My dearest Buenos Aires

Hey friends! Finally you've got what you've been patiently waiting for: some lines about my dearest Buenos Aires in English! As you can imagine, it took me some weeks to settle down and find myself again in the streets of Tango. Imagine friends and family queuing to see me, tons of things waiting for me to be done, and some freelance work going on: all of these were the causes that obliged me to postpone my writing.

But now I'm here, with no more excuses, sitting in a cafe in Santa Fé Avenue and watching through the window how cars and people run from here to there, going nowhere. Spinetta is now singing in the back "aunque enlocido vuelvo" (words of a song that many have dedicated to their lovers), what is mixed with the sound of a machine grounding coffee and results in a delightful environment that captures you through sound and smell.

This Sunday is Mothers' Day. People come and go to buy chocolates and 'alfajores' Havanna, our classic and greatest sweet. Locals and tourists fall in love with it buying boxes and more boxes of dozens of 'alfajores' of chocolate and dulce de leche. Anand can confirm you this if you think I'm overreacting. He had the pleasure to try them some weeks ago when he spent holidays here.


What can I tell you about my city? It's a question with no simple answer. Wide avenues with four or five lines of cars take you to one hundred neighbourhoods with an architecture that easily paints the multiple faces of the city: in Monserrat, colonial-time buildings with Spanish heart; in Palermo, French style streets and houses with an avenue that is the South American version of Champs Elysees; in San Telmo, the corners and pubs where the 'malevo' and the street girl made history dancing Tango not so long ago.


But Buenos Aires is not only that. Buenos Aires is the kids that earn their living selling flowers in the traffic lights, the homeless sleeping in the parks, and the youth collecting paper, cardboard and plastic day and night to survive. A group of fighters that deal every day with the indifference of the rest of us, those who run in the streets, speed the car or jump into the tube not to be late to our busy routine.

From the city that instead of "mind the gap" has a "sir do not hold the doors or the train won't leave", I hope you enjoyed the reading, the five-minute trip to the South hemisphere, as well as your own writing that I'll expect in the section of 'comments'. I'm paying the coffee now, I'll go and mix myself again in the street jungle...