18
posts labeled argentina
05.03.2008
I have already written about the I've ever known, in a pink residential apartment tower in Beijing's Haidian district. My life there was bookended by another elevator a few hundred meters away, in a glass box office tower where I worked. ...
The Great Porteño Smokeout
04.23.2008
The smoke attack is a kind of model Argentine crisis. It affects everyone, its underlying causes are obscure even though the immediate causes are clear, the government has done everything it can to pretend it's not happening before taking ineffective half-measures, a...
Controlled Tango Into Terrain
04.01.2008
From a Buenos Aires travel guide: Spice up your life! A few weeks ago I walked into a tango studio that I had been passing daily, just down the block from my apartment. San Telmo is a tango-rich environment and there are many studios advertising instruction, but this one see...
The Second World
01.17.2008
The defining characteristic of a Second World country is the non-absorbent napkin. From Moscow to Valparaiso, if your café napkin is a square of waxed paper that takes grease from your lips and spreads it to the rest of your face, you can be certain of encountering the whole constellation of other t...
Rosario
01.12.2008
When I had finished the steak, the same steward floated by to find out what I would like to drink. Right away, sir! Buses serving Buenos Aires leave from a bus terminal in Retiro, a long snake of a building hidden behind three train stations. Rosario is a city 300km...
Nuevo Año
01.09.2008
Buenos Aires itself is technically on the water, at the mouth of the River Plate, but access to the river is blocked by a fairly new riverfront park called the . The helps provide the city with the copious amounts of wetland acreage required to breed sufficient mosquitoes for a population ...
A Very Porteño Christmas
01.01.2008
Strange things happen when deeply Catholic Europeans switch hemispheres without enough time to adapt their traditions. The little stores selling fruitcake are surrounded on all sides by greengrocers selling actual fruit, the preservation of which into midwinter was probably the whole point o...
Volví!
12.16.2007
The time difference between Buenos Aires and New York City is six months and two hours. The two hours aren't bad, once the strange feeling passes of travelling in an airplane for a full day and night and arriving still in synch with the local dinnertime. The change of season is harder to get us...
El Chaltén
05.28.2006
Just when you thought nationalism had nothing good to offer the world, along comes a wonder like El Chaltén. A town with no conceivable economic or geographic purpose other than sticking it to the nearby Chileans, El Chaltén (Spanish for ) is an accidental hikers' paradise in what used to b...
Las Torres Del Paine
05.04.2006
Condors love this place. The are gigantic birds, with exceptional eyesight that lets them soar high overhead, and a lazy fondness for the kind of high winds that let them soar without flapping their wings. At times they descend low enough that you can se...
Argentina On Two Steaks A Day
04.13.2006
Juan Díaz de Solís, a Sevillian and a gentleman, arrived in the Freshwater Sea in February of 1516, when none of this existed yet. He voyaged in three ships, as is fitting, and when some shameless natives made him a signal of welcome, he readily l...
Land Of Fire
04.03.2006
All of this is just for show. The island has a shockingly equable climate. It rarely gets hotter than sixty degrees in summer, or drops below twenty degrees in winter. The rain may be blowing horizontally, but you will never face a hard frost in Tierra del Fueg...
The Collapse of the Perito Moreno
03.25.2006
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Ruling Antarctica
03.07.2006
On first coming to Argentina, I was amused to find that every map of the country included a little pie-slice of Antarctica. Whether it was the bus map, the television weather forecast, or the Aerolineas Argentinas in-flight magazine, no map of Argentina was complete without the two dots of...
Junin De Los Andes
02.26.2006
Apart from its scenery, which is what you would expect from a place called 'the lake district', the region is famous for its trout fishing (catch and release, a gastronomic lap dance) and a very strange kind of tree called the pehué, or araucaria, or monkey puzzle. The araucaria looks ...
Two Dinosaurs
02.15.2006
I had come to see the paleontological museums in two little towns, Plaza Huincul and Villa El Chocón. Both are about an hour's bus ride away from Neuquén, in hot desert country that looks a lot like Nevada. Plaza Huincul is home to the largest herbivorous dinosaur ever found:...
Penguins At Punta Tombo
02.07.2006
Chubut However, after a few miserable initial winters, the settlers managed to build an excellent irrigation system and actually begin growing some food. The colony may not have thrived, but it survived, and as late as the 1970's the Welsh influence on this part of Argentina...
Heist!
02.06.2006
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