I had a beautiful week in Buenos Aires, and still have to upload some of the pictures I took. We started out on Wednesday morning by going to the MALBA, (free on Wednesdays), but didn't stay there long. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of modern art, not so surprising since I'm not a particulary modern person in general. My favorite thing in there was this very cool bench in one of the rooms that was carved out of a huge piece of tree root (or carved to look like it). It was comfortable to sit on and looked so impossibly twirly that I fell in love with it.
From there, we walked past a bunch of embassies towards Recoleta to see the big metal flower in the park (where is my map of Buenos Aires? Argh.) I took some pictures of buildings, but none even came close to this amazingly grand palace that I saw later in the week. It took up a whole city block. When we went to see what it was, we discovered that it was the "Palacio de Agua Corriente" or "Palace of Running Water" or "Water District". :-)
Anyway, back to Recoleta. There's a huge metal flower that opens and closes with the sun. The sheer magnitude of it was amazing. From there, we ate lunch at the design center and then stopped by the cemetery. I could have spent hours in the cemetery. It's like a little city in there, with 15-foot high mausoleums for family after family. And cats everywhere. In fact, there were cats all over Buenos Aires, wandering around. But cats definitely ruled the cemetery. Some of the crypts were not in such great condition, and occasionally you would get a sweet whiff of decay, which made me wonder what those cats are eating...but then I saw a man feeding some of the cats so at least they're not only eating dead bodies. :-)
I don't know why I liked the cemetery so much. The hushed alleyways? The amazing tombs? The greenery taking hold and engulfing some of the buildings? I don't know, but I definitely want to go back there again.
