San Telmo

I passed the first two weeks or so I was in Buenos Aires in a hostel in the neighborhood of San Telmo. Famous for it's Sunday antiques fair and for claiming a strong tradition of small tango clubs (milongas) and historic cafes, it's a pretty fun neighborhood. While some of my porteño friends claim that they can't stand San Telmo, I like it. The neighborhood is (forgive me for using this word!) gritty, with narrow streets, old houses , antique shops and small boutiques and art galleries (and a reputation for being somewhat dangerous for tourists after dark). It sits right below the downtown, with it's most well-known street, Defensa, running straight down from the Plaza de Mayo to La Boca. If you walk toward the river you end up in the upscale neighborhood of Puerto Madero and will eventually run into the natural reserve that runs along one section of the river. Walking away from the river you run into 9 de julio, one of the widest streets in the world. If you cross 9 de julio (which is impossible to do in the span of one red light unless you RUN) you end up in Monserrat and eventually hit the area around the Congress building.

I stayed at this same hostel six years ago, when I was doing research for my masters thesis. It's called Sandanzas (I'm including a link to the website here because I really do think it's a great spot). It wasn't quite like deja vu to be there again, but it was close. I still remember the walk from the hostel to the San Juan subte (subway) station that took me to the Library of Congress newspaper archives. The neighborhood has changed somewhat from what I remember...there are more empty buildings and "for sale" signs, more graffiti, more trash. Not that I remember Buenos Aires as a terribly clean city. Beware of dog poop landmines on the sidewalks all you who want to walk the streets of Buenos Aires someday! The first time I stayed in San Telmo the antique market filled the Plaza Dorrego and spilled out into a few surrounding streets, with the antiques concentrated in the plaza and booths of handicrafts and hand-made jewelry lining the sidestreets. Now all of Defensa Street is closed on Sundays, with thousands of tourists and locals wandering past booths that are open well into the evening. Only the traditional antique booths close at dusk, the owners packing away chandeliers and goblets, crystal decanters and antique telephones, costume jewelry and gemstones alike into cardboard boxes and hauling them back to the stores that line Defensa. During the day the whole plaza looks like a giant yard sale for the rich, with the contents of mansions laid out on plywood tables. I'm sure most of it is junk, really, but it is impressive none-the-less.

I spent much of the two weeks in San Telmo searching for an apartment. Since I was planning on staying for a little over two months I wanted to have an apartment within walking distance to the Library of Congress. Hostel living is not really that great if you're looking to actually get some work done. But I will admit to some touristy activities while at the hostel. I spent a lovely evening eating the most delicious steak that has ever graced my taste-buds and conversing with a Californian and an Irishman about energetic healing, took a tango class with a bunch of rowdy Basques, got my hair cut, toured the cemetery in Recoleta for the fifth time, chatted well into the evening with the owners of the hostel and slept long passed when I should have hauled myself out of bed almost every morning. It pretty close to being on vacation.

The night of tango lessons with the rowdy Basques deserves a more detailed explanation. One of the last nights I was in the hostel a group of six Basques (five men and one woman) checked in for a few days. They were on their way back to Spain after coming to Argentina for a friend's wedding. We talked them in to taking a tango class that evening despite the fact that men would far out-number women, a situation that hardly ever happens in any kind of partner-dancing class (at least in my experience). I have often had to dance with another woman in a tango or samba class, but never have I seen the men paired with other men. The Basque guys just jumped right in with no thought as to whether the gender of their partner had any effect on their images of masculinity, an act which I'm not sure would be replicated by most straight men from the US. And these guys were straight. It was probably the strangest but most entertaining tango class I've ever had the pleasure to be a part of. These guys were a riot. We all ended up at a milonga that night set up at a local cultural center a few blocks away, and one of the guys kept trying to convince me he was going to take me out to dance in the crowd of obviously experienced tango dancers even though he had never even heard tango music before that night. We got as far as half-way to the dance floor before he finally chickened-out, shocked that I actually took him up on his offer.

I finally moved my stuff to my new apartment after almost two weeks in the hostel. I looked at maybe five apartments, most of them in the Congreso and Monserrat neighborhoods. In the end I picked a house just off 9 de julio. I'll fill you all in on my B.A. apartment in the next installment...