7 hours on foot

I´m down to me last few hours in Buenos Aires. Yesterday was another day spent alone, wandering through the city. Recoleta is a beautiful necropolis, some tombs well over a century old. Who are the one who still are looked after, that have their cobwebs removed, wood caskets polished, marble cases dusted, articifial flowers changed every now and again to prevent fading? Who are the ones who no lineage exists to come restore or paid to have restored the cracked plaster ceilings, broken glass swept, who hold the key to the rusted locked?

I spent the remainder of the afternoon walking what felt like one end of the city to the other but the map suggests I really only traversed through 3 or 4 neighborhoods. Either this map is completely out of scale, this city is deceptively huge or I´m just really slow. My motivation was dad´s gift, I know it existed somewhere in this city, and I went from Recoleta to Palermo to Barrio Norte to Plaza de Mayo (which I arrived at rather uncerimoniously in what seemed to be a transit rotary), to Retiro (which was far more interesting than Plaza de Mayo except for the madhouse nature of being caight at the terminus for every mode of transport during rush hour, and plus, I was going in the wrong direction), back to Recoleta.

Ah, and yes, Avenida 9 de Julio is actually 20 lanes. And you must take 2 light turns to cross.

By the time I arrived back to Recoleta, eyes bleary from the constant exposure to smog and congestion, sticky with sweat from the humidity, feet about to fall off, I really just wanted a cold beer and good food. Tempted to just return to La Cholita, I decided, I should try another place and went to the seemingly more populat Cumana. It seems fate wanted me to drink a lot of beer yesterday. At lunch they could only offer me a .75 litre beer which I turned down. At dinner they could only offer me a litre of beer. Given it was my last night, I gave in.

It seems, I also can´t eat vegetables. I knew somewhere in the back of my head that spinatta is not spinach. It´s salami, as I realized when my sandwhich at lunch arrived. And my vegetales rustica cazuela at dinner came with every non-vegetable - potato, mushroom, onion, yam and squash. Where were the zucchini, carrots, and cauliflower I just saw at the market just down the street! Good thing I had a litre of beer calories to consume! Yes, so when in Buenos Aires, stick with the steak. Or empanadas.

Onward to Ushuaia