Pictures + other adventures

Hey everyone! I have some pictures now (though still not many) but at least you can see what my house looks like!

This is my room. It's pretty small but comfortable and definitely plenty of room for my stuff

It has a bathroom in it, which is nice, but really tiny. I could literally pee and shower at the same time...but as the hot water for the shower doesn't work, I just use the shower downstairs, which is way more comfortable anyway :)

My room is more or less on the roof of the house, attached to this patio. This is the view from my door. It's pretty nice to have this right outside, and I can see what's going on in the street below, which is always entertaining.

One of the coolest things I've done since being here was going on a walking tour of an area of the city called Puerto Madero.

Puerto Madero is the port of the city of Buenos Aires. It used to run parallel to the Rio de la Plata, which constitutes Buenos Aires's eastern border (where it looks like the coast should be) and still kind of does, but for various reasons the edge of the river is now miles further from the edge of the city than it used to be.

This picture shows the old part of Puerto Madero, on the side of the port that the city is on. The other side of the port (where I was standing when I took this picture) is actually all brand new. Until fairly recently it was full of abandoned buildings and was really run down. The government then decided to tear down everything and build all new office buildings, apartment complexes, retail stuff, etc. It's now the richest and newest part of Buenos Aires, but also the least interesting. What IS interesting, though, is what they decided to do with the debris from the demolitions of the old buildings. Instead of moving it, they just left it all there, till things started growing again, and now it's an "ecological reserve."

....

interesting....

So now they have all this nature, but it's growing on a whole bunch of trash...

Anyway, it was really fascinating.

Something else that's cool about Puerto Madero is that in the entire area, both on the older side and the newer side, all the streets are named for notable Argentine women. According to our tour guide, the people who were doing the street namings at the time noticed that the cities as a whole generally lacked representation of important and influential women in their street names; they recognized men of all kinds, but rarely were streets anywhere named for women. So, they decided to dedicate the whole area to this recognition. They have streets named for women poets, artists, politicians, activists, etc. Two of them are named for the two Madres de la Plaza de Mayo who were disappeared by the government in an attempt to discourage the rest of them from contnuing their protests during the Dirty War of the late 1970s and 1980s. Overall, I thought this was a really cool tribute. The bridge that connects the older side with the newer side is also called Puente de la Mujer (the big white bridge you see here).

I've also had a chance to walk through the parks in Palermo and Recoleta (two of the higher-class barrios) which are beautiful and really extensive. Sara and I went to the Museo Nacional de las Bellas Artes (the National Museum of Art) which was kind of small but had some really cool Argentine art and some amazing photographs. There was even one of Che in Bolivia right as he was about to be killed. Pretty amazing.

Anyway, that's about all I have for now. I've been in an internet cafe for several hours and I should probably go do something exciting and fun but I hope this was interesting. At least the pictures might have spiced things up :)

Until next time...!!