Buses waiting at the Retiro terminal (photo: Beatrice Murch)

The Urban Transport Workers Union (UTA) stopped all long-distance bus routes on Thursday as part of a strike. The union is demanding a 23% wage increase. Representatives said that the strike will last “until there are solutions”.

More specifically, the group is protesting against “threats of layoffs, job insecurity and the absence of wage agreement”.

The businesses are looking to eliminate secondary drivers for each unit and install 8-hour driving shifts.

“The stoppage is national, but only for the long-distance busses. There is no agreement in the joint (negotiations) that have taken place since 1st January. We are going to end the strike when the problems are solved,” union spokesman Mario Caligari said on Thursday morning.

In Buenos Aires, the Retiro station is largely affected by the strike. Some 22,000 long-distance bus drivers are believed to be participating in the stoppage.

Furthermore, in the province of Córdoba, there has been no urban transit for six days due to strikes. The Coniferal, City of Córdoba, and Tamse bus companies, all members of the UTA, have stopped services for the strike. Thousands of Córdoba residents have been affected.

Meanwhile, Córdoba city government is asking for reparations following a violent strike by drivers last Tuesday that caused damage to the Palacio 6 de Julio.

City bus and train fares will increase tomorrow while subte fares will remain the same for now. The minimum bus fare will increase from $1.10 to $1.50 and the minimum train fare will increase from $0.70 to $1.00. Passengers who pay without a SUBE card will have a doubled fare.

Minister of Interior and Transportation Florencio Randazzo announced today that these increases will be implemented tomorrow 21st December. He said that fares for retirees, beneficiaries of the Universal Child Allowance, maids, veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas War, and primary and secondary school students will remain the same.

Rendazzo’s goal for the future is that SUBE cards will recognise each passenger’s status and charge them accordingly. This project is a work in progress, he explained.

In other transport news, after 14 hours of legislative debate on Wednesday, the bill to transfer the subte services from the national government to the City of Buenos Aires was passed.

“There is no plan on increases in subte rates in the short term,” mayor Mauricio announced today.

The bill that was agreed upon Wednesday will increase city road tolls and also increase car registration fees for high-end vehicles. With these increases, Macri expects to collect $550 million – $600 million. He estimates that this will help compensate for the $360 million that the national government will not be providing after January.

During negotiations, Macri withdrew his plan of increasing $0.40 per litre of petrol but did agree to increase the stamp duty. He also attempted to limit the union’s striking power but settled for an agreement that unions will have to announce strikes 48 hours beforehand.

At least 30 people were wounded this morning after a 109 bus crashed into a building on the corner of Paraguay and Agüero in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Palermo around 8.00am.

Although there were no fatalities, at least three people are reported to be in critical condition. Those with serious injuries have been transferred to local hospitals; others were treated at the site of the accident.

Witnesses described a dispute between the driver and a passenger who lacked the correct fare as the cause of the accident. Alfredo Traverso, head of transit for the 109 line, confirmed these reports: “There was a discussion with the passenger, who hit the driver and knocked him out. The driver lost control [of the vehicle] as a result, which caused the collision with the building,” he told local media.

Passage on all buses in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area costs between $1.10 and $2.00 with an electronic SUBE card and between $2.00 and $4.00 with coins, depending on the length of the journey.

Traverso described the driver as “experienced”, having worked for the company for at least five years. He is among those hospitalised.

Since the crash, both Paraguay and Agüero have been temporarily blocked to traffic; municipal and federal police are using Gallo and Mansilla as detour routes.

On a press conference this morning, minister of the interior and transportation Florencio Randazzo announced a series of changes that will be introduced to the use of SUBE, the card used to pay for subte, bus, and train fares in Buenos Aires.

Randazzo explained that from today onwards, once the SUBE card runs out of credit, $7.50 will be automatically credited. This amount will be then discounted when the user tops up their card’s credit. He reiterated that the use of the SUBE card is still necessary to receive subsidised fares on buses. For those who choose to pay with coins, the minimum bus fare is $2, whilst the SUBE subsidised fare remains at $1.10.

The minister also announced that the card can be purchased online, on the SUBE website. It has a cost of $15, plus a $10 postage fee. According to the information on the website, the card is delivered within 10 working days. Foreigners can obtain their SUBE card by showing their passport and completing the relevant forms at any authorised distribution centre.

Daniel Tunnard at GrinGo Stand Up (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his MAJOR PLUG ALERT! THIS TUESDAY 5th JUNE THE WORLD-FAMOUS GRINGO STAND-UP COMEDY SHOW IN ENGLISH (FEATURING ME AND FOUR OTHER WONDERFULLY FUNNY PEOPLE) MOVES TO SAN TELMO, BECAUSE LET’S FACE IT, NO ONE WANTS TO GO TO CONGRESO ON A COLD TUESDAY NIGHT. SO COME DOWN TO CAFÉ RIVAS, ESTADOS UNIDOS 302 (CORNER OF BALCARCE) ON TUESDAY AT 9PM FOR THE BEST ENGLISH-BASED COMEDY EXPERIENCE IN THE COUNTRY. 30 PESOS, DETAILS HERE ADVANCED BOOKINGS HERE.

Ahem. Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 22.

Millions of things are happening in Buenos Aires at this very moment. A man in Villa Devoto places a bleach bottle with this phone number on top of his Peugeot 504 and wonders exactly when Argentines decided this was the most effective way to sell a car. An old man in San Cristóbal throws crumbs to the pigeons, oblivious to the fact that the pigeons find this quite patronizing, as if they were incapable of finding their own food. And on ‘Salven el Millón’(known elsewhere as ‘Million Dollar Money Drop’), the best programme on Argentine TV (the fact that this is far and away the best programme in Argentina speaks volumes about the sorry state of Argentine programming) Susana Giménez asks which province the town of Londres is in. The competing couple bet $40,000 on Santiago del Estero. The answer is Catamarca.

For the first time in Colectivaizeishon I go past Plaza de Mayo and the Cathedral. I’d love to know the meaning of so many of these architectural references to be found in the buildings in the old part of the city, but the philosophy of Colectivaizeishon is that you can read about that kind of thing elsewhere and Colectivaizeishon can stick to making sarcastic jokes about the quotidian minutiae of Buenos Aires life. One of the few architectural references I do know is regarding the frontispiece above the Cathedral entrance. This depicts the reencounter between Joseph and Jacob (or was it Abraham?) in the book of Genesis, which symbolizes the reunification of Buenos Aires with the rest of Argentina in 1860 (or was it 1862. So of all the curious stories that exist about Buenos Aires architecture, I’ve managed to commit to memory one of the least interesting ones and can’t even remember its most salient points. (Pub quizzes in 1850s Britain often ended in tantrums and name-calling when the question ‘What is the capital of Argentina?’ was answered correctly as ‘Paraná’ but the quizmaster had been using an outdated encyclopaedia and arrogantly insisted it was Buenos Aires. Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ attests to such a dispute.)

The 22 is one of the few buses that connects Retiro with the south without just going straight down Paseo Colón, which is good news for the present author who was running out of things to say about said Paseo, except to say that its name in English could facetiously be translated as ‘Colon Stroll’. In my first years in Buenos Aires I thought Paseo Colón was a tree-lined pedestrian walkway next to the Colón Theatre. This is patently not the case. Only now is such a walkway being built, and it’s called Vatican Square. I am as oblivious to the reasons for this name as am I to finding a punch line for this paragraph.

Starbucks on the corner of Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Instead of doing the Colon Stroll, the 22 takes me through San Telmo. For many years, when I lived in Palermo and any bar, restaurant or shoe shop more than five blocks from my house was a bar, restaurant or shoe shop not worth going to, I used to go to San Telmo but once a year and every time I did it was a letdown. You know when you go to a foreign city that’s supposed to be really cool, but you spend all your time wandering round the main square bored off your tits because you’re too tight to shell out for a guidebook and so haven’t got a clue where all the groovy people in town hang out? That’s what San Telmo was like to me for many a year.

But then we made friends in San Telmo and with that came the sad obligation to have to visit San Telmo more regularly. One of the things I do like about San Telmo is Av. Caseros, basically because it’s British, with the old British railway workers’ buildings and the Bar Británico a few blocks away. All the same, we came to San Telmo late. According to my spies in the south, San Telmo is just the same as Palermo today, they even have a Starbucks, and Plaza Dorrego’s only purpose is to rip off the tourists. A few years ago I read part of a travel book by AA Gill in which he writes some such nonsense as: “Porteños dance the tango on every corner of this city. The señoritas won’t sleep with you unless you marry them, but they will instead allow you one dance of the most sensual tango.” I can only imagine that AA Gill spent the entirety of his stay on Plaza Dorrego or Florida, and that he was really rubbish at picking up women. (But then AA Gill also described the British as “an embarrassing, ugly race […] lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd” so he’s not a completely rubbish writer.)

I’m surprised to discover that Av. Montes de Oca is named after a man called Manuel Montes de Oca, and not, as I had always imagined, a great mountain of ganders, which would be the literal translation of ‘montes de oca’. What a mountain of ganders is and why a major thoroughfare of La Boca should be named after such a concept are two questions that clearly never occurred to me.

It is on this avenue that I see a man sharpening a knife on his special pushbike. Round about 2005 I was talking to a student who was saying that one of the things she loved about Buenos Aires was that it was a city where men cycled round sharpening whatever blunt instrument presented itself for grateful housewives. I nodded and didn’t tell her how much it bothered me that these people came round buzzing all the intercom buzzers in the building at siesta time. But I decided to go along with my student’s starry-eyed take on porteño life. Two days later, I’m having a nice nap when some idiot buzzes all the intercom buzzers in the building.

Angel, on his converted bicycle, sharpening a knife. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

‘How much?’ I ask.

‘Three pesos,’ says the chap on the intercom. I go downstairs with a chef’s knife, and the old man proceeds to sharpen it on his pimped-up pushbike. He’s done in five minutes and I give him my three pesos.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Thirteen pesos.’

Thirteen pesos! To sharpen a knife that cost me twelve pesos! Now, I know I have a tendency to zone out a bit when spoken to in Spanish, but where money is concerned I sit up and listen, and this man clearly said three pesos (‘Tres’ and ‘trece’ sound alike in Spanish. So do ‘dos’ and ‘doce’. It’s an imperfect language, really. They have no word for ‘flick’ either. They make great show of the fact that they have one word for ‘the back of the neck’ and we don’t, as if that was something, but instead of ‘toe’ they say ‘foot finger’. They really haven’t given this language any thought at all.) I only have a $100 note on me and this man, obviously, doesn’t have any change. I have to cross the road to the Chinese supermarket and spend ten pesos to get change. I cross back and give thirteen pesos to the sharpener, who doesn’t even say thank you, the git. He cycles off and I look at my knife. He’s buggered it. I could have sharpened it better myself, and with a normal bicycle.

Besides, what do we need knife-sharpening men for in this day and age? What is it that you’re cutting, Madame, that requires such a sharp blade? I say, if you’ll forgive me my impertinence, instead of throwing away money on these rip-off artists, why not spend your money on better-quality meat? Unless you, Madame, have murdered your husband and need to dispose of the body, in which case carry on.

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. 124.

Villa Devoto (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The bus goes down a street called Ramón Lista and I have no idea where I am, among the anonymous grey buildings and the abject lack of any distinguishing feature. I think it’s Villa Devoto, because it’s so anonymous that it looks like nowhere in particular, which is in fact Villa Devoto’s most distinguishing feature. I check in the map book. It is indeed Villa Devoto, the barrio where middle-class porteños go to die when they can no longer stand the thrill of achingly beautiful architecture.

As there is nothing to write about outside the bus, I’m forced to examine the urban fauna within it. A man sits down in the seat in front of me. He’s about forty and has long, curly greying hair in a classic Bryan May style. I like this in Buenos Aires’ men, their obliviousness to the fact that after the age of 32, long hair is no longer an option, least of all when it is accompanied by notably incipient alopecia. And yet, this man is clear evidence that in this city you can look like the unlikely lovechild of Isaac Newton and George Costanza and still have an attractive girlfriend. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many average-looking foreign men with stunning Argentine women on their arms, there’s your answer.

This 124 is a very conversational bus. I do a head count and discover that there are nine different conversations underway. In fact, everyone on this bus is talking to the person sitting next to them, except me. The girl next to me is reading Lolita, and I’m tempted to strike up a conversation about Nabokov, just so she doesn’t feel left out, but I’m concerned that she’ll see me as the kind of person who starts conversations with strangers on the bus, and a conversation about a novel that deals with paedophilia sympathetically, to boot. A lot of people ask me why I don’t speak to other passengers on the buses, as if I was a journalist, failing to realise that if you’re a woman and some stranger on the bus starts asking you where you live and where you’re going, it’s a bit creepy. In twenty years’ time, when I write the inevitable 20th anniversary re-edition of Colectivaizeishon, then I’ll be able to talk to the passengers, when I’m old and a bit weird and the girls on the bus see me as a strange man, but a harmless and somewhat eccentric strange man, like a distant uncle only without all the groping.

Because I wasted an hour wandering lost around La Boca in a failed attempt to find the bus stop for the 8 or the 86, and then ended up taking the 53 and the 124, it’s now half past five and I’ve still got five hours’ more bus travel before I finish for the day. The clock is ticking as we crawl down Corrientes in that way buses do on Sundays. If I carry on, I’ll wind up taking the 152 in La Boca at the same time the Boca match finishes. I’m willing to withstand all kinds of discomforts in my quest to take all the buses in Buenos Aires, but spending two hours on a bus filled with Boca fans is not one of them. I could get off at the Law Faculty, take the 67 and be home in half an hour. Or, I could cover those sixty blocks to my house via the most roundabout way imaginable, taking the 124 back to Villa Devoto, the 53 to La Boca and the 152 to Puente Saavedra and then walking the thirty blocks home. I want to take the more difficult route, because a wise man once said the hardest way is often the most worthwhile way. But the wise man would have come better prepared for this nippy spring evening, and would be wise enough not to put himself deliberately in a situation of being surrounded by 40,000 Boca fans on a Sunday night. I go home.

I complete the return parts of the three routes the next day. I discover that the “Neotrans” electronic news boards still exist on those buses built around 2000, when Argentina was still deluding itself about its economy and people didn’t have mobile phones with better jokes and more up-to-date news. The “Neotrans” board is pretty crap (older readers may also fondly remember “Infotrans”, which was the same shite, like doing a taste test between Quilmes and Brahma). It tells us that a yacht has exploded in Tigre, some eight days after the fact. And it tells us the etymology of the word “testify”, which according to Neotrans derives from Roman senators’ tendency to touch their testicles while swearing an oath. This is a load of balls, no pun intended (yeah, OK, pun fully intended.) Both “testify” and “testicle” come from “testis”, the Latin for “witness”, from a root that means “third person”. If one testified, they did so as a reliable third person. “Testicles” was coined by the Romans as a joke, as a way of saying that one’s nuts were “witnesses” to the “feats” of the member. Of course, this is a bit more risqué to be putting on a Neotrans news board, even though no one pays it the slightest heed, because everyone’s bought Blackberrys for their renowned superiority in matters etymological.

We go past a bar called “Cosmos 69 Bar Wiskería”. I learnt very recently that a “wiskería” is not, to my chagrin, a place where one goes to savour a range of fine imported whiskies, but is in fact a euphemism for “knocking shop”. It would be great if I had an anecdote about the terribly embarrassing way in which I uncovered this small truth, but I haven’t. My wife told me, after seeing me gazing longingly at the whiskerías that line Route 14 to Entre Ríos. My apologies for the lack of a more mortifying anecdote in the present paragraph.

Corrientes during a weekday is a bit different than on the weekend. (Photo: Edgardo Milla)

The difference between taking the 124 on a Monday instead of taking it on a Sunday is that on Sundays the bus goes at about five blocks a minute, while the next day the bus gets caught up in the Monday traffic and goes at about five blocks a minute. I entertain myself by looking at all the cotillón shops in Once. Cotillón, one of my favourite words in the Spanish language, is a catch-all term for all manner of party hats, wigs and other accessories. As much as I like the word, looking at shop after shop of the stuff is not the most entertaining way to pass the time on the bus. I get to wondering why there are so many cotillón shops in Once. It’s not like the barrio has this great reputation for partying.

Here’s something else I get to wondering: Is Lavalle the ugliest street in the whole city? The observant reader will know that Lavalle’s route takes in the pedestrian street where the high society once took in moving pictures but where today the low society gets taken in by fake sports gear, the crowded streets around the law courts, the tat shops in Once, the waste coming out of the back end of Abasto Shopping Centre and ending with five pot-holed blocks in Almagro, before it gets swallowed up into Avenida Córdoba. What kind of person was Lavalle to deserve such a homage? I try to think of everything I know about Lavalle. First name: Juan. Sent Dorrego to the firing squad, or Dorrego sent Lavalle to the firing squad, or maybe they just duelled with pistols. I remember he pops up a lot in Sabato’s On Heroes and Tombs, but I read the book about ten years ago, when my Spanish and understanding of Argentine history were sketchy at best, and can remember little or nothing. There were some elms, or someone called Elms, or a place called Elms. That’s about it. 

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 32.

As today is Rosh Hashanah, I have half an idea to write about the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. But despite travelling on the 19 between Belgrano and Once, the most heavily populated parts of Jewish Buenos Aires, I don’t see any of this. On reflection, I don’t know what I expected to see, lots of men in black hats dancing to “Hava Nagila”, I don’t know. I see lots of colectivos but very little of the colectividad, which is a fine joke in Spanish, rest assured. In the first days of Colectivaizeishon I go out with a vague idea in my mind of what each bus chapter is going to be about. By the third day, I give up on the idea and let the 32 show me its surprises, which are not small in number. They are zero in number.

Plaza Miserere (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

The 32 starts its route in Plaza Miserere. During the second British invasion of 1807 (although many maintain that this so-called “invasion” was a mere misunderstanding, and that it was really just a case of typical Brits abroad, drunk and yobbish perhaps, but hardly an invasion) there was a battle known as the “Combate de Miserere” which took place in the Miserere Corrals, part of which is now Plaza Miserere. While many squares, avenues and streets of this city are named after battles (Caseros, Ituzaingó, Maipú, and something like a hundred more, but I haven’t yet been bored enough on the buses to count them all), Plaza Miserere is the only square, avenue or street in Buenos Aires which did the opposite and gave its name to a battle.

In the plaza, a group of Andeans play a prerecorded version of Abba’s “Chiquitita” on their sound system. I’m about to bemoan the loss of so much culture that in the name of entertainment the natives of the altiplano have now got rid of their centuries-old instruments and songs and resorted to playing ersatz renditions of a Swedish band’s songs over a PA made in China, but it turns out they’re having a coffee break, and they’ll be back shortly to play that Simon & Garfunkel song and “Lambada”.

There’s a school kid occupying my official Colectivaizeishon seat (at the back, next to the door), listening to music on his school laptop (all Argentine state school kids get free laptops, which sounds progressive, until you see the state the state schools are in.) This is the fourth time I’ve seen a school kid using one of these laptops, and none of them have been studying. But then again, like many boys I used to use my own school exercise books for drawing pictures of willies and writing lyrics for my imaginary rock band. “Hey girl, gonna make you sweat, your loving life ain’t over yet” being one memorable line written by this staunchly virginal 14-year-old listening to too much Led Zeppelin.

Parque Patricios (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

In the window of a lottery agency in Parque Patricios I read a sign that says “THERE IS NO MONTEVIDEO”. What happened to Montevideo? What’s filling in for Montevideo while it’s not existing, or is there just a void, a black hole in the south of Uruguay where Montevideo used to be? But if Montevideo is a black hole, is it not that Montevideo continues to exist, albeit in the form of a black hole? Or am I being facetious and deliberately confusing the Montevideo lottery with the city itself? Sounds like a facile explanation.

There’s something about the names Puente Alsina, Puente Pueyrredón and Puente de la Noria that fills me with trepidation. These are bridges towards the unknown, towards the Province of Buenos Aires, with its dragons and stuff. But I’m beginning to think that this attitude is down to my living in a mansion in Belgrano, imagining in the outskirts of town this subclass of delinquents and ne’er-do-wells. So to shake off this perception and prove to myself just how brave I am, I cross Puente Alsina, on foot, no less, and enter for the first time ever the district of Lanús. Check me out. The fact that there are hundreds of people doing the exact same thing as me at this very moment, and without the slightest indication that they are undertaking an act of the noblest valour, takes a little of the sheen off my achievement.

The River Riachuelo below the bridge is to perfume what Diego Maradona is to humility. I try to imagine what this river was like when it was a major waterway, highly navigable, clean and of great importance to the city. Now you get the impression that they could pave it over and turn it into a motorway and not even Greenpeace would give a solitary one. The world’s third-most contaminated river, in 1993 María Julia Alsogaray (Secretary for Environment & Embezzlement during the first Menem administration, when everyone still liked him and his comedy sideburns) submitted a plan to clean it up within 1,000 days. María Julia was missing a couple of zeros, and not for the last time.

Puente Alsina leads you to the town of Valentín Alsina, named after the chap who administered the construction of one of the original bridges. The current bridge, painted in that neo-colonial style that makes you wonder why the neocolonialists had such a thing for the colour mustard, was renamed after de facto president José Félix Uriburu, then renamed Puente Alsina again in 2002. Can you imagine building a bridge, and then a couple of years later they take your name off it and give it the name of an evil military dictator? Then again, I’m pretty sure that with a name like Valentín, Mr. Alsina didn’t get his hands dirty in the actual nitty-gritty of building the thing. That’s the good thing about being an administrator, someone else does all the work and you take all the credit. I should have “administrated” this book, instead of wasting my days examining the historic bridges of Lanús.

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!”