Wednesday, August 15, 2007: Wake up Argentina

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

After going to bed at almost 8:30 am, I amazingly woke up at 11:15 ready to take on the day. I managed to drag Calli up around 12 and we were finally ready to head out at 1 pm. We stopped by to tell our new American friends that we were heading out. They were all dead asleep but within 10 minutes they were all showered and ready to grab lunch with us. They took us to a great parillada or steak house called La Cholita (I don’t know what it means!). I ate Bife de lomo which is basically filet mignon and fries for 6 bucks. I’m telling you, if you like steak, fly to Argentina, stay in a hostel, and eat out the whole time you are there. By the time you leave, the amount of money you saved on food will pay for the ticket down there!
After lunch we helped the boys do their last minute gift shopping that they had put of their entire 5 weeks then we parted ways. It was like saying goodbye to lifelong friends, but luckily they are on Facebook! Around 4 pm, we finally started playing tourist (which I had planned to start around 11 am!) But since the entire Argentinean biological clock is pushed back about 5 hours, it worked out quite well!

We first went to the Basilica Nuestra Señora de Pilar, a famous old church and convent in Recoleta right next to the Recoleta cemetery, which we visited next. We were sitting in the cemetery when a beautiful woman approached us and in English asked us if we spoke English. We said yes and she went on to tell us that her husband works for the cemetery restoring the monuments and when he is done for the day he is allowed to give tours. So the woman and her husband work together to give tours and all they ask for is a donation to raise money for a daycare center that they help fund for lower income families. Calli and I looked at each other, quickly judging whether or not this was a major scam, but decided that the cemetery was full of other tourists and she seemed very sincere and a tour would be really interesting. We agreed and ended up having a great tour of the incredible old cemetery.

Her husband explained to us how the families bury their dead, keep up the graves, pass them on through the generations or leave them abandoned. They showed us the graves of 1) the saddest story: an 18 year old girl went into a coma and her family, taking her for dead, buried her in the tomb. Then next day people walking through the cemetery heard pounding from inside a tomb. By the time they figured out where it was coming from and opened it up, the girl had suffocated, 2) the most expensive monument: 47 MILLION US DOLLARS! The family of a noble prize winning physician and scientist that developed vaccines etc. 3) the most romantic monument: a Christian and a Jew loved each other but their families refused to let them marry. When the parents got old and passed them the family businesses, the secret couple built a monument in the cemetery with both a menorah and a cross, representing the universality of love. Right before their parents died, they told them that they would all be buried there together. I’m sure this didn’t help, but now all the parents and the couple are buried together in one of the only monuments in all of Argentina where Jews and Christians are buried together. Finally, they took us to Evita Peron’s tomb. There were tons of plaques, flowers, and people taking photos. The amazing thing is that if you weren’t paying attention and there weren’t tons of people, you wouldn’t even notice the humble monument.
After the cemetery and the tour, we went to the Centro Cultural right next door. Right now they have an incredible Modern Art exhibit with a huge Video art exhibition. We spent about hour wandering through the galleries constantly asking ourselves, “What the crap does that mean?” When we couldn’t take anymore beauty/abstraction, we went to mass at the basilica for the Assumption of Mary. The mass was totally packed and it was a good think we arrived 15 minutes early or we would have been staying, smashed in the back. Unfortunately we were pretty far back, it was warm, and we were finally sitting down and Calli and I had a hard time staying awake for the whole mass. Moral of the story, get more sleep and sit in the front so you can pay attention!
For dinner we went to a Spanish tapas restaurant. The deal was that the kitchen picked the 6 tapas and Calli and I were in for an adventure. It turned out pretty good except for the Sweet Bread (pancreas of a cow) tapa. After dinner, we waited at the hostel for our friends Niki and Sam to get in. Once they arrived and settled, they went to find dinner and Calli and I took a cab to visit Andy, a friend of mine from Tulane. Andy is studying here with the same program as me, CIEE and was having some people over to hang out. We met 5 other girls with CIEE and it was great hearing their perspective on their study abroad experience. The CIEE program in BA is over 100 students and they can take all their classes with foreigners if they want. (In Santiago, we only have 45 ish students and we can only take 1 class with the program). Also, they have fewer options for volunteering and seemed to be really spread out all over the city. But they all love BA and seem to be having a great time. We headed home a little before 2 am since both of us were going off about 4 hours of sleep.