Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The No. 184.
By early October in the Colectivaizeishon project I’m already exhausted. In the last fortnight I’ve taken 15 of Buenos Aires’ bus lines from start to finish, plus two other buses I had to take due to wandering around La Boca with an outdated street map book. I’ve written 20,000 words about the journeys including the first two columns for La Razón. I’ve walked 200 blocks. I’ve taken 15 buses, but I’ve still got 126 to go. After the first day on the buses, I got home and wrote for five hours straight. By the fifth day of this nonsense, worn out from the physical and mental strain, I get home and don’t even want to see another bus, never mind make up sarcastic jokes about them.
Several different bus lines from puente saavedra line up along Av Cabildo (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)
It’s the third time in a week that I’ve walked the 30 blocks to Puente Saavedra to take the bus that then takes me back along the 30 blocks I’ve just walked. I know I could easily cheat and start the journeys at Cabildo and Juramento and no one would know any different, but I’d know. As my mum used to say when I was a boy, and she still says it because she’s transmogrified into a really nagging conscience, when you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself. Clearly, my mother forgets a certain Maradona goal in 1986.
I wish I didn’t have to cover these 30 blocks because there really isn’t much to say about Av. Cabildo in Núñez, the northernmost barrio of Buenos Aires. Four years ago, this area was completely foreign to me and I was scared of what awaited me whenever I crossed under Puente Saavedra to go to piano classes in Florida, which is a town in the province of Buenos Aires, not the place where old New Yorkers retire to. Being afraid of the wealthy Zona Norte is up there with being slightly afraid of my neighbour’s barking poodle on the list of things I discreetly show to people still labouring under the delusion that I am a real man.
But later I got a job as a scriptwriter for a producer in Núñez, and I liked the barrio so much that I moved closer to it (I’m one of many people who live in the skankier part of dreadfully unhip Belgrano and say they live in Núñez in a desperate bid to look cool. I like to call this area Belgrúñez.) It was this producer, Faivre Hermanos, who gave me my first gig as a writer, the first to believe in me as a writer and pay me to write, and I will be eternally grateful to them for giving me this start, not least because it saved me from having to complete an unnecessarily labyrinthine novel that made Liberace look unpretentious.
An everyday scene of a fabric store along Av Cabildo. (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)
As a consequence of living the last three years a few blocks from Av. Cabildo, I find it harder to write about Belgrúñez than some other barrio on the other side of the city, because I’ve stopped seeing it through the eyes of a foreigner. This is partly why I’m writing Colectivaizeishon now, before the whole city seems so terribly quotidian and I have nothing original to say about it. I know that in the eyes of the Argentines I’ll always be a foreigner, because even though they famously think of themselves as a country of immigrants, they very much see things as “us” and “them”, where “them” is immigrants from the last 30 years and “us” is anyone who can trace their Argentine lineage back to the French Basque royal family, a dirt-poor Sicilian village or some sixteenth-century Syrian family who once owned a whole northern province (and very often all three of these at once.) An English friend moved to Buenos Aires thirty years ago, during the last military government, and still has to answer the same three questions that Argentines always ask us, the not-really-Argentines.
These three questions never vary, and I know this from conversations I’ve had with thousands of foreigners here. The first is always “where are you from?” and the second “have you been here long?” So far, so good, most of us would ask the same. But then comes the third question: “do you like Buenos Aires?” Note, oh patient reader, that you have just told your interlocutor that you have lived in this city for 10, 20, maybe 30 years, and it still occurs to them to ask whether you like it. Now, there are obviously things we don’t like: the cordilleras of dog shit on the pavement, the inability of the average Argentine motorist to understand that beeping his or her horn will accomplish no more than making every person in that block hate the average Argentine motorist, and the fact that the simplest bureaucratic procedure takes up half your working week. But do you really think that a foreigner with the means to go anywhere in the world would stay in Buenos Aires half their life if they didn’t like it? I know some cases, but they are very scarce and very embittered. In general, it’s the Argentines who hate Buenos Aires. Us foreigners love it, which is why we come here and end up staying, even though the fourth question in this inevitable litany is “do you like dulce de leche?” My own response to this will require a whole chapter of its own.
Going back to where we were before the fifth paragraph got all tangential on our arses, what can anyone write about Belgrano? I think it’s one of those barrios where you rarely hear people say “my barrio” with the kind of exaggerated pride you find in the locals of, say, Villa Crespo or La Boca. Moving to Belgrano is like having sex when you’re married: it’s functional and safe and you don’t have to put much thought it into. You’re never going to see a sign on Av. Cabildo, such as you see in La Boca, declaring “Welcome to the Republic of Belgrano”. At most, in Colegiales (trendy-without-trying-to-be-trendy barrio between Palermo and Belgrano) there is a sign pointing forwards to Belgrano and back to Palermo, in case you have second thoughts and want to go back (we passed this sign the day we moved from Palermo to Belgrano, and had a moment’s hesitation.) Not even the biggest club in the Argentine second division boasts about being from Belgrano. Although River Plate’s stadium is within the limits of Belgrano, they call themselves el Club de Núñez. To look cool, probably.
Flower seller along Av Cabildo. (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)
But, however and notwithstanding all the abovementioned, I like Belgrano. I like how, unlike Palermo, there are hardware shops and fishmongers instead of chi-chi shoe shops and restaurants twisting semantics to push up their prices. It’s true that the only time I entered a hardware shop in the last three years was to buy wall plugs so that my father-in-law would do a 400-mile roundtrip to put up some shelves for me, but I do find their presence comforting. I like being close to Chinatown and the kitsch shopping galleries on Avenida Cabildo with their tobacconists and record shops. And I like the fact that it isn’t a cool barrio, so you only have to make the slightest effort in order to become the coolest person on your street. A natty hat, perhaps, or a pair of coloured socks.
And I like how I have the same birthday as Manuel de Belgrano, after whom my barrio (feel that pride!) is named. Here’s a story I love telling because it makes me look important: During the Falklands War, the Belgrano was sunk on 2nd May, and on 4th May the HMS Sheffield was sunk in retaliation. I was born in Sheffield, but live in Belgrano. I studied Spanish at the University of Sheffield, and taught English at the University of Belgrano, where I told this hilarious anecdote to my students. None of them laughed. It was their first day of classes, and they didn’t speak English. If I ever die in Belgrano, one 16th June like Manuel de Belgrano did, I hope at least one of the mourners will say “ah, fancy that.”
Daniel, cool article, but can you please change “concentration camp in Poland” to Nazi-German Concentration camp in occupied Poland. The term you used is misleading and hurtful to us Poles. Thanks
I note that the revisionism of the history of WW2 continues. The article first described “a Polish concentration camp”, then “a concentration camp in Poland”. These were camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, and Poles were imprisoned and suffered and died in them. Its hard to know what to believe any more, the Official Media History of WW2 is spinning so much.
It is not ‘picky’ to ask for accuracy in times when most people’s knowledge of history is very poor, so please take this on board – to avoid misunderstanding by readers.
” … concentration camps in Poland” doesn’t do the business – what can people deduce? that the camps were in some way set up or run by Poles. Clearly this did not happen, so to be clear needs something like ” … Nazi German concentration camps set up on occupied Polish territory”.
I will be grateful if the article were amended in the interests of clarity.
Interesting article but there was never any concentration camps in Poland. The camps were German concentration camps in occupied Poland. Anything else falsifies history and defames the memory of 6 million plus Poles who died in WW2 who paid dearly for resisting both the Germans and Russians.
Apologies for any offence caused, but you people really need to get out more. Sue, revisionism? Good grief.
The line will now be changed to “the French Basque royal family”. I look forward to the barrage of complaints from French Basques saying that they never had a royal family.
Poland did not exist as a nation during World War Two: it was incorporated into the German Reich and the Soviet empire. It therefore stands to reason that there could not have been any “concentration camps in Poland”. In the interest of historical accuracy, please correct your error.
Yes, Daniel, revisionism. Because of the constant barrage in the media of “Polish” concentration camps, ghettos, and death camps, the facts have been obscured and it has become accepted as conventional wisdom that it was the Poles who established and operated the camps. Your verbiage is akin to stating that Pearl Harbor was an “American” attack!
Dudes – young people do not know what a concentration camp is. And they certainly do not know if they were Polish or not.
By putting in Polish concentration camp you imply
- It was in Poland
- It was run by Poles
- It was Poland that contributed to those atrocities and ultimately responsible
This implication is really horrible especially since the Germans invaded Poland, created horrible concentration camps in German occupied Poland and then the Germans did those unimaginable atrocities.
So I think it really makes sense to just call them what they really are:
German concentration camps, run by German people, created in occupied Poland.
This is all. You just want to tell what really happened that Germany is responsible for those sick atrocities that make me ashamed of being a human being.
It would be nice to read some comments about the article itself, which was not about Poland or WW2 or concentration camps.
So… great story, as usual! I admire how you managed to write a story about riding bus 184 without actually mentioning the bus ride at all!!
I think in the questions that Argentines ask foreigners you could add “why are you living here”? (emphasis on the “why” and a puzzled look on their faces). I must also say that I can’t understand why you would need a whole new article for the answer to question 4, when it should clearly be a simple “I LOVE IT!!”.
Finally, I was going to start a heated debate where I criticised your insensitivity and lack of geopolitical knowledge of the city and its football clubs for saying that River is in Belgrano -but then I realised you were actually right!
Great article, but I’m puzzled by some of these comments. It seems to me that in the context of Daniel’s original line about “tracing lineage back” it is perfectly reasonable to use the current name for the place where these camps existed; it is widely known that modern Poland is the geographical location of some of these camps. And I do not agree that “it has become accepted as conventional wisdom that it was the Poles who established and operated the camps”… Really, I don’t know anyone who would think that. Nobody at all. Does anybody really think that?
To Daniel and Sonya: On times you have to suffer personally an issue to understand it. By the time the Jewish Holocaust had started my family were either dead, prisoners of war or had been deported to Kazakhstan by the Soviet Russians. I was not born until 20 years after WWII ended. That didn’t stop someone I had known for 15 years accusing me of being a Jew killer. If Poles are a little sensitive on this subject then you have to remember our suffering which when followed by people wrongly accusing you of committing the crime is a form of double suffering.
It may not be the “conventional wisdom” but it is increasing common. I have a 35 page document with quotes from experts on this issue. If you want I post some of them saying Poland is facing a “slide to guilt by association with the Holocaust – is still widespread”, the term “conflates the geographical location of the Nazi death camps with their historical perpetrators”, that the falsification in North America is reaching a critical point and if not opposed, will “strip Poles of their self-esteem and dignity.”, that Poles “face accusation after accusation over their involvement in the Holocaust” and even that Poles are accused of being responsible for the Final Solution.
Please try to understand our feeling and that the experts agree with us on this matter. Poland is wrongly being associated with the Holocaust and poor wording in the media is contributing to this.
Thanks you for changing the article.
You’re a brave man taking on *all* the buses in Buenos Aires Capital! It must come as some relief that they have now introduced the ‘Sube’ card, eliminating the need to have a pocket full of precious coins in order to pay your way.
One thing I notice about buses in the city is that they sometimes make a ‘wolf-whistle’ type noise, do you know what I am referring to? Whenever I hear it I assume that the (male) driver has spotted an attractive female (not difficult) and has some clever device in which to proudly & loudly advertise that he is not gay.
I also live in Belgrano and am very comfortable here. We have pretty much everything withing walking distance. I do think that interesting restaurants are a bit thin on the ground though. All the cool ones are in Palermo. I miss British Pubs. The ‘Irish’ Pubs are a bit fake.
As a foreigner that “third question” bugs me, partly because I know it is coming, and secondly because a simple yes or no isn’t enough; it requires some explanation of why you don’t like it (if that happens to be your opinion at the time of asking). I’m sure the things I don’t like about Argentina are the same things that irk the locals – politics, poverty, inflation etc. etc.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading your article. I’ll look out for later instalments!
Indeed, brave you are sir! To take all the buses in BA??? You must have stepped on some big toes in a previous life, to have to ride the buses now.
I read your articles with great interest. I say interest because being born Argentinian and lived ten years of my childhood there, the other forty in the U.S.A., it makes me wonder what makes the average Argentinian tick? Why are they so impatient with their fellow human being? How can they possibly think they are better then their South American neighbor? What makes them believe the center of the universe is Capital Federal, to be specific the Obelisco? I really can’t understand how a nation can put up with so much ineptitude from their governments for over a century, and keep asking for more?
Now, as I said I’m Argie and love both my countries and can safely say this dual citizenship sparked a curiosity about my bothers and sisters in Argentina since I was able to reason as an adult. Why can’t we grow up as an intelligent, considerate, respectful nation? It’s as if we are condemned to be an eternally adolescent, clueless, impetuous country. Never knowing the pride to have matured into a productive, serious, dependable and honest (note honest) member of the world community.
If anybody needs an example of the saying, if you don’t know your history you are condemned to repeat it, all you have to do is visit as Henry Kissinger said, the dagger pointed to the south pole, Argentina.