My most vivid image from our first day in Argentina, which happened to coincide with the last day of 2009, was of calendar pages. At around 4 pm on New Years Eve, Courtney and I were walking through Buenos Aires' famous Plaza del Mayo, where Evita and Juan Peron would whip crowds of supporters into a frenzy. As we wandered the neighborhood, the streets were abandoned, and papers were littered everywhere, as if we'd just missed a ticker tape parade. It wasn't until Courtney looked closer that we saw most of the papers were calendar pages, small and thin, the kind you might find in a cheap desk calendar.
We had come to the plaza to see the vigil of the Mothers of the Disappeared, a group of women whose children are among the 30,000 people kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina's "Dirty War" in the late 1970s. Since 1977, they have come to the plaza every Thursday at 3:30 p.m., initially to march in protest, and recently to hold a silent vigil in rememberance. We got there late, too late for the vigil, but we did see the mothers schmoozing and hugging their supporters. Courtney commented that it felt like we were crashing a family get together.
Later, we walked behind the Pink House, where the president holds office, to the river behind it, and wandered down to the Punta de la Mujere, a Calatravi designed (and donated) pedestrian bridge that is supposed to suggest the gestures of the tango, but made me think of the sails of a boat. The structure is so graceful and thin, it seems like it might catch the wind and start floating down the river alongside the boats.
It was on the shore of the river that Courtney and I had our first encounter with one of the most important attractions in Buenos Aires: the helado, or ice cream. With all the people who had recommended it to us, we had decided (without actually discussing the matter, because some decisions are so obvious they make themselves) that our honeymoon would double as an ice cream tour. In our four days in Buenos Aires we were destined to have helado at least once a day, if not twice, and always at a different store. The verdict (so far): Freddo's Tramontana beats all comers, but Persicco's powerful mint chocolate chip/coffe double scoop comes in a close second.
To celebrate the new year, we ate more ice cream, then took the recommendation of our concierge and went to a restaurant that turned out to be pretty mediocre. But we sat next to a couple of porteños (natives of Buenos Aires) who made the evening more interesting. The man, in his twenties, was short and thickly muscled, with slicked back hair and a tight shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. Across from him was a woman old enough to be his mother. Actually, we found out, it was his mother, and he turned out to be a sweet, gentle soul. As Courtney pointed out, there's definitely an Argentinian machismo and ego to his style, but there's also a family-oriented welcoming instinct that he embodied as well. When new year came, everybody got up and started dancing, and this guy went to every individual in the restaurant and kissed him or her on the cheek. He's fairly upper class (he works in his father's shippings business and speaks French, Russian, English, Spanish,German, and Portugese), but still seemed representative of this odd combination of egotism and friendliness that runs through Argentinian society.
Afterwards, Courtney and I went on the roof deck and danced into the morning to music and fireworks.
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