cemetary was right in front of a large art fair, and before leaving for the airport, we returned for some shopping. I return now to paintings because we actually did purchase one here. We were looking through the paintings and we both stopped at the same time and pointed it out to each other. The artist then came over and talked to us for a while and told us about himself. I think he used painting as an excuse to go outside and meet people. We wound up buying the painting, and, personally, I don't think its worth buying the painting unless the person that painted it is like this guy.

Some of you may be wondering how my parents fared while we were away. I must say that I was impressed with the exercise regimen the kids were forced to follow each day. My parents had one goal...make the kids so tired they were crying for naps by ten in the morning and begging for bed at five in the afternoon. Ansley informed us that she and Sawyer were forced to run around the pool in the rain on Sunday and swim when it was cold outside on Saturday. I told her that maybe now she would believe me when I told her Grandma and Grandpa should be feared. She did say that the one bright spot was finding a bunch of monkey's on one of the forced marches grandma made them take.

24 hours of fun...

It's been a couple of weeks since I have posted anything, and I have a post of a happier nature half way done, but I thought I would give everyone a laugh and describe our last few days paying special attention to the last 24 hours. Thursday night I grabbed the computer and went to finish the happier blog I mentioned above, but the internet wasn't working. I went into the room where our modem sits and hit the light switch only to discover that we had a partial blackout taking shape. For reasons I can not explain, one circuit coming into the house was dead. This impacted the room with the computer, Sawyer's room, and two-thirds of the kitchen. The only saving grace was that the one-third of the kitchen that worked included the refrigerator. The next morning Ansley woke up and seemed to devine that the microwave was one of the devices temporarily out of order and insisted upon having breakfast foods that required the microwave. The lights were apparently the fault of the electric company as they came by to fix them about an hour before the repairman I called showed up. I believe he was a little frustrated, but he put up with me well, as I learned later in the weekend. We did not realize it at the time, but the breakfast ordeal was the beginning of a game the kids like to play called "Let's push mommy's buttons." In this game, I watch helplessly as the kids turn their mother into a raving lunatic. It was pretty much the theme for Saturday, and I have a feeling all of you reading this with kids know some form of the game. Saturday concluded with Auburn officially claiming the title "worst of the SEC west" with a stellar loss to lowly Arkansas. Sunday, my parents arrived in Rio and Ansley and I picked them up from the airport. Sem problema. Ansley was overjoyed to see them and Sunday was fairly relaxing with a few issues that were not out of the ordinary for any day involving two kids under the age of four. The 24 hours I mentioned officially began at 6:00pm in Rio. I had given Sawyer a bath and was taking Sawyer into his bathroom to brush his teeth. As I took a step into the bathroom, my foot landed with a very wet splash. I should have mentioned a common plumbing feature for houses in Rio - the water tanks for the house are kept in the attic. The floor of the attic is concrete. These two features together mean that the floor of an attic in Brazil will hold an amazing volume of water before any of it spills down below and we had a leak. After throwing Sawyer and his teeth to my mom and grabbing my ladder, I discovered that one of the pipes in our house had probably been leaking since Wednesday. We had our very own lagoa positioned directly over our heads...not very ideal. I started making calls shortly following the discovery to a repairman (he swore he would be at the house first thing in the morning and made certain I knew how to turn off the water to the house...joy!) and one to the owner of the house (whose cell phone was off and not receiving text messages). My parents probably had it worse than Vic and I as they had spent the prior night wedged into an airplane seat pretending like they were going to sleep. They got to stay up two hours later than intended helping Vic and I soak up water, position pots to catch drips and building dams to stop some of the leaks from spreading. The next morning we were still finding leaks and trying to explain to Ansley that, without water, she was not going to get the blueberry pancakes she was certain she was promised. Vic and my mom finally got her into the car and prepared to take her to school when the next event struck. Vic is fairly new to a manual transmission and is accustomed to her car being the way she left it - chiefly in neutral; however, the night before my dad had used her car to run to get ice and left the car the way he is accustomed to leaving a manual - in gear. This meant that as my dad, Sawyer and I were discussing the leak there was suddenly a very audible thunk as Vic started the car with it in gear and without the clutch in. The car gave a tremendous heave forward...straight into the kitchen wall. We are actually lucky that the impact wasn't greater than it was because I believe we were nearly at the walls breaking point. The car was still working and there was no damage other than Vic's nerves (mine were numb at this point). The final straw came when I thought I heard the repairman showing up and went to the front gate only to find a courier waiting for me to sign that he had delivered the fine from the transportation authority here in Rio (the repairman showed up four hours later). Anyway, I hope that our day can put a smile on your face. I'm hoping that when I come back to this post a year from now, I'll be able to laugh at it. I promise a cheerier post later this week dealing with Spring in Rio and some fun times with my parents. Hope everyone is well.