feliz cumple, argentina!

This week it was the Argentine Bicentennial. Monday and Tuesday were holidays, and there were festivities all around. I've never been big on crowds or parades and didn't attend anything. But I happened to pass through the crowd Monday evening.



.Everyone was just wandering around, confused, looking for...stuff to look at.

house under glass

Yes, Papa! The glass house of Sarmiento is so strange. I thought it was some kind of architectural stunt. But it is simply the house of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who was the president or Argentina from 1868-1874.

Tigre I

Where did I take the train on Tuesday? To Tigre! That's the Tigre Delta region, just about 25 miles from Buenos Aires. The train takes less than an hour from downtown and costs about a quarter. It is such a cool place, so different from the city. The region is made up of a network of connected rivers and such. You take boats to get around.

the beacon

This is the Swiss Hospital in Buenos Aires. It is such a cool building. It glows red on the top floors and there is a big cutout waiting area where you can see people standing inside. Sometime I'll go back with my tripod and shoot a closer photo of that part. But I like how it just stands out--so appropriate, because it's a hospital. If you're bleeding out, you can just point to the beacon and say, "Take...me...there..." Or, I guess, "Llevame alla!" (Thanks Ricky...I can't believe I dont't know how to say that.)

Urban darkness

We lost power in my neighborhood for three days and three nights. This is what the street looks like in the dark, with just car headlights sweeping across or bearing down from the end of the avenue where there was power.



It is a weird thing to walk around in urban darkness. I thought it would be scary because, you know, you can't see. You hear something and see a dark person-shape but you have no idea what kind of person it is. But similarly, as a five-foot-three Asian girl, people can't tell that I'm a victim-waiting-to-happen. I could be a burly dude, you just can't tell. So I found that I actually feel pretty comfortable in the darkness, where people are just as wary of me as I am of them.

More Flooding.

The power went out in the middle of a storm Monday night. It was around 10 pm, pitch black. When I went out to buy some candles, this is what I saw:



We were in the middle of a lake!

Street Fighting

No, I'm not one of those obsessive graffiti photographers, but I do like to take photos of street art that I find especially interesting. Like this one.



There is a ton of street art around Buenos Aires. There are lots of different styles, ranging from sweet cartoon-like muffin-heads to anti-capitalist stencils. But I like this one a lot. First of all, it's huge. That is an industrial-sized garage door. Second, these tiger-faced guys are recurring characters around the city, particularly in my neighborhood, which is also my third reason--this is in my neighborhood. I like these guys. I like characters with some fight in them.

Valen-chino

It was a happy coincidence for me that Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day were both on Sunday. This meant that instead of having to spend two separate holidays feeling lonely, I got it all out of my system in one day! This photo is the collision of "Dia de los Enamoradas" and "Ano Nuevo Chino" in Buenos Aires.



I am getting much better at shooting photos while walking in low light. After the sun went down, I had dinner in a restaurant called China Rose to round out the evening. It was the kind of Chinese restaurant where there were packaged Italian breadsticks on some of the tables (as well as on the floor), and they only served one-liter bottles of Heineken.