Iguazu! Amazing Waterfall Experience

We’re in northeast Argentina, where it borders with Paraguay and Brazil.  In fact yesterday we went to the Brazilian national park to see the incredible Iguazu waterfall from there.  (Fortunately for us, the requirement for US citizens to have visas to enter Brazil ended June 17 this year, otherwise we wouldn’t have had time to get one.)

There’s little I can say about this experience.  It was amazing.  The power of the falls is amazing.  Amazing, amazing, amazing.  The pictures don’t do it justice.  Actually, they are pretty bad.  I took so many and it’s hard to find the best using the iPad tools that I’ve figured out so far.  When I get back to my old computer I might replace these.

  

For all the years that I’ve joked about there being an elevator at the end of a hike, well this time there was.

Today we view the falls from the Argentine side.

A little more from Wikipedia:

The area surrounding Iguazu Falls was inhabited 10,000 years ago by the hunter-gatherers of the Eldoradense culture. They were displaced around 1000 C.E. by the Guaraní, who brought new agricultural technologies, and were displaced in turn by the  Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores in the sixteenth century.
The first European to discover the Falls was the Spanish Conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in 1541, after whom one of the falls on the Argentine side is named. Jesuit missions followed in 1609.
A Brazilian army officer, Edmundo de Barros, proposed the creation of a national park near the Falls in 1897. As the Falls form a part of the border between Brazil and Argentina, once those boundaries were clearly defined, two separate national parks were established, one in each nation. Iguazú National Park in Argentina was established in 1934 and Iguaçu National Park of Brazil was established in 1939.
The great power of the Falls was not utilized until the construction of the huge Itaipu Dam, built jointly by Paraguay and Brazil, which was completed in 1991. The dam, touted as a masterpiece of technology, is one of the largest in the world, providing nearly forty percent of the power to Brazil and Argentina. 

The map comes from Lonely Planet  and You can see Iguazu in the upper right hand corner of Argentina.

Recoleta Open Market

The cemetery is a major destination in Buenos Aires, but while we had passed it, we hadn’t had time to go in.  An added bonus of going yesterday was the Recoleta weekend outdoor market around it on Saturday.  Here are a few pictures to give a sense of it.  Basically it was decorative arts - lots of jewelry, leather work, clothing, paintings, and other odds and ends.

  

There was even a bit of tango in front of the entrance to the cemetery.   The paintings weren’t my style.  A lot of pictures of Argentine themes and then stuff like this.

 

 Mate (pronounced MA-te) is an Argentine tea.  You stick a lot of leaves into the cup and keep refilling it with hot water and drink the tea through a metal straw.  This man is selling mate. Cups and straws.

“Drinking mate is highly ritualised, its conventions and procedures are fixed and never broken. Gringos stirring the tea with the bombilla will, for example, be met with Argentineans diving to recover the mate. It is just one faux pas among many”. [From The Real Argentina ]

This woman below had beautiful painted boxes and other small items.

I couldn’t figure out how to take a good picture of all the booths that make up the market.  So this picture is here just to give you a vague sense.  In parts there are booths on both sides.  This was when we first got there and more vendors kept showing up.

Visiting Evita And Others At The Recoleta Cemetery

We went to the Recoleta Cemetery today, which was surrounded by an open market with lots of artwork.  But we also stumbled into the Recoleto Cultural Center.  I’ll just do some cemetery pictures today without much commentary, because we have an early morning flight tomorrow.

The cemetery is like a little city of houses of the dead.  Lots of Argentine history here.

 Dr. Manuel Florence Mantilla (above).

This Argentine boxer was known as The Bull of the Pampas.

Augustine De Elia was once president of the Jockey Club.



And Here’s Evita.  We wouldn’t have found her, but I asked someone who turned out to be a funeral director from Columbia and he and a small group of funeral folks were getting a tour of the cemetary from an older local who knew it all well.  So we tagged along.  Her grave did have something of a crowd around it, flowers, and, we discovered there’s a map at the entrance.  But she’s listed under her family name - Duarte.

After Evita we passed by this statue and grave that was unlike anything else there.  Liliana died at 25  when an avalanche hit an Austrian ski lodge she was in with her husband and dog.  Here’s a Wikipedia page ab out her in Spanish.  But you can cut and paste it into Google translate and get a pretty good English version.  

I’ve got to finish packing and get to bed.  We’re supposed to be at the airport at 6am!  But it’s the airport for flights inside Argentina, so it’s not too far.

Hard Times In Argentina Reflected In Book Titles At One Giant, Beautiful Book Store

In the week we’ve been here, I’ve heard a lot about the terrible Argentine economy these days, About how corruption has badly hurt every day Argentinians.  How the Peso has dropped drastically in value.  I’ve tried to include pictures of people in the posts I’ve done so that you can see that this is a population that doesn’t look that different from people in the states.  Men in public are wearing jeans and tennis shoes.  Women are dressed in a range from casual to chic.  

There are lots of coffee shops with people sitting inside and out with coffee and pastries and more substantial snacks.  There was a strong middle class.  

I keep hearing that Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world, per capita..  Here’s the beginning of an article on that by an Argentinian.  

In the textbook “Economics”, written by the Nobel Prize in Economics Paul Krugman together with his wife Robin Wells, in the chapter on introduction to macroeconomics, they make a small comparison between the evolution of Canada and Argentina. With the title “A story of two countries”.  “One of the most informative contrasts is between Canada and Argentina, two countries that, at the beginning of the 20th century, seemed to be in a good economic position. From today’s point of view, it is surprising to realize that Canada and Argentina looked pretty much alike before the First World War. (…) Economic historians believe that the average level of per capita income was almost the same in the two countries until the 1930s.”[1]

The Peso was down 52% in 2018 (the most of any country listed in the article)    The link provides five other factors leading to Argentina’s economic crisis.  

People were limited to taking only $200 (in US currency in one case I heard about) per day.

People jog, go to the gym, ride bikes, go to the university, and all things Americans and Europeans do, but they are also feeling the pinch.  Homeless are sleeping on the streets and in the subway walkways - but not as bad as I’ve seen in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and even Anchorage.  But then I’ve not seen a lot of the city, so maybe there are more.  

People look weary and our host and teachers and people we meet tell us the same story.  Life is getting harder and harder.  On the other hand, university is free, and we met a man waiting for the bus today who was born in Buenos Aires, but grew up in Miami.  He’s back here going to the university.  

All this is prelude to the book store we went to yesterday - the biggest one in Argentina.  

Tucked away in Barrio Norte, Buenos Aires is a beautiful shop that every bookworm would love to visit, called El Ateneo Grand Splendid. It is built within the almost 100-year-old Grand Splendid Theater, which opened in 1919. The premises were later converted into a movie theater and eventually, in 2000, it was transformed into the El Ateneo Grand Splendid bookstore, which currently welcomes over one million book lovers each year.

Below is my picture, but go to the link to see much better pictures of the building than I have.  And to learn more about the history of this giant bookstore.  https://www.boredpanda.com/buenos-aires-bookstore-theatre-el-ateneo-grand-splendid/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic 

I’m going to focus mostly on the Argentine politics section of the store which is a relatively small part of the whole bookstore.  So I’ll add just a couple of pictures of other nearby titles.

I don’t recall ever seeing a section on Military Dictatorships in a book store before.  

I Do Not Forgive:  The Testimony of Erika Lederer, Daughter of a Genocial Obsterician.

Google isn’t giving me anything in English - even though I’m asking for English - on Erika Lederer.  Here’s a translation from google.  There are some oddly gendered pronouns.  Is this book available in English?  I’m guessing not:

The Spanish version was from Planeta de Libros.  

She is the first daughter of medical captain Ricardo Lederer, second chief of clandestine maternity in Campo de Mayo during the period of State terrorism. Raised in a professional middle class family, she attended a private school in the German community of Villa Ballester, where she began to read her first philosophy books. His father was an obstetrician doctor, a commando soldier and part of the carapintada uprising of the La Tablada barracks, in 1987. The union is also called, in the book Nunca más, as "the madman with pretensions to purge the race."She is a lawyer from the University of Buenos Aires, specializing in Family Mediation. Works in family mediation in confinement contexts. As she defines it, this is "doing magic; Provide tools to build an alternative story, that is habitable for the person. "He practiced swimming, running and today pole dance; disciplines in which are the metaphors that mark his life in different stages.He joined the founding group of "Disobedient Stories" and, later, "Former children and former daughters of genocide for Truth, Memory and Justice".

Perished::  Who wins the America Cup of orruption?  

[While writing this post, the screen here went blank.  I was able to post it - and what I’d done was still there, but I wasn’t finished.  So now I’m finiahing.]

Another book in that section.  

Google translates this as Under the Water, but I’m guessing that it might mean Under Water.  I suspect any English speaker can decipher the subtitle.

Here’s one book that appears to look at how the world’s torments impact the River of Silver (the area around Buenos Aires.). And another that seems to look the other way around - how the torments of Argentina affect the world.  

And as promised, a couple of books from different sections.

Our Spanish classes ended today.  I learned a lot, but I’m still tongue tied when I get out of class.  I have a sense of how my two year old granddaughter feels as she gets more words and sentences out effectively.  Actually, she’s advancing much faster than I am.  Both of us had excellent teachers.   

And J got her stitches out today.  If I posted pictures of the doctor stitching her up and the nurse taking them out today, the surroundings look pretty much the same.  Here it was the German Hospital of Buenos Aires.  Looks a lot like Providence Anchorage, but more patients, and better places to eat in the neighborhood.  

And I finally broke down and went to the travel agent recommended by the language school, to plan out the rest of the trip.  We aren’t tour people, but for the national park - Iguasu - it just seems a lot easier and they did some more planning until the rest of the family is here for the eclipse.  Then we have more time to plan out.  

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Overwhelmed - Here Are Some Pictures From Buenos Aires

Sorry, between being busy and doing homework and my iPad’s bad relations with Blogger, this will just be a few pictures.  We went to the Rosadel - a park with a rose garden - across a huge Avenida from where we are staying.

Then through other park areas to the Japanese Garden.

Apartments along Avenida Liberdad.

People eating out at coffee shops on the first day of winter.

It took me a while to figure out that this was a gas station.  I should mention that today was the second holiday this week, so no school.

Busy Day, Sun Came Out

We had to be at the language school at 8.  It had thundered a lot during the night.  Loudly.  So I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have liked.  But we learned from our first bus trip, and this time we asked people to help us get off at the right stop.  It’s hard when it’s dark and rainy.  But all went well.

Classes were great.  There were only three new people and they rated us at different levels, so we ended up with private lessons.  There are also two holidays this week, so we only get three days instead of five.  But they calculate the private lessons as worth more time than group lessons.  And mine were prefect for me.

We got our sim cards into working order and we now have What’s App, because lots of people don’t get actual talking on their phone - text and internet, and call people using What’s App.

We had a tour of San Martin Square - we were told he was the liberator of Argentina and Chile and handed the baton to Simon Bolivar in Peru.  How come we all know about Bolivar, but not Martin?  I don’t know.

Then we were able to see a doctor at the Deutsches Hospital, but he said he rather wait a few more days to take our her stitches.  They’re ok, but a few more days would be better.

And then I’ve been doing homework all evening.  Pictures are:


1. Statue of San Martin
2. Our first sunshine in Argentina (we got here Saturday, and I’m writing Tuesday night)
3. Milo, our host’s dog

Güemes Died, The Clouds Cried

Martín Miguel de Güemes (8 February 1785 – 17 June 1821) was a military leader and popular caudillo who defended northwestern Argentina from the Spanish during the Argentine War of Independence.

If you read the quote from Wikipedia  carefully, you might realize that today is the 198th anniversary of his death.  And it’s a national holiday in memory of his heroic fighting against the Spanish and British. (At least that’s how he’s portrayed here and now.  So our Spanish class doesn’t start til tomorrow. So we went off to do errands and some sightseeing.  

Our host went with us at the beginning because she was walking the dog.  First stop the emergency room to get J’s stitches out.  But they only do emergencies and it’s a holiday.  Fortunately our host was with us and will try to make an appointment tomorrow.  We went on and she went back with the dog.  

Claro - the kind of phone chip we have - was closed for the holiday, so we still don’t have cell service.  Then by subway to Plaza de Mayo.  Our first time in the SUBTE (subway) and we had to figure out how to tap our card to get thru the turnstile.  

Subway is easy, clean, and fast.  But that could be because it’s a holiday.  The train we returned on was brand new, or so it seemed.  People come down the aisle and put little packages on people’s laps - a bunch of pocket tissue packets one time, pens another - and once they’ve done the car they walk back to collect a fee or the item.  I didn’t notice anyone buying, but people were nicely handing them back.  

I had my big camera with me today.  I also have my old Powershot since I can’t download from my phone yet.  It’s nice to have a piece of equipment I’m completely familiar with and it’s much easier than dragging my big camera out of the bag in the rain.  I used it for one picture, inside the Cathedral.  

Subway and rain pictures first.

The Cabildo - 

The Cabildo de Buenos Aires was the site of Spain's colonial administration in the city. Originally constructed from adobe and thatch in 1580, the current building was constructed over the second half of the 18th century, witnessed the Argentine Revolution in 1810, and served as an important administrative building during the first century of Argentine independence. MuseumThe building now houses the National Museum of the Cabildo and the May Revolution, and displays original artefacts and documents as well as interactive exhibits on the Spanish colonial era, the British invasions of 1806 and 1807, and the early days of independence. The museum was renovated in 2016, and now includes access to the former jail and more historic documents.

And then the Cathedral.

And then the Rosario - where Evita Peron spoke to the people from the balcony.  (There were two different balconies, but this one is more in the middle.

But mostly it rained today.  

Winter starts in a few days, but I know it can’t get too cold because there are palm trees and banana trees all over.