Argentina de porteña

I flat out have a big-time crush on Buenos Aires, no two ways about it. BA, Bs As, Porteño land, has such a magic touch to it, something that moves the soul and makes it want to shake and dance because life is beautiful.

 The people have gone through some rough hardships in the past few generations, and those tough times are not forgotten; every week, the women of BA come to Plaza de Mayo to commemorate the missing from the Dirty War, and curse those responsible for it. There are memorials popping up in the spots around the city, under bridges, where hundreds of bodies were recently discovered hidden by the past governments. The people are not quiet about their past, and there is no reason to be; they were wronged, sent to disgraceful war in the Falklands  to try and save face for the President, and suffocated politically under his crazy wife´s rule. That is history; the present generation has seen quite a bit itself. Going from the most prominent and developed country in South America to plunging into poverty overnight in 2001, people saw their families desperate, and life 180 for the worst. Now, the economy is slowly climbing, but it is a very slow crawl, and it is difficult to accept that I am essentially profiting off of their terrible exchange rate. There are laws stating that tourist attractions may charge two prices, one to Argentines, and one to foreigners, to which gringos are outraged. I am of mixed feelings; the price they give us is still so cheap by our standards, why not let them make some extra cash while staying in our price range?

  There is money in Argentina, plenty of it, it just happens to lie in few´s hands. The range of wealth is shocking; I remember seeing an entire family living on an old mattress behind a shop in the bus station, the children running around unaccompanied as the television did a special on how dangerous the station had gotten. And I also remember seeing the wealth of the few families with estancias, thousands of hectars of land for one family, land that they probably will never visit entirely as they live in the decadent apartments in the city.

  But despite this rift, there is something amongst porteños that keeps them moving and smiling. The hot, hot days where all anyone can do is sit on a shady stoop of a once glorious building and sip mate under the trees. The busy plazas with everyone running every which way while just as many people busy themselves watching. The hundreds of people in the extensive parks, whiling away the day with their families, complaining about work. Maybe it was an unreal slice of life that I got to see, but I felt that here, people do not feel stress as we know it. They may work in offices, they may take a VERY crowded subte home in the oppressive heat, but at the end of the day, people are smiling, kissing, hugging, laughing, crying, shouting, FEELING. And that is what I came for, the city that feels outwardly, that has no problem showing what they have gone through, what they are going through, that has a pride in showing the world what they are and where they are from. Porteños.