Que triste cuando se acaba

We said goodbye to my family last Monday and headed for Buenos Aires, the capital, for our last five days in Argentina. It was a sad goodbye. We had so much fun and Mark was made to feel like one of the family.

Now we’re in Buenos Aires one of the biggest cities in the world. Similar to New York in its bustling and hurried lifestyle, and to Paris in its greatness and splendor it’s also a city of contrasts, where the excesses of the monuments and of the rich clash with the poverty left by a horrid recession. We’ve already walked through most of the city. My favorite part is San Telmo, the old neighborhood of the newly emigrated from Italy or Spain. Today it’s full of anticuarians and bohemians. Every store is like a museum and we found the best restaurant there, more like a local cafeteria. We’ve been to touristy and colorful Boca, visited Plaza de Mayo (where we’ll be returning today to watch the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo mourn for the disappeared), gotten tickets for the opera tonight at Teatro Colon, and visited the apartment complexes of the dead and rich at the Recoleta cemetery (where Evita is buried). But my favorite so far has been the Museum of Immigration, housed in the old Immigrant Hotel, a huge building complex where people from all over Europe where given housing, food, language courses, and helped to find jobs when they first arrived to Buenos Aires. They have a database where you can search for relatives for a fee. I tried it out hoping to find the dates when my great grandparents (my grandma Chola’s parents) came from Italy. I couldn’t find them but it seems someone with my greatgrandmothers last name and place of birth came to Argentina in the 1920s. I’ll have to ask my aunt to see if they might be a relative or not. Anyways, that’s it for now. We’ll be back on Sunday so see you (or talk to you) soon,

Giovi