Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The No. 47.

Buenos Aires school children (Photo: Buenos Aires city government)

Some primary school children get on the bus in their little white lab coats. These are standard school uniform in Argentina, because they’re cheap but, at the same time, aspirational. In my first year in Buenos Aires, it was always a cause of minor amusement to see these little people in their little white lab coats, since in England and most other sensible countries the only people who get to where such garments are scientists and their ilk. How I marvelled that here was a country so developed that by the age of six, these gifted children had already qualified as biochemists and astrophysicists and were on their way to the lab to fuse some more atoms.

I’m starting to like Liniers and the surrounding neighbourhoods of Versailles and Vélez Sarsfield. The 47 goes pretty much the length of Alejandro Margariños Cervantes, a pleasant tree-lined street with well-presented houses and PLO (People Like Oneself). I have no idea where I am, but I like it, and I know it’s not Villa Devoto, because it lacks anonymity.

One attractive thing about my fleeting idea of moving to a barrio like Liniers is seeing how people have turned their own houses into little steakhouses. You ring the bell, walk through their living room and have a meal in the back yard of a stranger. It’s a bit like the supper clubs and closed door restaurants you get in Palermo and elsewhere, but without them charging $200 per person. In fact, the home parrilla that the 47 goes past has a sign promising “Pork belly w/chips $30”. It’s like travelling back in time to pre-inflation 2005.

By the time I get home at night, I’ve got a whole house-moving plan to show the wife. After a brief conversation, it turns out we probably won’t be moving to Liniers in the near future. “Ni en pedo” were her exact, if somewhat predictable, words. “Not even if I was drunk.”

This is a great shame because there are little things in Liniers that I’m starting to like, on this my third visit to the barrio in two weeks. Little things like the butcher’s called El Rey del Carne (The King of Meat), whose logo is a photo of a random butcher with a garish crown badly photoshopped onto his head. Little things like the way the acronym of the football team Club Atlético Nueva Chicago spells out “C.A.N.CH.” and I can only lament that the founders did not add an “Argentino” or “de América” to the end of the name so that the club’s crest spelled out where the club played, “cancha” being the Argentine word for “stadium”. And little things like the big shop on Juan B. Justo and Gana that sells dining tables that turn into pool tables, in addition to a wide array of other indoor sports goods. As a native of a country that invented indoor sports and considers them sports so that you can say you play a sport without having to go to any more effort than picking up a dart and throwing it six feet, I love indoor sports and want to live in a barrio where I can pass by the biggest indoor sports shop in Latin America and stare into the window, drooling.

Amid so many minor things I begin to lose my major and irrational fear of the breezeblocks. Near the Club Deportivo Español stadium, where Parque Avellaneda turns into Villa Lugano, I begin to see hundreds of monoblocks which a few weeks earlier would have instilled great panic in me. And yet, the people I see around here are normal folk, teenagers mucking about at the bus stop, kids coming home from school, people who while not exactly PLO (People Like Oneself) are at least DWP (Decent Working People). I see very few marauding bands of murderers or kidnappers. In fact, if I’m honest, I see none. There are couple of shifty-looking youths, but that’s nothing to me. I grew up in Stockport, the town that invented the concept of the shifty-looking youth.

Under construction (Photo: Matías Garabedian)

In Villa Riachuelo, the barrio with the arguable fortune to be named after the third-filthiest river in the world, I see new monoblocks being built, modern buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in Palermo Viejo, where they demolish impeccable mansions so that trendy people can have their expensive flat with rooftop swimming pool and function room on Humboldt and Nicaragua. [Humboldt and Nicaragua are the names of two streets in Palermo. Don’t be imagining a German botanist and Central American republic being razed to the ground for the sake of luxury apartments.] It occurs to me that here lies the key to stop so many grand old buildings from being demolished in certain areas of Buenos Aires for the sake of building enormous, faceless buildings without providing an adequate provision of running water and parking and other provisionables. My idea is this: gentrification for Villa Riachuelo, Villa Lugano, Villa Soldati and other Villas which are not villas in the shanty town sense of the word even though many people think they are.

All it takes is for a group of capital investors and estate agents to build in these Villas the following premises: some bars where they charge you $40 for a stingy shot of whisky that costs $40 the bottle in the supermarket; some parrillas where they charge you $20 just for the honour of sitting down in the premises; and some clothes shops with hilarious names like ‘¡Vete al Diablo, chévere!’ and ‘Las Chabombas Mágicas’ where the saleswomen wear skintight jeans and sell you clothes whose durability is inversely proportional to their price. With these simple capitalist gestures, within six months all the people who typically move to a different barrio simply because it’s “in” will be queuing up to buy themselves a loft in Villa Lugano. That way, the south of the city gets developed and they can stop screwing with us who like Palermo Viejo (PS. If you say Palermo Soho, you’re a twat) as it was. That is, as it was around about 2000, not as it was around about 1980 when it was more dangerous that Villa Soldati and not even the most daring of hipsters would dare set foot in it.

Chori vendors in Liniers (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Sorry about calling you a twat just now. Back in Liniers, I decide I’m going to show how comfortable and safe I feel in this barrio by eating a choripán at one of the stands that inhabit the thin strip between Avenida Rivadavia and the railway tracks, with their cumbia and their plastic Quilmes napkin holders and their ignorance of hygiene standards, where the only fridges are for the drinks and all the other ingredients are left out in the open air. The chorizo in question is one that one might describe as “picado grueso”, which would be fine if it was coarse-cut salami, but which in the case of the present choripán means huge chunks of indigestible gristle. I end up leaving half the chori on my plate, and the men at the stand look at me like a fancy gringo who can’t appreciate a proper Argentine chorizo and should go back to fancy Palermo. It’s at this moment that I know, even before my wife rejects my great plan to move the family to Liniers, that the people of this barrio will never accept me as one of their own.

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.”

The nine rolling up Piedras (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

There are Buenos Aires bus journeys that inspire, and there are Buenos Aires bus journeys that dull the will to live. The journey on the 9 is one of the latter.

The number 9 has the old-fashioned buses, with antediluvian ticket machines that you have to thump to get your ticket. I get my first palindrome ticket: 000989. I know it’s not a perfect palindrome from the point of view of those who trouble themselves with such matters, but it’s my palindrome ticket and I’m calling a double palindrome.

Getting a palindrome ticket is a meaningful life happening in Buenos Aires. What does it mean? I don’t know.

I go past Del Tigre street and wonder if there’s a street called Ojo del Tigre, or Eye of the Tiger Street. There isn’t. I notice that while all the greengrocers in the city have agreed to sell three bunches of spinach for five pesos, the Frutería Daiana in Pompeya is selling four bunches for the same price. Can you imagine the comparative strength the people of Pompeya must have if they’re eating 33% more spinach than the rest of Buenos Aires? The sons of Pompeya are the sons of Popeye.

The bus driver has a face of a thousand journeys on the 9. He looks like he hasn’t slept for a week and when he does manage to drop off, his wife injects fluid into the bags under his eyes so that they swell up and he looks older than her. It takes us twenty-five minutes to cover the eleven blocks from Esmeralda and Avenida de Mayo to Esmeralda and Santa Fe I amuse myself by recalling the first Argentine joke I ever learnt:

Q: How do you turn stones into emerald?

A: By crossing Rivadavia.

For full enjoyment of this joke, you need to know that the street called Piedras (stones) turns into Esmeralda (emerald) after it crosses Av. Rivadavia, but if you laughed without knowing full background to the joke then full credit to you and your postmodernist worldview.

Waiting for the 9 (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

I get off the number 9 at Retiro and get on another 9 going back to Puente Alsina. I’d like to stay on the bus to see where it goes after dropping off the last passenger. I’m pretty sure there’s a private beach there behind the bus station, where the drivers stretch out on the sand while unemployed starlets give them non-alcoholic cocktails and foot rubs and perform a storming rendition of a selection of songs from The Sound of Music. But the bus driver kicks me off at the last stop, I’ll never know for sure. Let’s just agree that that’s what happens, and move on.

On the journey back I have the arguable pleasure of listening to the phone conversation of the young lady sitting next to me with her dyed orange hair and inauthentic sport jacket. She is providing a friend with the minutiae of a somewhat complicated relationship, and I keep count in my notebook of how many times she uses the world “boluda”, literally a woman with big balls or an idiot, but more frequently used as a verbal crutch by people with self-expression difficulties, in this case pronounced “wolúa”. It’s probably classist of me to say so but it gets easy laughs. In the ten blocks between Marcelo T and Avenida de Mayo she says “wolúa” some twenty-two times, in addition to nine “nada” (which means “nothing” but is to certain Porteños what “y’know” is to David Beckham), six friendly “shut up” which I believe is an international mannerism, although this woman’s shut ups usually come out as “shut up big-balled woman”, four uses of the word “mal” which means “bad” but is used here as “a lot”, and one “too much”, which despite the existence of a perfectly acceptable equivalent in Spanish, many Argentines choose to render in English, and usually as “too match”, to show what idiots they are. But then she gives her seat to an old lady with a walking stick while I’m scribbling down my classist diatribe, so who’s the twat now?

As we go past Parque Patricios, I have one of many moments during this bus thing where I learn something that I would never have learnt had I chosen not to take all the buses in Buenos Aires but instead stay at home playing Scrabble against myself like I usually do. I see a poster commemorating the anniversary of 28 September 1966, when eighteen young Peronists hijacked an Aerolíneas Argentinas plane and forced it to land on the Falkland Islands, where they flew the Argentine flag for a bit before being told to do one. Some of them were killed. It’s a story that causes a strong impression on me. Those were different times, times when you could trust Aerolíneas Argentinas to take off on time and have enough fuel to reach the islands without crashing. I bet the food was better as well. (For those readers who have never had the dubious pleasure of flying with Aerolíneas Argentinas, it’s like Easy Jet only full price.)

Coming to the end of the route, we have to wait five minutes at the level crossing. You don’t often see level crossings in big cities like New York or London, and the city government is working on getting  rid of them as it’s finally dawned that Argentine drivers are too stupid to stop at the barrier. I’ll be sorry to see them go. As a boy, it was always a disappointment to get to a level crossing and find it open.

Granted, I was a nascent trainspotter, but who doesn’t feel that frisson of excitement of waiting for a train to go past? Trains are magical, and if we’re not capable of giving five minutes of our time to admire the passing of these glorious engines, then something is seriously wrong. It’s a matter of reverence. The train is the best form of transport, so it’s only right that the level crossing hierarchy be observed here. They should bring back the trams, while they’re at it. Pulled by horses.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 19.

Avenida Melian (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

Most of the buses that go from Saavedra Bridge to Once do so via avenues Cabildo, Santa Fe and Pueyrreddón. The 19 isn’t like other buses. The 19 is a maverick, a bus that plays by its own rules, a bus that knows that the best way to get somewhere isn’t always the shortest way. In short, the 19 is what is popularly known as “vueltero”, meaning that, rather like my narrative style, it goes round and round and back on itself without ever really getting anywhere.

And so we quickly get off nippy avenida Cabildo and head down avenida San Isidro for one block, turn immediately down Arias for a couple of blocks, and so on like that until we get to Once some twenty-five streets later. But it’s a quieter, more picturesque route, and really, when was the last time you were in a hurry to get to Once? Once is so called because that’s the number of times people hurry there before deciding they would do well to tarry in the future. You can’t beat a bit of tarrying where Once is concerned. Plus, the undeniable roundaboutness of this bus route means that I get to go past the premises of one of many former employers, the Buenos Aires Japanese School.

When I started at this school I had an interview with the director of English studies and the school principal, both of them Japanese who had worked in Buenos Aires on a three-year jolly and were gearing up to go back to the real world, or “Nihon” as they called it. (I lied to you just now about why Once is called Once. Sorry. Once actually means “Eleven”, as in 11^th of September.) The principal was an old and very curious fellow. During the interview, he’d ask me questions in English, such as “Where you from?”

I’d answer “Manchester”.

“Ah, sooooo desuka?” the principal would say (I trust you have a rudimentary grasp of Japanese. It’s not that 11^th of September, by the way.) Then he’d nod his head and sit in silence for about thirty seconds, deeply contemplating my answer. He asked me about four questions, and after every one of my answers he’d do the same: “sooooo desu”, head nodding, thirty seconds of silent contemplation, which may have actually been an attempt to recall his basic primary school English. To be honest, I liked this guy’s interview technique, once (that’s once in the usual English sense, not Once the area of Buenos Aires named after the 11th September 1888) I’d got over my own discomfort with these long silences. Can you imagine that kind of silence between three porteños? It’s a miracle if the three of them don’t all speak at the same time. This place, I quickly decided, was the place for me. (11th September, by the way, was when Domingo Faustino Sarmiento died.)

It didn’t take me long to realise that teaching English to Japanese kids isn’t the same as teaching English to Argentine adults. Unlikely though it may seem, the latter group speaks English with all the grace and fluency of Prince Charles compared with the former. After two months at the school, I’d given up on the possibility of ever teaching them to conjugate verbs or form coherent sentences and was concentrating on teaching them all the names of the fruits, which was the only thing they were interested in, apart from calling me rude names in Spanish (Sarmiento was kind of the father of education in Argentina, and advocated encouraging British and American teachers to immigrate to Argentina. He clearly didn’t have my type in mind.)

Japanese School (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

My most frequent lesson was “Fruit Salad”. Every pupil had to stand inside a hula hoop with all the hula hoops laid out in a circle, and I gave each pupil the name of a fruit. The pupil in the middle had to shout out the name of a fruit, and all the students who were that fruit had to swap places and occupy another hula hoop. Hours of fun. Or twenty minutes of fun, which was how long the classes were. If the pupil shouted “Fruit Salad”, they all had to swap places. Oh, the mayhem. This accounted for about eighty percent of all my classes. Somewhere in Japan right now, there are several teenagers who can’t speak a word of English but can enumerate all the fruits you’d care to mention.

End of term brought free outings to the best Japanese restaurants in the city, after which the wives would go home with their kids and the men would go to one of various Japanese karaoke bars. These are secret places and effectively exclusive for Japanese, mainly because even if you or I could find them, we wouldn’t be able to afford the entrance fee and the whisky. And these Japanese drank whisky. In fact, the only drinks available were whisky and water, and in the great Japanese tradition every teacher had his own bottle behind the bar with his name on a label. Before they’d downed their first Chivas, they’d start singing. You have not experienced everything Buenos Aires has to offer until you’ve sung “We Are The World” and “Shima Uta” with two middle-aged Japanese men in a speakeasy in Barrio Norte.

When I left the school in 2006, we went out for sushi once again and I was asked to say a few words, and since I’m rarely the kind of person who turns down the chance to speak about himself to a captive audience, I told them this story:

When I’d started at the school three years earlier, I was told that I’d be teaching my classes in the “prayer room”, which I understood to be a kind of chapel, as we all had to take our shoes off before entering. The room didn’t look much like a chapel, just a big TV and a new carpet, but I knew these Asians to be spartan in their places of worship and thought nothing of it. A couple of years went by until one day I asked Marcelo, one of the few Argentine teachers at the school, if that day’s class was in “the chapel”.

“The what?”

“The chapel. You know, the prayer room.”

“No, boludo, that’s the playroom!”

“So why do we have to take our shoes off when we go in?”

“To keep the carpet clean!”

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 7.

Eva Peron mural by night. (Photo: Srikanth Jandhyala)

I’m going along avenida Eva Perón and Plaza Virreyes when I realise I’m 35 years old and I still haven’t seen the musical ‘Evita!’ and have never taken the Premetro, the diddiest tram in the world. The two things are related. It is a little-known fact that the Premetro originally had lyrics written by Tim Rice, though they didn’t use them in the end, and few people know that Evita! was originally going to have another branch through Barrio Piedrabuena up to the avenida General Paz.

An hour later I see for the first time the new mural of Evita on the side of the former Ministry of Public Works. I can’t make out whether the Evita in the mural is singing or shouting into her microphone, but she looks angry. I’m not surprised she’s angry, I’d be angry too if Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote a musical about my life and then Madonna  played me in the film adaptation. (In contrast, if I was Jesus and some Chilean metallers did a metal adaptation of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and called it Jesucristo Metalstar, I’d be pretty pleased)

Continuing with the question of Eva Perón, and treading very carefully on eggshells for fear of losing half my readership, it is a little-known fact that between 1952 and 1955, the province of La Pampa was called Eva Perón Province, and that the Province of El Chaco was called Juan Perón Province? Which means that if they hadn’t had their names changed to what they are today, the model Carolina Ardohaín would be known as Eva Peroncita, and the folk singer Juanperoneño Palavecino would never have enjoyed so much success with such a name. (Before you all write in with surprisingly knowledgeable comments about Argentine folklore, I know Chaqueño Palavecino isn’t really from El Chaco.)

I don’t have much of a political stance, and am neither pro- or anti-Peronist (you have to be careful with these Peronists, there’s no arguing with them. I’ve been at parties where staunch Peronists have stormed out because somebody criticised the president’s shoes. I wish I was joking.) I’m one of those uncommitted centre-leftish liberals, no backbone and admittedly loathsome. Basically, I believe that there is good and bad in everyone, and we learn to live when we learn to give each other what we need to survive, together alive. And if that sounds corny, it’s because I lifted it from “Ebony and Ivory”.

Politics, like Argentina, is divided between the rich and the poor, except for three families from Caballito who make up what remains of the Argentine middle class and still vote UCR. And I believe, dear reader, that there isn’t so much difference between a rich man and a poor man. Allow me to illustrate. I see too stray horses along the number 7’s route, and I reflect on how if a poor man has a horse, he might work hard to save up some money to buy himself a moped. The years go by and with the fruit of his sweat he’s finally able to afford his first car. He works and works, buys increasingly luxurious cars, until one fine day he comes CEO of a company and moves to a private polo country club and buys himself a horse. So it is that the only people in Argentina who have horses are the very poor and the very rich.

And I believe there is something that unites us all as Argentines (and also those people who try to pass themselves off as Argentines but are convincing no one with that accent), and that thing is the choripán, or sausage sandwich. In a small square to the side of Avenida Saénz, a blues-rock band plays on a makeshift stage. Some old women watch the band with typical faces of old women watching a blues-rock band, and they’re not the most appreciative faces of said genre, while other locals smile and enjoy the music, but they all eat choripán from a grill set up on the pavement. And  I think to myself, in that Carrie Bradshaw manner of mine: How much happiness must be related to this humble sausage?

As I never eat chorizo at home, as I get all my calories from alcohol, and I rarely eat choripán from street stands, as I still have my sanity, I only ever eat choripán at asados, birthdays, weddings and other celebrations (but never on sad occasions, such as funerals or when ‘Marley and Me’ is on cable). If it is the choripán that unites us in our happiness, and politics that divides us, wouldn’t the country be a much more united place if we cancelled all presidential elections and instead had the biggest choripaneada (‘sausage party’, but not in the way you’re thinking) the world has ever seen? And if the weather’s nice, get all the rich and poor people to bring their horses and we’ll have a big horsey parade. (I’m tempted to comment that doing away with democracy and replacing it with a sausage sandwich and a plastic glass of Pepsi is also a fairly Peronist thing to do, but this would compromise my alleged political neutrality.)

Villa Soldati at the end of the 'Samore' branch of the 7 (Photo: violenti porti)

I’m just thinking about all this when I realise, and not for the first time today, that I haven’t the slightest idea where I am. This is the fourth time I’ve taken the number 7, because it was the last bus I took in my first attempt to take all the buses in  2009. There is a startling abundance of low-cost housing and motorways that were here neither two years ago nor four hours ago when I took this bus to Retiro. Either the city government’s meeting its housing plan targets a lot faster than its critics might say, or the number 7 has got a second route that I was previously oblivious to. This is a problem, as I have to get to the terminal in Parque Avellaneda to take the 107 back to my distant Belgrano. I’m about to soil myself for the second time in a week, just four days after my previous self-soiling episode as the 80 went past Ciudad Oculta.

“I stop here,” the bus driver shouts at me.

“Where’s the 107 terminal?” I shout from the back of the bus.

“What terminal? This is the other route. Barrio Samore.”

Do you know what Barrio Samore is? When the moon hits your eyes like a big pizza pie, that’s Samore. This Barrio Samore looks nothing like the Samore in the song.

Over the coming six months, I learn what thoroughly good and helpful people bus drivers are. The driver of the errant 7 explains that I have to walk a block, take the number 50 and get off at Eva Perón and Medina. I want to ask him if he doesn’t mind walking me that one block, but he’s a busy man and it turns out that my preconception of danger bears scant danger to reality, once again. In fact, although I worry about all the things that might happen going through all the poorer neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires, the only sign of violence I come across today is two rich blokes having a bit of a drunken scrap on Juramento and Vuelta de Obligado, five blocks from my Belgrúñez mansion.

Lead photo by Round Indigo Rock.

Photo: Kelsey Marie Bell

Boedo is on the cusp of being cool. A crop of new cafes and stores celebrating the arts have recently emerged as fixtures along the avenue for which the barrio is named. However, while the press has begun to take note, the tourist population still remains largely ignorant of these new ventures inside and around this area defined by avenidas Independencia and San Juan, around the 4000 mark.

Having pushed my way through crowded sidewalks all week and always wanting to be the first to uncover new trends, I decide to check Boedo out for myself.

My first stop is Esquina Homero Manzi, named for beloved tango author and cinema director Homero Manzi who mentioned the location, San Juan and Boedo, in his milonga song, ‘Sur’. The song paints a nostalgic picture of the past and is older than Boedo the neighbourhood, which was not formally defined until its borders were drawn in 1972:

Old San Juan and Boedo, and all of the sky,
Pompeii and what was before the flood.
The mane of your girlfriend in your memory
and how your name flowered in the farewell.
The corner that belonged to the blacksmith, the mud and the land,
your home, your path and the settlement,
and a perfume of herbs and alfalfa
that again fills my heart.

Homero Manzi plaque (Photo: Kelsey Marie Bell)

The city has done its part to enhance Boedo’s appeal so that it may again be remembered in the hearts of many as it was in the heart of Manzi by erecting statues down the avenue which bears the barrio’s name, and creating a tourism and cultural map and website that illuminates just how much those who have yet to visit are missing.

A quick look at the map ‘boedo+10’ reveals I seemed to have stumbled into another Buenos Aires theatre district. Teatro Boedo XXI (Av Boedo 853, www.teatroboedoxxi.blogspot.com) is particularly popular and tonight there are hordes of people entering. There’s something here for everyone, with plays created specifically for kids, adolescents, and adults as well as choreography and yoga classes on the premises.

For those who’ve worked up an appetite, nearby is a haven for both art enthusiasts and foodies alike known as Pan y Arte, (Av Boedo 878, www.panyarte.com.ar). This hybrid between a café and a gallery is a creation of the Marín family from Mendoza, and their subsequent openings of eateries and art centres has sparked the interests of similar minded individuals who are now giving pause to the once faded barrio. Pan y Arte has become notorious for the buena onda that would, naturally it seems, accompany any establishment replete with white and orange walls and playful artwork. Those inside seem to be absorbing this palpable energy; I walk into a lively establishment with friends jumping up to greet one another with kisses and exuberant smiles and chatting animatedly with wild hand gestures fueled by cafe cortado.

While the many recent additions to Boedo seem to suggest a vested interest in creativity, the area has always been a haven for authors of literary works and tango lyrics, poets, and sculptors. Various street corners bear plaques with these artists’ names to remind visitors of this special aspect of the area’s history.

There seems to be something about the crux of San Ignacio and Av Boedo that gets one’s creative juices flowing. In the 1920s prominent Socialist party members met and voiced their opinions on a podium near the intersection.

Pan y Arte (Photo: Kelsey Marie Bell)

Currently though, most visitors remember the site for two other reasons:  the famous sculptor Francisco Reyes who has been honoured in that the esquina now bears his name, and the divine Café Margot (Av Boedo 857). Literary types seem to burrow in here under the soft glow of the lights and draw inspiration from the elegance of waiters in fine attire contrasted against the aged brick walls.

Should your tastes be more mainstream, and your goal be to fight your own hunger rather than plot a revolution, there’s the Trianon Confiteria (Av. Boedo 845, www.confiteriatrianon.com.ar). The establishment advertises itself as the birthplace of the traditional sandwich de pavita, or turkey sandwich. Yet despite this deli delight, the restaurant’s real forte appears to be its expansive menu of facturas, cakes and delights that are so well presented they are impossible to ignore.

In case those who crave heavier fare are beginning to worry, fret not! There are quite a few parrillas, including Cosechero (Beauchef 2000), which adds live folk music to your dining experience.

There is too of course, cena con tango, lest it be forgotten that Boedo was the birthplace of the dance. To celebrate this piece of history, head over to the dinner show at Esquina Osvaldo Pugliese (Av. Boedo 909), or Bien Bohemio (Sánchez de Loria 745), if you’ve wandered a bit north.

Finally, for after-dinner activities check out Cossab Bar (Carlos Calvo 4199, www.pubcossab.com.ar), which has possible the largest selection of beers in the capital, many of them home brewed or artisan. After having drank so much malbec it seems to be leaking out of your pores, I promise it will be a welcome change!

And if you can still stand after all the rubias and negras, why not finish your night off at Klub Killer (Castro Barros 809, www.klubkiller.com.ar), a bar that looks like nothing from the street, but is a wonderful intimate hangout inside a traditional casa chorizo.

Boedo is accessible by the station which bears its name on the E subte line. For more information get your hands on the boedo+10 Mapa Turístico Cultural or check out www.boedomas10.com.ar.