buenos aires

It's been called the Paris of South America. Perhaps that's accurate; I've not yet seen Paris. But what film and popular culture lead me to believe about it is very different from the city in which I spent nine days earlier this month.

People keep asking me how it was, and no one will take “Fine” for an answer. I feel like I'm letting everyone down by coming back here without stories sprinkled liberally with dazzling romance and beauty. But that's what it was. Fine. It was no Prague, no Istanbul and certainly no Kyiv, but it was a perfectly fine city in its own right. That I don't have rave reviews for it is incidental.

That being said, it was indeed lovely in some ways. The Cementerio de la Recoleta was marvelous; the Cabildo is extraordinarily well preserved; the Block of Illumination (if you can find it) still stands in an almost tangible cloak of very great age and mystery. Downtown was a zoo, even though I purposely went on an early weekday morning in an attempt to avoid crowds. The Plaza de Mayo was undergoing construction and the high, ugly fence around the Casa Rosada prevented satisfactory picture-taking. I wandered down Calle Florida, the Centro's main shopping and dining street, for over two hours. The crowd was so thick it was nearly impossible to walk without touching others, and the humid summer air took on the smell of a locker room. Sweat, breath, bare feet. Bodies being used. Anything but a bad smell.

It took two days to explore Palermo and La Recoleta on foot. The unusually broad streets of Palermo, which my guidebook assured me was the “nice” part of town, were littered with debris and its air polluted with black bus fumes. The parks went untended (score one point for Miraflores) and the sidewalks unswept. I spent an hour in the late afternoon one day exploring the Cementerio de la Recoleta and marveling at the fantastically ornate statues and mausoleums. Only the wealthiest and most important (dead) Argentines find their way into a crypt in La Recoleta, which leads to me to suspect that the decorations there are mostly the result of an upper class desperate to show itself equal in some way to death. Yes, you may take our loved ones, but here on earth we have the power, see?

The Japanese Gardens (Jardines Japonesa) were well tended and colorful but too many visitors (and their awful screaming children) rather ruined what could have been a therapeutically tranquil experience. And the koi pond was packed so full I almost felt sorry for the fish, who must get not even a moment of privacy in their lives. The guidebook devoted an entire page to the wonders of the Museo de Arte de Latinoamericano, so I made that my next stop. After half an hour, however, I decided the page must have been written by either museum staff or an art fanatic and left.

I crammed San Telmo and part of La Boca into the last day and a half, and it was in the former that I began to really enjoy myself. Literally just a few blocks from the madness of the Centro, San Telmo more closely resembles a small town unto itself than a major distrito in a huge Latin American capital city. I liked it. San Telmo was colorful – splashily so. It was also hotter than the other distritos, maybe because there were fewer cars constantly whooshing by, but then there were also more trees and thus more natural shade. Despite having the personality of an outgoing seven-year-old child, however, San Telmo smelled inexplicably like an old, musty building. The smell was familiar, like the nearly 200-year-old college my mother and aunt attended in the 1970s. I tried to get lost on the million little streets intersecting the main avenues of Peru, Bolivar and Defensa, meandering through tiny shops and eventually happening upon both the Museo Historico Nacional and the Pasaje de la Defensa, its myriad internal courtyards packed full of whimsical and utterly delightful artwork.

My favorite part of San Telmo, though, were the sweating window units that kept me reasonably cool (and a little wet) in the suffocating heat. Every few feet, a small but telltale puddle would alert me to the presence of a unit overhead and I'd stand in anticipation until I felt the wonderfully cold drops in the part of my hair, running down the back of my head and onto my neck. That, I am slightly ashamed to say, was the only part of Buenos Aires that made me feel especially alive.

For lunch nearly every day, I ate three of the warm, flaky ham-and-cheese empanadas from Disco, a supermarket close to my hostel in Palermo. At dinner I tried my Spanish on waiters in various nearby cafes. I felt more acutely alone during this trip than I had on others, and I thought frequently of Sam – what would he think of his Argentine brethren and their dirty streets and sweating window units?

On the Sunday, I took the two-peso, two-hour bus ride from Avenida de Mayo to the international airport at Ezeiza. I watched the city become outskirts, then suburbs, then completely rural. We passed through several villages with alarmingly narrow streets. Dirty, wide-eyed children were gathered at each stop, not to get on, but to watch from a great metaphorical distance the very different lives of other people who were going to get on a airplane and go somewhere quite far away. I clutched my suitcase a little tighter. I was not like them. My passport says so. It says my opinions matter, that I am free to go and do as I wish, and need never fear being unwelcome virtually anywhere.

I've been a lot of places; Buenos Aires was just the latest. I'm back in Lima now. I had nearly forgotten that the world is big. And very strange.