OF TANGO AND TRASH IN BUENOS AIRES
Our flight leaving Santiago was delayed one hour, and then to make up for it LAN Chile had us debark first by boarding a hot shuttle bus with no air conditioning. Because they were running late they did not check everyone’s ID cards, or ask the appropriate questions about having the VISA’s for prearranged entry fees for Argentina. The last time I travelled to Argentina a year ago (2013) one made the reciprocity payment upon arrival, but we soon discovered they had changed the system. At the Buenos Aires airport, while standing in the new immigration lines, complete with nice granite floors, we found out that there was no longer a counter to arrange for the entry fees. My passport gets stamped and cleared, but Yani’s and Owen’s not, they look at our Chilean temporary ID’s, and then say that these cannot be used to enter the country, that the fee was supposed to be paid in advance and that LAN was supposed to screen the passengers before letting us travel.
The immigration officer led us into a back office, and then sat us down in a small windowless room to wait. He said they would call LAN and have them fix the problems, but really what they should be doing is having us deported, shipped back to Chile, so he made it sound like they were doing us a favor. After an hour a representative from LAN had not shown up. Three government workers were sitting at computers looking out the two-way mirror with view of the immigration booths; they were chitchatting, gossiping, and not spending any effort in resolving our issue. Yani raised the question, asking what we should be doing, they said to wait. But we knew they were putting out no effort to fix the problem. I ask the agent to show us the bathroom, both Owen and I have been holding it, so they escort us back out towards the passenger in-transit section, and the man watches us taking a leak, then escorts us back to the holding tank. Two hours have gone by, and nothing happened. Apparently they have no way to receive payment from people to enter their own country. In other words, the agency in charge in immigration cannot immigrate.
It was going nowhere, the officials not attempting to help. So I left Yani and Owen in the room to go get our baggage, pass it through customs, and then went out into the main airport to find some sort of help from LAN. The place is packed, and hot, and hauling around the three pieces of luggage was a pain in the neck because there were no push carts available. I did not want to wait through the long ticketing lines, and instead I managed to find a smaller LAN office outside of the airport, a place that handles baggage claims more than general business. I spoke with two men there, one said there was nothing they could do while the other made a phone call, and told me to wait. He got in touch with somebody, and said for me to return to the immigration office. I hauled the luggage back into the airport, then wandered around the funky layout trying to find the immigration office entrance, no signage, but picked up on it spatially just from my mental map of the airport; it helps having good orientation and memory for these things.
At the immigration office I find a bald LAN agent inside, he has Yani’s and Owen’s passports, I can’t see my family through the window, but the agent asks me if I have a credit card. Yes, he is going to help. I wait for him to exit and walk around the customs X-ray machines, and then follow him to the offices behind ticketing, once again pulling along the three luggage pieces. The LAN agent takes my Mastercard inside, telling me to wait outside of the office. He uses their computers/internet to find the Argentina immigration website and make the online payment for the Tasa de reciprocidad. The LAN agent returns after 45 minutes with printouts showing the payments. I thank him and haul the luggage across the airport to the immigration window. I pass the paperwork inside, and they lead Yani and Owen back outside to the main immigration booths to register them. Another twenty minutes and they come out to join me- thus we are starting our Argentina vacation.
The thing that really pisses me off is that 1) the Argentina immigration officers did not explain or suggest how to solve the problem, and 2) they had computers with internet right outside the waiting room that they could have let us use to make the payment. So many words that come to mind describing these Argentinian government workers are Unhelpful, Uncaring, and Turkeys.
The one-hour taxi ride takes us through Buenos Aires heavy traffic on highways, crossing numerous sectors, to arrive in the historic old town of San Telmo and our hotel at the Mansion Dandi Royal Tango Hotel, a building dating from 1889. We exchange 100 dollars for Argentinian pesos, getting 7 pesos to the dollar. The official bank rate at the ATM machines has 6.3 pesos to the dollar. I spend some time with the internet, hunting down a restaurant, and select a place called La Estacion. We take a taxi in the night down to Avenue Lavalle, and then have to walk several blocks to the place because it is along a pedestrian-only walkway. The street is crowded at 9 p.m., although some of the stores are starting to roll down the armored fronts. We have the parrilladas, the large coal-heated platter of mixed meats, finding the portion for two being twice the amount of meat needed. The baby goat meat was very tender, but the best flavor was from the marmato strips. Afterwards we walked out to Avenue Pellegrini and saw the tall white obelisk at night, whereupon I heard Owen shriek and then Yani scream as a very large cockroach came charging at them from the sewer drain.
Buenos Aires Opera House
The next day we wander the ruined streets of San Telmo looking for historic doors to photograph, finding most of them covered in bars, broken, or messed up by spray paint. The place has many old buildings, many dating from 1905, but some new mixed-in apartment buildings too. A few of the streets have cobblestones and remnants of trolley car rails. It is hot, and soon we find ourselves in the San Telmo plaza, which is filled with tables and chairs being serviced by at least five different restaurants, all pouring the same Quilmes beer. How does one select? At the center is a strip of flooring where Tango dancers perform for tips. A thin woman in a black dress has very short 1920’s styled haircut. We drink some beer, have meat empanadas, and watch a few dance shows before returning to the hotel and prepare for the evening’s outing.
Our second night out in Buenos Aires is at the expensive Senor Tango for two hundred dollars a ticket, you get a mediocre dinner, and then chicas wearing glittering lipstick, metallic dresses slit up the back, give burlesque moves showing fishnet stockings with shapely legs. They give stunning dance moves with Vegas-style effects from a spinning circular stage, fog machine, and a dance routine with a man performing with two women on wirelines, aerial Tango with the women swinging over the audience. But then the owner sings Tango music, the sound system is too loud, and the man’s ego overly fed to show videos of himself on the large array of flat screen TVs. The show ended and their transport shuttle took us through the industrial blocks, under the raised highway, us watching transients picking through trash piles, groups of men sitting shirtless and nursing large bottles of beer, and the long rows of closed up steel roll-down doors painted in graffiti comprised of unremarkable scrawls. The shuttle leaves us at the corner of the block we step out and have to avoid the tall piles of trash, and then buzz the door of Mansion Dandi to open at 1 a.m., watching the street to make sure no one approaches us.
Puerto Madero- a stroll in the morning heat, a tour of the floating museum aboard the historic ship Sarmiento. Next we take a hot walk along the river front and then have some Quilmes beer at the patio of an Italian restaurant. Afterwards we walk to the Museum of Collection of art Amelia Lacroze de Fortabat; we enjoyed their air conditioning more than the artworks. We then ride a taxi to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, which has a free entrance. The place is heavy on the church art, and mostly lacking air conditioning. The museum has two to three security officers per gallery room, making for a huge number of government employees.
Next we stroll through an open air arts and crafts market, located in the park across the street in the Plaza Intendente Torcuato de Alvear. Here we buy some leather belts and a small Tango dance souvenir statue. This works up a drenching sweat, so we walk over to the Hard Rock Café for lunch, finding the place packed. We wait 20 minutes and then we are seated next to a very large, noisy and annoying family that had in orbit about their planet numerous screaming kids running about and bumping into our chairs. The restaurant exchanged dollars for payment, giving a conversion rate of 9.4 pesos to the dollar.
We take a long cab-ride to a zone known for selling leather goods, finding dozens of stores side by side. Yani scores two black leather skirts, leather pants, and a leather jacket. At the Murillo 666 store we paid in dollars, getting an exchange rate of 9.2 pesos to the dollar. We have a long wait in the heat trying to hail a taxi, and then a much longer ride back to the hotel in heavy traffic, finding the car’s AC underpowered, the windows rolled up, and the sun baking us through the windows. Arriving at our hotel we are feeling completely dehydrated. But now it is time for showers and getting ready to go out for tonight’s Tango show.
A shuttle bus takes us through the dusk streets, weaving about many blocks to other hotels to pick up additional show-goers. Next, the bus drives by the large congress building and central plaza, which we immediately put on the list for tomorrow’s visits. After dark we arrive down a narrow street lined by rolled-down steel doors and the theater at Sabor a Tango.
Sabor a Tango is a smaller venue than last night’s affair. After paying the US$110 per entrance ticket, and skipping the couple in Tango dress catching people for posed photographs for a fee, we are directed through the gift shop, and escape it after having bought a how-to dance Tango DVD. The main dining and show hall is a long rectangular room with white paint, black-framed black and white photographs of Tango themes, black and white tablecloths, and a red velvet curtain at the stage.
The Tango show begins at the early periods, having people wearing dress styles from the 1920’s and the dance moves were more conservative. The show then progresses to a saloon setting, and a comic routine. In between the dance numbers the band does instrumental pieces, and features some bandoneon solos. At mid-show comes the Gaucho’s banging drums, and then spinning boleros, followed by a fat whitish dude playing Andean folk music; he looked like Ozzy Osbourne playing the panpipe. A good musician, but I had to joke that during the classic song, “El Condor Pasa” it was more like “El gordo pasa y el Condor es Feliz.” Yani was very enthusiastic about the folk music and this part of the show. Owen voted for this show being better than the previous night.
In the morning we ride a taxi to the Congreso, and then walk many blocks in the heat, searching for door pictures to include in our coffee table book project, finding nothing. We end up at the corner café just south of the Congreso, sitting in the air conditioning and having a late breakfast. After asking for the check we find out that we are short on pesos, and this is the one place in all of Argentina that refuses to take dollars and does not accept credit cards. Yani has to leave and find a store to purchase something and get enough change to pay the bill. Owen and I sit there for about twenty minutes, with my son asking every minute where did mom go? Yani returns with a new black sequence covered top to wear out in the evening, pays the bill and then we head out into the muggy heat.
We walk along the shady side of Avenida Callao, a four-lane street bordered by ten-story buildings that runs for at least 65 blocks. The traffic is heavy, the foot-traffic concentrated on the shady eastern side, and the air conditioners jetting from building windows occasionally bombing people with water droplets from above. We check out bookstores, shoe stores, and visit several banks before finding one where we can withdrawal money. Eventually make it to the somewhat uncared for Plaza R. Pena park. Here we have transitioned into the barrio of San Nicolas, and we continue on into the high-end boutique stores and apartment buildings of Recoleta.
The heat is tiresome, so we escape in the small Temple Bar along Avenida Las Heras and try their artisanal beers, which soon literally ran out, the keg empty. So we continued on, finding the Recoleta shopping mall and its air conditioning. Here we took a long break, watching the second Hobbit film to carry us through the afternoon. The movie was great, and then we sat out at some curbside tables to drink a couple of cold Brahma beers before taking a ride in heavy traffic back to the hotel being transported by a spastic cab driver.
Tango Piazzolla- a full size bus picks us up at 8 p.m., and we are the only people on it. It rolls through the narrow streets, barely making the ninety degree turns, and squeezes between traffic and parked cars, going back towards the area of Congreso and the barrio of Balvanera. It continues towards the Obelisco, and here picks up a very noisy group of ten Brazilians. Brazilians are a very loud bunch, always shouting. The bus drops everyone off at a street crossing, not at the show, and a white shirt employee guides us on a three-block walk to the show building. The venue here is in the basement, three flights of marble stairs down.
Inside the building it is hot and stuffy. The room we end up in has a high ceiling, is painted white, but has many golden accents, and private balcony seats with red curtains closed at their individuals entrances. It was an old theater. For many years the place was an adult cabaret. The seating was way more cramped, and a Swiss family sat next to us, the older woman next to me has a big bush of frizzy gray hair that blocked out half of the stage, which later caused me to move around the table to get a better view. The dinner food was the worst of the three shows; I left most of it on the plate. The air conditioning could not manage; we sweated and really watched the time until the show would be over. The band had the weakest music of the bunch (the room had very bad acoustics), but the dance shows were all pure Tango, and the dancers more skilled than at Sabor a Tango, on par with Senor Tango, and yet here we did not have stage side seats. The midnight bus ride through Buenos Aires at least ended with the driver taking us right to the hotel door step instead of dropping us off at the corner trash pile. The air conditioning in the hotel room felt so good after this long night of sweating.
One thing that I have never seen so much in any major city is the piles of trash that were in Buenos Aires- the place was rancid. We saw a woman sitting in a long pile of trash breast-feeding her baby. Each evening the businesses heap their trash in massive piles at the street corners, while men with push carts sort through the rubbish in some sort of recycling effort, pushing carts down the street stacked high cardboard or plastic. In five days we only once saw one garbage truck working in the night, and they left more trash on the street than they were picking up. We did not see any city workers cleaning the streets and sidewalks like you would come across in Lima, Quito, or Santiago. Mix this with the struggling sewer systems, gray water seeping out of the sidewalks here and there, and dog crap scattered about, and people pissing in the streets and on buildings, it all combines to make the city rank and overwhelming. Destitute is the word that comes to mind seeing people living in the city parks, the men idle in the mornings getting drunk- Buenos Aires once elegant sensual shows are being performed in a crumbling decay amongst the trash.
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South America seems to refuse to show its inexhaustible creative force.
