City of the Dead

Saturday: La Recoleta, the strangest, coolest cemetary you´ve ever seen. It's the cemetary for the very richest, oldest-money dead people in Buenos Aires. Evita is buried there, in the tomb of the Duarte family (her maiden name) but Juan Peron, her husband, wasn´t cool enough to be buried there, apparently. These tombs are seriously enormous. They have columns, domes, stained glass, big statues, all sorts of things. It seriously looks like a big fancy city full of dead people. Really, really rich dead people--did I mention that? I can´t even imagine how much these tombs cost. But they´re gorgeous. That part of the city is quite trendy, and we managed to meet all the english-speaking people in the whole city. The cemetary was chock-full of tourists.

Sunday, we went to church. The house we´re staying in was arranged by the international mennonite network, a quite useful thing, and so we went to this little city church a couple blocks away. Everyone was incredibly friendly. People in churches usually are, and when you combine that with the typical Argentine habit of kissing EVERYBODY it gets a bit overwhelming. We met a retired american missionary, who seemed to be everyone´s surrogate grandmother, a couple from Kazakhstan via Chicago, and about 30 other people.

After this we went to the feria de mataderos, an arts and crafts fair with Argentine folk music and dancing and handicrafts. Oh, and a llama. Which was quite spoiled and tried to steal peoples´ food. We were taken by Luis, the brother of Maria Ines, who lives at "our" house. He was shocked when we told him we were vegetarian. "no comes nada carne? nada?" Anyway, we had vegetable empanadas with spinach and stuff inside, and paps dulces. Very tasty.

When we got back, there were 3 new Swiss students at the house. They´re staying till thursday. I think one of them was originally from a Mennonite colony in Paraguay. And Luis came over, and some guy Julio, who seemed to know the Swiss students, and an older couple from church. The man told us we should come to his house, and that we should go to the Puente Perreydon, where apparently the Piqueteros have a road blockade every thursday. He joked that it was a "tourist attraction" and of course we said we´d like to go. So we sat around drinking Mate for a while and talking. In spanish, of course, which made it pretty confusing for me sometimes.

The major problem so far is that Buenos Aires has a distinct lack of peanut butter. We´ve gone hunting, and we've found soymilk, veggie burgers, cumin, dried fruit and nuts, and other useful things, but no peanut butter. Apparently it´s very difficult to find in this city. I guess I never thought of peanut butter as particularly hard to find. I mean, it´s PEANUT BUTTER. How bizarre.

So today we´re on a peanut butter hunt. And a "how do we get to solano" hunt. We've figured out the subway system pretty well, but Solano is south of here, in Quilmes, so it's outside subway range. We'll call later and see what the people there know.