Women expats and helpers who live in Buenos Aires have voluntarily given their time to put together ‘Hola, Buenos Aires!’ e-book for those wishing to relocate to Argentina’s capital city. The ladies are from all over the world and, after experiencing the city first-hand, decided to take an old, spiral-bound city guide that they had found in the University Women’s Club of Buenos Aires, update it and turn it into a modern manual for managing the metropolis.

The first edition of the book was published in 1989 with six or seven contributing women. It was then updated, with the last print edition publishing in 2003. The new e-book is a result of the efforts of 23 contributing ladies, including some who no longer live in Buenos Aires, but helped out with editing and proof-reading.

All proceeds from the US$14.99 cover price of the e-book will go to the Association of Sponsors of Rural Students and Schools (APAER), an Argentine NGO that promotes education in disadvantaged rural schools.

The book covers topics ranging from food, traffic, the ‘how-to’ of everyday life (like paying bills, when stores are open), to coping with culture-shock. The Argentina Independent had the chance to sit down with one of the project’s leaders, Michal Leon, who has been living in BA since October 2009. She is an entrepreneur as well as wife of the South African ambassador to Argentina. Although their time in Buenos Aires was up at the end of September, Michal felt it would be helpful to update the book for those choosing to move to Buenos Aires, helping them to have an easy and accessible guide to help them in the integration process. In a way, the digital version of ‘Hola, Buenos Aires!’ is her legacy in Buenos Aires.

“When you move to a country with someone from that culture, the shock is much softer, but for those who do not have that, this book will help them,” Michal explained.

When it comes to the basics, the book also helps out on letting sojourners know things to expect that you are not expecting, like food. The simpler things, like peanut butter, tomato juice, tomato and bean sauce, just do not exist. Hot sauce is also hard to come by, although some foreigners have taken on the challenge themselves.

There is a section on where to find a screwdriver or how to get your laundry done if you do not have a washing machine, as well as sections that have information for those who are bringing pets, or even legal matters that expand beyond the embassy. There is a chapter for those who are choosing to leave Argentina and how to prepare for that, too.

“The book is meant to prepare people who choose to live in Argentina for a month up to forever,” Michal added.

The book was released online on Monday and costs US$14.99. All proceeds go to APAER. To download the book, visit: www.uwcba.com.ar.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 33.

Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo in Ciudad-Universidad (Photo: ha +)

The 33 leaves from Ciudad Universitaria, or UniverCity as it will be known hereon. To get there I have to cross a park with the refreshingly unreconstructed name of Parque de la Raza, on a bank holiday formerly called Día de la Raza, which used to be a celebration of the superiority of the Spanish race in overcoming a load of scantily-armed Native Americans, but is now called Day of Respect and Cultural Diversity, but is still basically a commemoration of Columbus’s arrival in town and the sound of shit hitting indigenous fans all across the continent.

UniverCity wasn’t designed with hardened pedestrians like me in mind, probably because everyone knows how lazy students are. After crossing White Supremacy Park, I have to negotiate my way across two motorways and locate the only pedestrian bridge, next to Scalabrini Ortiz railway station. In the typical modern architectural style of Buenos Aires, where anything built in the last two decades looks decrepit and rain-stained within two years, this bridge has a Nahuel Huapi-sized puddle in the middle of it  that can only be crossed by building another bridge on top of this bridge. But you just know that once you’ve finished building the second bridge, it’ll rain again and you’ll have another big puddle which you’ll have to build another bridge over, and so on interminably. TIA, as certain annoying ex-pats say. This is Argentina.

I eventually stop faffing about, walk gingerly through the puddle and make it to UniverCity. Having graduated in England before I moved to Argentina, the university experience in Buenos Aires is one I thankfully avoided, but I have a fair idea of what it’s like because my first wife broke a telephone and computer keyboard in her frustrated attempts to tramitar her anthropology degree. Tramitar is an Argentine verb meaning “to waste hours or days of your life carrying out a procedure that is automatic in most civilised countries.” TIA.

The 33 leaves UniverCity and goes down the Costanera Norte, and I remember that I live in a city that has a river the size of a sea right next to it, something that I’m otherwise oblivious to much of the time here, not least when stuck on a bus somewhere in Liniers. Elsewhere in Argentina the river is a central part of the life of many a town, but the bit of river that Buenos Aires has been left with is no great shakes, with a great steaming port in the middle and a fair bit of pollution. I’ve swum in the River Plate. I wouldn’t swim in it again. Then again, far worse is the Costanera in Quilmes, downriver from all the toxic waste of the Riachuelo. I’ve seen people windsurfing there. You have to be really, really keen on windsurfing to end up doing it in Quilmes.

Choripan vendor (Photo: Jakobien van der Weijden)

On the Costanera Norte are the famous stands selling choripán and morcipán and large-slab-of-beef-pán. This is pretty much all the street food Buenos Aires has managed to come up with in its exalted 431-year history, so people make the most of it. Buenos Aires’ food bloggers blog a lot about these places, and according to them the best choripán stand in the city is Cocacolero, opposite the city airport on the Costanera. Now, I know there’s a difference between a good choripán and a choripán that leaves you in hospital, but I really don’t get how much difference there can be between one edible one and another edible one. If you said that such-and-such a stand was manned by Faena chefs using only Kobe beef flown in from Japan and with organic chimichurri sauce served on a brioche, then fine, write up your chori Top Ten for Joy magazine. All I see is a sausage sandwich. And a sausage sandwich, I hasten to add, with no bacon.

Something I’ve always wanted to know during many years living in Buenos Aires is what’s behind Retiro bus station before you get to the river? Thanks to the 33, I now know: there’s a shitload of containers.

By the port there is also a building which I’d wanted to know for years what it was, a building with two large towers that can be seen from any tall building in Palermo with a river view. Thanks to the 33, I now know. It’s a power station. This is one of many beautiful brick-built power stations of the Compañía Italo-Argentino. If you have a penchant for the brick-built power stations and substations of Buenos Aires (and who doesn’t?) you’d do well to click here.

33 along Paseo Colon (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

The New Port was opened eighty-three years ago but they still call it the New Port. Football club Newell’s Old Boys, meanwhile, has a mostly fresh-faced team. TIA. The port of Buenos Aires was originally going to be Puerto Madero, which opened in the late 19th century, only to close ten years later when the agriculture export boom went “boom”, the boats grew in size and Puerto Madero’s dinky little docks could no longer accommodate them. Classic Buenos Aires clusterfuck! So the government then commissioned the engineer Luis Huergo, whose original idea the government had rejected ten years earlier in favour of Eduardo Madero’s, to build a port that, you know, worked. Puerto Nuevo is his baby.

Puerto Madero and Puerto Nuevo caused a major political brouhaha, dividing the city’s governors. They were also both built by British companies, which makes them somewhat representative of the history of Buenos Aires, whereby a load of Argentines bicker with each other while a couple of foreigners make a tidy profit. If the Colectivaizeishon book becomes a bestseller, it’ll perpetuate this pattern.

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.”

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. 

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography. This time he takes us on a wander around Chacarita.

Rat going through a maze. (Photo: Melissa Baldwin)

One of the fathers of 20th century psychology, Edward Tolman, claimed that psychology boils down to what makes a rat turn left or right in a maze.

But what about the human turning left or right in the city? What does this infer about how we interact with cities, how we find our way, consciously or unconsciously through these labyrinthian structures?

Wayfinding is something that has captivated me since moving to Buenos Aires. Despite the fairly consistent grid system, I have lost my bearing on numerous occasions and my partner has frequent bouts of spatial disorientation.

According to current navigational theories, some of us rely on a compass bearing and navigate accordingly, relying on, for instance, ‘east and west’ to find our way around. However, others rely on cues that cannot be geographically categorized – typically, landmarks, thus finding their way by linking together identifiable objects, ‘right at the Baroque church, follow till abandoned building, and left at the red apartment.

Arguably, Buenos Aires is not a great city for navigation-by-landmarks. Straight proportional streets, discrete churches, and scant public squares add up to a fairly cue-less landscape, making it quite plausible to walk the same street several times without knowing it.

Google Map of Buenos Aires showing one orientation.

And if you’re the type who navigates through compass bearings, Buenos Aires can also prove confusing.  Why are there so many maps of the city rendered according to different axes? After a simple Google image search of Buenos Aires Map I located at least 5 maps aligned to different axes (north/ west/ north by northwest etc…).  I suppose this is why it’s common to avoid using bearings to discuss navigation in Buenos Aires. It’s so much easier to just say ‘down Santa Fe towards Retiro’ than to have to figure out if your mental map has a north-south axis or some mutated variation.

But this is all digression. The purpose of this walk is not to wayfind or navigate but the opposite. I am seeking to get lost, allowing my spatial senses to blur and fade out, in order to better take-in my surroundings and allow them to guide my ‘lefts and rights’.

Abe, a friend visiting from Canada, and I decided to get lost in Chacarita, a part of the city I had had no experience of. We wanted to test out the purest form of psychogeography’s derive (drift) – the completely aimless stroll. Up till now my pedestrian experiments have used constructed drifts to explore the city, such as walking Linea D of the metro, walking home from the airport and walking in the shape of a crucifix between places of worship in Palermo. This drift was intended to enable us to lose ourselves within the city.

39 bus in Chacarita (Photo: Francis Mariani)

At random we exited bus number 39, unaware of our location and began to walk. It was within a minute that we realized the challenge at hand; we stood at an intersection and couldn’t decide which way to go. Should he decide, should I decide, should we vote, how do we proceed? What does it mean to be aimless when there is another person? If we both don’t have aims how do we decide where to go?

We stumbled through this process, bit by bit. As we grew less conscious of decisions and eventually found a rhythm with both our walking and with each other, our decision-making became increasingly fluid.

The truly aimless walk was first pioneered by the French Surrealists in the early 20^th century. They took the practice of automatism, which, like automatic writing, they applied to walking and thus set locomotion free from consciousness. Through dispassionate strolling, they sought to discover places that have no reason to exist but simply are; through this process they stumbled upon odd juxtapositionings, coincidences and embarked on unplanned diversions.

As Abe and I ambled onwards, I began to spot the developing patterns in our choices of direction. At crossroads, there was a clear trend of choosing to venture into areas that were partially covered or obscured, whether by foliage, a turn in the road, or an obstructing building. Curiosity and intrigue were throttle and steering wheel. Green areas such as small parks, abandoned lots and informal parks led us onwards. Graffiti and abandoned buildings stopped us in our tracks; we investigated closer, pried through fences and pondered over building’s fates and the messages conveyed in spray paint.

The aimlessness evolved into wonder. The places we passed through were full of narratives, nearly all of which were out of our reach. At one point we came across a large concrete foundation with nothing more than a single dilapidated wall left standing.  Upon closer inspection, we found a tiny laminated note on the wall, which simply stated that at a previous time this was a helado factory.  Abe and I were transfixed with this idea, we tried to visualise what it would have looked like, how the neighbours interacted with it (free ice-cream being snuck out from the backdoor?) and the impact of its closure.

Some of the seemingly insignificant sections of neighbourhood that we passed, such as the abandoned lot or rusty bus shelter, may in fact retain a lot more emotional value to the block’s inhabitants than the majestic town hall down the road.  But this is not recognised, accepted, or valued.  We are surrounded by countless informal public monuments; each one has an impact on our lives and yet they commonly remain unrecognised and under-appreciated.

Guy Debord, one of the founders of psychogeography, believed that through the aimless stroll it was possible to identify emotional zones in the city. Psychogeography, as he saw it, was a pure science enabling identification and distillation of urban ambiances.

From our perspective, it would take a lot more walking to achieve something like this in Chacarita. In many ways, the identification and distillation that was achieved was an internal one. It required an effortful switching off of the intentional button, turning down the pragmatic dial, and listening to the dialectic between the surrounding space and ourselves.

The surrealists saw the derive as playful aquiescensce to the subconscious and the Situationists mixed submitting to the unconscious with radical politics. Abe and I mixed exploration, wonder, and hunger. It’s hard to deny the extent to which both our conscious and unconscious was guiding us towards streets where it would be possible to find a hearty lunch.  It’s hard to be aimless when hungry.

Abe felt that by taking away the objective behind the endeavor, his senses were heightened and he was able to extract the extraordinary from the banal.  Indeed, drifting brought us face-to-face with places and situations, which were curious, out of our control and novel.  Being lost helped with establishing a sense of wonder and purposelessness.

Over a period of six hours and covering 13km, we nearly completed a full circle.

What makes a human turn left or right in the city? 99% of the time it’s to achieve an objective, go to work, meet friends, buy food etc… The other 1%, from Abe and my experience, tends to be propelled by the city itself subconsciously guiding us left and right by its spaces of imagination, curiousity, and wonder.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 6.

The Six on route to Retiro. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

I’m about to take the 6 in Retiro when it becomes painfully manifest that I have a large project inside of me that has come to fruition and will be needing a public toilet before I got to Villa Soldati, bearing in mind the effect that my exaggerated fear of certain southside barrios have on my digestive system. But I also know that Retiro is distinctly lacking in the facilities necessary for those of us who consider ourselves discerning in this respect, so I go up the hill to Plaza San Martín and by chance find myself right outside the café where, on the day I first arrived in Buenos Aires 14 years ago, I was shown how to get to Av. San Martín and Juan B Justo.

Although this may not sound like much, this was at the time an act of immeasurable solidarity because I’d already spent over two hours looking for this junction, after an 18-hour coach trip from Asunción. It’s hard to believe it these days when there are areas of Buenos Aires that have hostels on every corner, but back in 1997 there were only two hostels in the whole of the city. In those days they were called “hostales”, with a silent h, and the word “hostel” did not come to be pronounced with an aspirated h until 2003, when porteños started to aspire once again. (I’m very proud of this joke and hope you enjoy it too. If you don’t get it, have a cup of tea and read the paragraph again, slowly this time. If you still don’t get, try not to let it trouble you. The world of humour is a vast and varied finger buffet, at which linguistics-based jokes are the neglected fishy bowl in which few people dare to dip their crudités)

One of the city’s two hostels was in Constitución and the other, recommended by the legendary South American Handbook, was in La Paternal, home of legendary blues legend Pappo, although the legendary South American Handbook made scant mention of this. Said mythical guidebook-cum-bible came with a map of the city centre, in which I could clearly see that what I supposed was Av. San Martín was just a few steps away from Retiro bus station. The map finished at Rivadavia so I couldn’t see Av. Juan B Justo, but it was obvious to any arrogant young traveller that by walking along San Martín one could easily get there.

I strapped on my rucksack and started walking. I got to the end of San Martín street without finding the junction with Juan B Justo, so I supposed I’d missed it, turned around and walked all the way back down San Martín, under the February sun (for reasons I’ve never been able to satisfactorily explain, February is summer in Argentina, as is December. August is winter. Crazy fucking Argentines) and with a 30-pound rucksack on my back. I got to the end of San Martín again. Nothing doing. Bear in mind that I was a man (still am, technically) and, far worse, a 20-year-old man, so there wasn’t even the slightest chance of my asking for directions.

An hour later, with San Martín street now well and truly covered, Juan B Justo remained conspicuous by its absence, so I gave in and asked a policeman standing on San Martín and Perón. Don’t be picturing a policeman standing on the rotting corpse of a popular political icon. Perón is the name of a street. I should have also explained earlier than San Martín here refers to the street, and not to the rotting corpse of The Liberator of Argentina, Chile, and Peru, although said corpse can in fact be found at the end of San Martín, buried in the Cathedral.

“No, pibe,” says the policeman. “You have to take a bus.”

I thanked him and walked off grumbling fucking lazy-arse Argentine police telling me to take a bus when I’m already on San Martín. There was no way I was spending  60 centavos on a bus, when at that time for the same sum you could buy a Coke, a pack of fags and an Ugi’s pizza.

Eventually, after two and a half hours, with salt stains on my rucksack from sweating so much, I stopped by a bar in Plaza San Martín to clean myself up, and finally my will broke. I asked the men at the bar how to get to Av. Juan B Justo and San Martín. They didn’t know either, but they got out their Guía “T” and showed me how to take my first Buenos Aires bus. I think it was the 106. It turned out there were two thoroughfares in Buenos Aires called San Martín. They do this on purpose, to annoy the tourists. (The reason why all this is relevant is because I then met my future first ex-wife through this hostel, and lived there for a whole year in 1999. But that’s a different chapter. The book will be far better-written than this, promise.)

San Martin in springtime (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Fourteen years later I find myself outside the same bar, needing another act of solidarity. But the bar changed owners years ago and it now calls itself a “bistro”. “Bistro” sounds like an easy way to fleece you of 50 pesos for a toasted sandwich and a Coke, and besides, everyone knows where the best public toilets are in any place in any city, because they have 27,000 premises in 120 countries (the phrases “turtle head” and “McShit” were bowdlerised from this article by my wife. This was probably a good thing), and the closest one is on Florida and Marcelo T. Intrepid reader, not since Martín Palermo scored his last-minute goal against Peru has anyone in the history of this city felt such relief.

After that, the trip to Villa Soldati and back to Retiro passes without incident. The most interesting thing I see is an advert in the window of an ophthalmologist’s in Once for audigafas, or if you want a bad translation, hearispecs. Hearispecs, in case you haven’t heard, or indeed seen, are spectacles with built-in hearing aids in the arms of the specs. By the time you and I are old enough to need them, there will be spectacles that come with everything built in: hearing aids, false teeth, colostomy bag, comedy moustache and a little chain so you can take off the whole apparatus and hang it round your neck when you want to watch Songs of Praise (for non-British readers, Songs of Praise is a TV programme watched mostly by old people. Feel free to replace this in the above text with a cultural equivalent of your choosing.)

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography, by walking the entire length of Subte line D. 

“We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost,” wrote Ivan Chtcheglov, one of the fathers of psychogeography, in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’. He claims that we have lost a sense of imagining the city, no longer does it contain the phantasmagoric.

Congreso de Tucumán on line D (Photo: Diego Herrera)

How would you describe your routine movements in Buenos Aires? Do they fill you with surprise, awe, and inspiration—or quite the opposite?

Street corners, gutters, pavement, bends, movement, art, hidden nooks, and exposed cracks—what do we notice, what catches our eye and captures our interest? Is it true, that amidst so much distraction we have lost our sense of discovery within the city?

A regular part of my urban existence is the subte, I ride it frequently yet often have no idea of the neighbourhoods that I travel under.  I feel dislocated when I arrive at my destination. Whole parts of the city remain glaringly blank in my mental map, void of exploration.

With this in mind I set off on a voyage of discovery, to walk the city’s longest metro line, Línea D (the Green line that was, strangely enough, formerly the red line pre-90s). I did this both to discover what sits and fits between and to try my hand at discovering the city anew.

In the heat of the middle of the day, I rode the metro to Congreso de Tucumán subte station from where I began the long walk to Catedral station. Unfortunately I had no suitable walking shoes and my satchel had recently disintegrated, which meant having to walk in my flip-flops and with my girlfriend’s embroidered shoulder-bag (not ideal).

The crowd walks along the subte hallways (photo: Galio)

The metro/subway/subte or however you want to call the underground rapid transit system is an ingenious method of transport. No traffic, simple to navigate, reliable, and in the winter doesn’t require waiting in the cold.

However, these systems severely alter the way in which cities are understood and lived, making it possible to experience certain parts of the city without needing to cogently connect them together, giving the illusion that neighbourhoods float independently from one another. For instance, it’s possible to live in Belgrano and work in Microcentro without having to ever see what lies in between. It’s a way of folding up space; our brains create new maps that match our experience of these two places – separate yet connected.

Buenos Aires’ subte, opened in 1913, was the first in South America or south of the equator, for that matter. It boasts six lines that carry 1.7 million passengers a day, a number that looks staggeringly high but falls behind daily ridership numbers of considerably smaller cities like Prague and Vienna and ranked globally at only 28th.

The 77 subte stations are nothing out of the ordinary. They don’t offer elaborate showcases of Soviet pomp like Moscow’s or modernist masterpieces like Montreal’s. But, there is a certain charm to Buenos Aires’ subte, particularly some of the bizarre tile murals (is that a topless mermaid or a fish with breasts at Angel Gallardo?) and Línea A’s rolling stock classical carriages and the whole system’s Anglo-legacy with the direction that the carriages travel, which follow the British logic of driving on the left hand side.

Similar to air travel, the metro can induce forms of spatial dislocation. As I emerged from Congreso de Tucumán, I found myself gaping at the street names and seeking familiar landmarks to orient myself.

The "murales" on line D (photo: Thomas Hobbs)

The initial walk from Tucumán station was ordinary. Av. Cabildo to Av. Santa Fe was sun-baked, crowded and monotonous. I collected a total of nine flyers, was dripped on twice by an unknown liquid (hopefully water), and had a woman accidently try to hold my hand, mistaking me for her husband. I wasn’t able to reflect on my surroundings or delve into the unnoticed world around me; sidewalk inertia was pushing me forward. I was surprised at how quickly I passed subte station after subte station.

I surveyed the jagged disparate rooflines, they looked like aborted games of Tetris – clumsy blocks thrown together without much logic and left to find their own congruence. Or, like awkward family members posing for a photo.

I passed as travellers entered and exited the stations. Most of those exiting seemed to know where they were going, yet others clearly did not, dawdling on the sidewalk, obstructing passers-by, until they got their bearings.

Crowds increased as I passed the Palermo subte next to the Pacifico train bridge – named after the company that planned, and failed, to build a track from there to Chile. Walking towards Scalabrini Ortiz became tedious, stop-go walking, avoiding crowds, and at several points required perilously walking on the road itself in order to keep a decent pace.

Nonetheless, connecting the subte stations felt rather liberating. The big green signs are like navigational beacons. I was putting together the pieces of an urban puzzle.

It struck me how we live in a giant metropolis heaving with life and yet often fail to appreciate the individuality of its components. Its immensity, throbbing energy and in-built expectations make it onerous to slow down and reflect, to seek out new passages, and re-examine our connection with the city.

After Subte Puerreydón (and yes, it’s ridiculous that there are two stations named this, which sit 1.2km apart) the linear route began to zig-zag towards Facultad de Medicina as I tried to stay as true to the diagonal route of the subte below.

I found my way but I did not find intrigue, just a sense of emptiness. The streets here seemed void of human relations outside of commercial transactions. It was mid-day and brutally hot.

Penultimate station on line D (photo: Kara Brugman)

My interest veered to the sound of birds, I watched as they played on ledges, infinitely more free than the cheerless people with whom I was sharing a sidewalk – sweating in their suits, rushing. I hated the heat, I needed to find a shaded refuge. I finally slumped down against a shaded wall in an unnamed alley, where I waited and watched.

Finally coming across another metro line, Línea C, after the 9 de Julio station was a magnificent moment. I am sure something quite akin to discovering the confluence of the Nile. And shortly after this excitement, my ambulation ended as I made my way down the steps of Catedral station, hot and tired.

While I walked I wondered whether it was to be a fruitless endeavor. I wasn’t convinced that I was gaining a familiarity with Línea D, connecting some of the gaps in my mental map of the city nor discovering parts of the city anew. It was only afterwards, when riding on the subte from Catedral, that I realised this new knowledge invoked a completely different metro ride experience; I felt intimately aware of what was passing above me and how the stations were connected, what lay between, and the feeling derived from walking that space.

Robert Park, an urban sociologist from the late 19th century claimed that the city is built in man’s image – in his desires and wants. The city I witnessed, the city that lies above Línea D struck me as utilitarian; movement from point-of-habitation to point-of-work to point-of-consumption and repeat – a city that’s lost its imagination as observed by Ivan Chtcheglov. In this regard, I would look to Marx and side with the situationists and argue that the city that lies above Linea D is built in the image of the bourgeoisie – their desires and wants.

But did I miss something, is there something more, something playful, dangerous, and exciting at the prospect of the city. Do I have to look deeper, explore more widely or just avoid walking in the mid-day heat?

Daniel Tunnard continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 1 – Buenos Aires’ first bus, and shares with readers other firsts.

Long line for the No 1 bus in Liniers (Photo: Agus Carini)

The number 1 bus starts its route in Morón (stop giggling), so it’s full when I get on in Liniers. Now, this might sound selfish, but shouldn’t there be a seat reserved for writers? What are we supposed to do, write standing up? It should be a common courtesy to have to give up your seat to any person you see holding an A4 pad and pen. Or a novel over 500 pages, because they’re quite hard to hold open with one hand. I’m going to write to the bus company and suggest they put up signs that say ‘Reserved for Writers and Readers of Really Quite Long Books’ in fancy fileteado letters. I’ll let you know if they get back to me.

Deprived as I am of practicing my trade, I instead read the tabloid-tastic Diario Popular over the shoulder of the man sitting in the seat which in future will be reserved for writers. Here’s last nights news: Banfield regaled their fans with a ‘discreet’ 1-1 draw against Olimpo; Ricardo Fort’s former bodyguard and the Teen Angel went to a telephone vote, in what I assume is something to do with the racy Argentine equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing; and in the classic style of this kind of newspaper, on the page where the photo goes of the young lady showing her boobies, there’s a photo of a young lady showing her boobies. I’m not knocking it, I have fond memories of reading my grandmother’s The Sun when I was a toddler. Some things are the same wherever you go. But has anyone else noticed that Argentina’s equivalent of page 3 girls seem just a little less innocent?

Vélez Sarsfield stadium along the No 1 bus route (Photo: Agus Carini)

Coming out of Liniers, I spot the Vélez Sarsfield stadium. This stadium was the very first thing I ever saw of Buenos Aires, in a video of Queen’s first show here in February 1981, which I first saw as a geeky 13-year old in 1989. It’s fitting that this should have been the first thing ever that I saw of Buenos Aires, because one of the things I like most about Argentina is that, unlike in Britain when I was growing up, Queen are not the sole preserve of spotty schoolboys and plump housewives, but enjoyed by many normal people too. You didn’t hear it from me, but some people even think Queen are cool. Seriously.

If you went to primary school here in the early 80s, classmates would split into two gangs depending on who you liked best, Queen or Kiss. This easily beats my school, where classmates were divided into gangs of people who wanted to beat me up for liking Queen and people who didn’t. I was the sole member of the latter gang, except on those occasions when I was joined by Peter Jackson. Not the bearded film director, the ginger Queen fan from Stockport.

This trip turns out to be one of many “firsts”, if only because I’m trying to find a theme for each of these journeys and then crowbarring this into my narrative. The number 1 bus, as you would imagine, was the first bus in Buenos Aires, taking passengers from Primera Junta to Flores. The number 1 started running on 24 September 1928, when a group of taxi drivers decided to let various strangers travel in their taxis at the same time, hence the name colectivo.

But the last thing this book intends to be is a comprehensive history of South American public transport. I don’t even know if the first bus really had a number 1 on the front. As it was the only line in the city, there wouldn’t have been any need for a number to distinguish it from all the other lines that didn’t exist yet. They probably just stuck a sign up that said ‘Bus’. And then all the people would get on and ask “¿What’s a bus?”, with an inverted question mark because they’d be speaking Spanish, and the driver would say “This is a bus. Hop on, I’ll take you to Flores” and the people would say “Oh OK, eighty centavos, please” because they didn’t have SUBE cards in those days.

So the number 1 didn’t have a number 1 on its front in the early days. It simply was, and it would be a long time before some wit made a joke about its way of not being for a considerable length of time to then suddenly be three times all at once.

Nearby the Primera Junta stop is a street called Puan. Because the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires is on this street, “Puan” has become synonymous with said faculty, so I’ve always had this idea that Puan Street was named after a Señor Puan who was a fantastically philosophical and lettered individual, an erudite, bearded chap with a monocle and pipe and brass-tipped walking stick, whose first name was Juan, so he was called Juan Puan, and his friends used to call his wife Juana Puana, even though her real name was Bernard.

The No 1 bus trundles along the streets of Buenos Aires from Morón to Primera Junta (Photo: Augus Carini)

Sadly, that’s all bollocks. For history, you see, is far more boring, and there never was a Señor Puan. The street is named after a town of the same name in the province of Buenos Aires which gets his name from the Mapuche for “Souls of the dead” (although anyone who’s ever had an Argentine tell them that Montevideo is an acronym of “Mount 6 from East to West” will know to take Argentine toponymy with a fistful of sal parillero). It’s a shame, because if Señor Puan had turned out to be a genocidal, bloodthirsty warmonger, which is where most of the city’s streets get their names from, it would have been tremendously ironic in the context of the Philosophy Faculty and these two paragraphs would have been a scream. But he wasn’t, and you’re left with this impoverishment of wit in its place.

The bus reaches the end of its route in Primera Junta. It was a few blocks from here that I met my future first Argentine wife, on my second day ever in Buenos Aires, in February 1997. She was going out with an Italian but we English are nothing if not forbearing, and when I came back in July the Italian had fucked off and my life was about to change in a way I could never have imagined. I’m just scribbling this reminiscent nugget down in my pad when I look up and see that there’s no one left on the bus. The driver looks at me in his mirror and goes “I’ve finished, ¿eh?”, again with an inverted question mark. Some things never change.

Buenos Aires city will choose its prefered model today as more than two-million porteños vote for the city’s Mayor and Deputy-Mayor. Current mayor Mauricio Macri and oponent Daniel Filmus appear as the favorites in most opinion polls, followed by Pino Solanas. The three have already casted their vote earlier today.

The election will also renew half of the legislature. The reconfiguration of the legislature will make the management of the next government. PRO brings into play 14 of their 24 seats. South Project no, but Kirchner and his allies could fight him a second minority status. There are also seven representatives for each of the fifteen city community boards.

Elections are to be held from 8 am to 18 pm. During this period, all public gatherng is prohibited, until three hours after the ballot closes. Selling alcoholic beverages is also prohibited today.Officials say the first results are expected from 9.30pm.

The candidate from the Front for Victory (FPV), Daniel Filmus, said today he was “very confident and optimistic” after casting his vote at a school in Coleraine.

 The mayor and candidate for reelection from the PRO, Mauricio Macri, Buenos Aires today urged to ”participate” and said that on this day “is selected a form of coexistence.” Mauricio Macri, who is seeking re-election, asked the Buenos Aires “to go to vote, to put joy and enthusiasm, especially those who are convinced that we can live better” and asked to make a lot of voters to achieve “new attendance record “in the City.

The candidate from Proyecto Sur Buenos Aires, Fernando “Pino” Solanas, predicted today that the election of his political force will be “of very good to very good,” but questioned the “work of polarization that has been made” in the face the elections.