[Buenos Aires] "Cultivate relationships with those that can teach you."

We changed hotels today, from our Microcentro location to the choice for the Global Exchange delegation in the working class neighborhood of San Telmo. The cafe and bar Hipopotamo next door to the hotel will be starting point for each day, where we discuss the itinerary for the day over a breakfast of medialunas and cafe con leche.

There are pros and cons to travel with a group. On the up side, groups often have access to more people and places than the individual traveler ever does. On the down side, the quality of your experience can be dramatically affected by the personalities of other travelers. The delegation is a small one, at eight people including Cassie and myself, so we were hopeful that it would be a focused and effective group.

Today's first order of business is a tour of the city for the delegation. The tour was decidedly less turista than the one we took a week before. Our guide was a student majoring in history and English at the University of Buenos Aires, and while the tour hit many of the same spots, our guide focused more on the reality of the neighborhoods we toured as opposed to the shopping opportunities.

One of the more memorable stops that we made was at the Plaza de Mayo, which has been one of the centers of Buenos Aires life throughout its history. While we were there, we saw our first of the demonstrations we have heard so much about. Picketers, known in Spanish as piqueteros, were blocking traffic on one of the streets and playing drums and setting off fireworks in the street. The piquetero movement has been one of the techniques of direct action applied in the country by various groups, but most often a picket is made up of unemployed workers blocking streets (no small thing in a city with such hellish traffic) or occupying buildings, with the main targets being either government buildings or the offices of multinational corporations. During our first week in BA, a group of piqueteros occupied a Mcdonald's restaurant near our hotel for a number of hours.

Today's picket was a cortado (cutting off street traffic) followed by an occupation of a government office that handles the disbursement of pension checks. As of this writing, Arengentina's newly elected president has forbidden the police against taking any action against protesters, at least partly because of heightened international scrutiny due to Argentina's history of brutal repression. This isn't to say that there haven't been incidents, including serious ones, but they have been rare and generally obscured from the media.

- posted by Edward @ 12:55 PM

 
[Buenos Aires] "Take advantage of your novelty."

Today was the unofficial first day of the group portion of the trip. We met up with Delia Marx, the delegation leader at a crowded cafe in the neighborhood of San Telmo. She took us for a ride on the bus to the neighborhood of Matadoros.

Matadoros is the traditional meat packing district of the city, so much that at one time it was called "Little Chicago" by residents. Besides slaughterhouses, the neighborhood is home to many people from the cowboy country of the Pampas who moved to the city. In an effort to keep their traditional culture alive, Matadoros hosts a Gaucho fair every weekend that celebrates the rural roots of residents with contests on horseback, including roping and spear work.

On the day we went, the contests had been canceled on account of rain, but we sat in an open air restaurant with neighborhood residents and their families, listening to old men sing traditional songs of love lost, cruel women and life in the city.

Fresh off a barbecue pit, we were served the traditional food of the lower classes in Argentina: "choripan," which is a large sausage served plain on crusty french bread. BA's excellence in meats definitely shows in the chorizo sausage, which was hearty and well spiced, although I didn't really want to know what was in it.
- posted by Edward @ 8:49 PM