Friday, 3 October 2014
From here we passed by the Barrio Norte neighborhood and the Recoleta neighborhood, where the famous Recoleta cemetery is located. Then we went to the Palermo neighborhood, which is roughly divided into 2 parts, Palermo Soho and Palermo Hollywood. Here is where the rich live. This place has the highest concentration of parks in the city of Buenos Aires, it is really quite a beautiful area, full of lush green plants and trees everywhere you look. There are a lot of big mansions here, once inhabited by rich families, and now made into embassies. The buildings had old Victorian designs and were very pretty to see.
Next, we passed through the Once (which has a large immigrant population, mainly from Bolivia and Paraguay), Monserratt and Constitucion neighborhoods, before stopping in the La Boca neighborhood, to see the stadium of the famous Argentinian football club, Boca Juniors. Diego Maradona used to play for this club. In La Boca neighborhood we also saw the harbour, the river that runs through the harbour, Riachuelo, is a tributary of the Rio De La Plata which literally means the Silver River, apparently the Spanish first came to South America looking for gold and silver and decided to name this river as the silver river. This river is polluted due to the various meat and other factories that used to dump their wastes into the river in the 19th century.
Across the harbour there is a small village named Caminito, this used to be a village where most of the immigrants used to stay in the 1940s and 1950s, but is now a tourist area. The immigrants used to work mainly as meat packers and in warehouses in the city, as well as in the docks. Here we got to go into a house preserved in it original state (as how the immigrants used to live in them), for touristic purposes of course. The attraction here is that this village is really colorful, a door could be orange, the windows green, the walls yellow and so on. The story is that the house owners did not have enough money to buy painting for their houses. They received donations, and it was hard to find a lot of paint in the same colour. Years went by and then it became a tradition to use different colors. It was quite pretty.
Then we drove along the river, where we saw a floating casino. This is apparently the only casino in Argentina, because casinos here are illegal, but this one is allowed because it is technically on a boat on the river and not on Argentinian soil. We then passed the Puerto Madero neighborhood, which is a fairly new neighborhood, the buildings here still look new and pristine, and the apartments overlook the harbour and the river, and the property prices here can only be afforded by the really rich people in Argentina. Argentina also has the problem of a large income gap between the rich and the poor. Here there is a very unique bridge named 'Puente de la Mujer' which means Bridge of the Woman. This bridge is supposedly an abstract of a couple dancing Tango, the man towering over the woman who is leaning back horizontally. The surrounding neighborhoods also has streets primarily named after women, and this is why the bridge is named as such.
We then passed the San Telmo neighborhood, which is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, you can still see colonial-style houses along narrow cobblestone lanes. Our final destination was in the Centro neighborhood, where most of the government buildings are. Here I saw what is called the 'Pink House', it is a pink building which serves as the office of the President of Argentina. Pink because there are 2 main warring factions in Argentina, one party is red (the federals) and the other white (the unitarios) so pink symbolizes unity and harmony. Pink because they used cow's blood to paint the walls, and the blood mixed with plaster turned pink. This is what the guide told me, and told me to choose my favorite story. Nice guy, this guide. The balcony facing Plaza de Mayo is the presidential podium where Evita Peron and other presidents addressed the crowds in the plaza.
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