Our city tour with local guide Diana started at eight thirty. We rode a large bus to the opera house to see the eclectic architecture on the outside, then walked a short distance to the Buenos Aires Obelisk.
We got back in the bus and rode through the business district to the Mayo Plaza and adjoining presidential palace. We heard a lot about the presidency and history of the government, including a focus on Los Desaparecidos, the estimated thirty thousand people who were abducted during military rule in the late 1960’s through the early 1980’s.
Back in the bus we drove out to the wide, wide Rio de la Plata via an overpass that was surrounded by a favela or slum area.
On the river shore a Memory Park for Los Desaparecidos has been created. A number of monk parakeets (which are actually parrots) were making a racket in the trees in this Monument to Victims of State Terrorism.
A large wall holds the names of about ten thousand ‘desaparecidos’ that have been identified and has room for the estimated twenty thousand additional, not yet identified, people. A man whose mother was snatched off the street by the government when he was a toddler spoke to us about how she never returned and the impact it had on his life. His father, fearing for his own life, left the boy with the mother’s parents and moved to a rural area to adopt a new life and identity. So this man grew up knowing that his mother had been “disappeared,” but that he should never talk about it outside the family. He was able to contact his father after several years, but the relationship is a little awkward.
Similar things happened to thousands of other children because the government targeted anyone they thought might possibly be or become part of a resistance movement for almost two decades. He showed us where his mother’s name appears on the wall.
Next we rode to the La Boca neighborhood. Barby, our tour guide, bought choripán for us all to try. This is a sandwich of chorizo sausage covered in chimichurri that is really tasty.
We walked down the Caminito, a couple of alleys with lots of art vendors and costumed tango dancers who would charge you to take photos with them.
Then the tour was over and the bus dropped us off near the Buller brew pub we had spotted across from the cemetary on our walk the previous day. We had a late lunch there. Their beers were decent and the food was also pretty good.
After lunch we walked to El Ateneo Grand Splendid book store. The store is in a building that had been a grand old theater with three balcony levels and is now a book store with a huge selection and a many small areas to sit with a coffee and read part of a book before deciding to purchase it.
The evening activity was home dinners, where a local hosts dinner for a group of four or five of the tour members. Our hostess was Elena, a very talkative mother of five who recently moved back to the city after nine years living in a gated community in a nearby province. The lively discussion centered around politics and the differences between city life and the fairly distant suburbs of BA. We heard a lot about her kids and how big the change has been for her children as they all started at new schools just a few weeks ago, and city living is new to them.
The political discussion was educational - Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, is a controversial figure. Our hostess voted for him, but she also worries greatly about the future of the country, so much so that she’s looking into acquiring Italian dual-citizenship for her children. But, as in the U.S.A., she felt the major party choices represented only “more of the same” when the country actually needs a change.