What, vacations again?

Folks, I'm going to Córdoba for the long weekend, so you won't be hearing from me until next Wednesday (at least). I leave this evening at 2 AM, and should be arriving in Córdoba at 8:30.

On principle, I oppose the commemoration of the Easter weekend, a religious holiday, as a public national holiday. But this is a minor issue, really, and I don't mind taking advantage of it for a short trip. What else am I going to do, stay home and medidate on my sins while I watch the two hours of torture of The Passion of the Christ? I'd rather relax somewhere else.

Monday, March 24, is the Day of Memory: the 32nd anniversary of the last coup d'état. This is a serious holiday. Right after Easter, no less!

Córdoba City was founded by Jesuits, and the shadow of the Church are everywhere. Two years ago I went to this same city on Easter weekend, and saw the swarms of priests, monks and nuns in old-style garb, and the flocks of the faithful, going about the imposing building of the Cathedral at the time of mass. This is the seat of the oldest diocese in the country, the same Cathedral where people heard the sermons of Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, Primate of Argentina at the time of the coup, who blessed the military, made a list of domiciles of Catholic teachers and workers available to military intelligence, and delivered "Marxist" priests (who worked with the poor) into the hands of the terrorist state. So it will be interesting to see what events are planned in Córdoba, and whether the two celebrations — the myth of death and resurrection, the true story of hopelessness and ruin of a whole country — interact and influence each other.

Besides Córdoba City, where Marisa and I are going to be greeted by a group of local photographers, I'll be visiting Alta Gracia, the childhood home of Ernesto Che Guevara, and Quebrada del Condorito National Park, where we're told you can have condors fly within reach of your hand.

I'm off now. See you next week!

Culture weekend

I always more-or-less supposed there were tons of culture-related events and culture thingies to do in Rosario at any given time, but then the propaganda machine of the Municipal Culture Secretariat is well-oiled and sometimes they do blow things out of proportion. However, this is not the case right now.

You'll remember the vernissage I attended last Tuesday — well, that exhibition was held in the very lobby of the seat of the Culture Secretariat, in Rosario Norte Station. (On a side note, I asked my artist friend how she'd managed to get that space. She said she had no idea; it was a deal with her university. And I was already fantasizing about a photo exhibition there...)

Then last Friday I went to see this display of old and new photos, drawings and blueprints of buildings by Lluís Domènech i Montaner. I had no idea who he was, but then I read that he was a pioneer of Catalan Art Nouveau (a.k.a. Modernisme) on par with Antoni Gaudí, so I went to the Parque España to check out the exhibition. Domènech designed buildings mostly in Barcelona, but I knew the style because other Catalan architects worked here in Argentina and particularly in Rosario (see my post with the picture of the Palacio Cabanellas).

Very impressive, enough for 45 minutes of admiration, and it only cost me one peso. I took as many pictures as I could, mostly not very good (pictures of pictures, under museum-type lighting, come out usually rather bad), but enough to document it. I don't know if it was allowed to take them, but nobody protested.

Then on Saturday I was scanning the cultural schedule again, and I found a Japan-themed event at the Museo Estévez, including a display of Japanese art pieces and ornaments, a short lecture on Japan's history, and kamishibai (paper theatre). I decided to check it out as well, but I made the mistake of taking a detour to enjoy the sunny view along the river (camera in hand, of course). It turned out that the view was extremely rewarding and I arrived at the museum when the lecture had already started, and after all the tickets for the kamishibai were reserved. It was all free of charge, but the space was limited, so I was told to come back for another show later. I couldn't do that, but I'm going to try it tonight if I can.

The lecture was fine enough — a brief surview of the relations between Japan and the West, showing how the myth of an enclosed, self-sufficient, almost xenophobic "millenary" culture is just a myth, as many of the things we associate distinctly with Japan were imported or adapted from the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch, the British or the Americans. The lecturer wandered into another kind of myth herself a couple of times, unnecessarily, for example speaking of the "unconfirmed" etymology of arigato from Portuguese obrigado, which has long been known to be absolutely bogus, and also relating a supposed graphical similarity between the Japanese kanji for "snow" and "blood" and samurai's concepts of purity and death. Maybe she meant "white" and "blood", which have somewhat similar characters, but then why not "white" and "red"?

Walking to and from the museum, I also noticed a lot of tourists. And I mean a lot. The riverside parks and the Flag Memorial were packed, and adding to the usual locals with mate and thermos and kids and dogs you couldn't stop noticing a large number of people with curious looks, camera in hand, taking pictures of themselves in front of absolutely unremarkable spots, or map in hand wandering the streets.

I found a young couple from some place in Greater Buenos Aires who actually asked me, not how they could get to a certain place, but where they could go, because they were not sure which direction to take. The girl seemed not to know that Rosario had a river, or that it was a large city, and somehow they'd both been able to walk down Córdoba St. without asking for (or finding by themselves) the 70-meter-tall Flag Memorial at the end of it. I also found a couple from Bánfield (Buenos Aires) who asked me to take a picture of them, and commented that Rosario's very nice but has almost no touristic infrastructure. I took another picture of a middle-aged couple from Córdoba. And on my way back I had to explain to two elderly ladies (one of them with a city map she was holding upside down) how to get back to the Bus Terminal.

The weekend is just half over, so there's still much to do...

Flaneurs benvinguts!

I had promised myself to go check a photo exhibition at the Centre Català that was noted by a fellow photographer. I don't recall ever entering the Centre before; it's a very nice but unremarkable little building on a pothole-ridden Entre Ríos St., right opposite the imponent and very dirty Faculty of Humanities and Art. My dad used to go there to sing in a choir. They have a small café, paintings, nice mosaics on the walls, and a warm Benvinguts ('Welcome') sign. They teach Catalan courses, which I have to try some day because I love how the language sounds. Anyway, the exhibition turned out to be a dozen black-and-white and colour pictures, some interesting, some rather plain. Nothing to go especially there for (is that a weird sentence or not?).

The topic, however, was intriguing. It was flâneur photography, a flâneur being a person that walks around the city to experience it (flâner means 'to stroll' in French). The definition excludes the common tourist and the professional photographer actively trying to get a particular shot, as well as the indifferent citizen. A note on the wall, next to the pictures, remarked that flâneurs are becoming a rare species, given how everybody goes from A to B as quickly as possible and often without a glance sideways, up, or down. I'm an active flâneur whenever I go, so this idea touched me more than the pictures.

Being loyal to my newly-named passion, I strolled around a bit and took a few pictures. I'm always amazed at this city — I've been walking the downtown for 15 years and I still "discover" fantastic historical architecture every day just by paying attention. Then I caught a bus, and after a 15-minute ride I got off of it at the Patio de la Madera, where the Rosario Book Fair is being held.

It was a bit better than last year, when I gave it an appalling review. The usual pseudoscience and Da Vinci Code-ish crap was restricted to a few specific spots; there was less fiction and more history books, as well as an inordinate amount of space for Marxist literature and, of course, many books by Roberto Fontanarrosa so that people who never knew who he was when he was alive can now buy them and show them off. Everything was terribly expensive, but that's how it usually is.

There was also a huge scale model of Santa Fe La Vieja, or Cayastá, the site of the first settlement of the city of Santa Fe, which had to be moved because, among other things, the nearby San Javier River had a tendency to eat away parts of the town. The provincial government is campaigning for Santa Fe La Vieja to be declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, which would mean funds for archaeological exploration and preservation.

My personal agenda for this weekend (agenda means 'schedule' or 'appointment book' in Spanish, being more faithful to the original Latin meaning '[things] to be done') is going to the Kite Festival at Scalabrini Ortiz Park, at least one day (it's a Fri-Sat-Sun event). I'll be there for the pictures only... I think haven't flown a kite in 20 years. Recurrent attenders have recommended it highly; there'll be fireworks, model aircraft, and even rokkaku kite (六角凧) fights.

It's a long weekend, since the holiday of August 17, honouring José de San Martín, is moved to Monday, August 20. So I'll have Sunday for roleplaying (if all of my players are healthy — one was attacked by a fierce Mycoplasma last week!), and Monday... we'll see.

Revolution Day weekend

The long weekend was fairly quiet. I got out with the gang on Thursday for some unhealthy fun and slept through all the glorious morning of Revolution Day. Patriotic celebrations don't really do much for me anyway, and after watching how President K turned the commemoration of the (bloodless, burgeois and porteño-centered) revolution of 25 May 1810 into a political meeting, busloads of hired voters included, I was pretty much satisfied that I didn't get up earlier. K went to Mendoza this year, ostensibly to reinforce his pro-federalist stance again, though as before, there were many who guessed he didn't want to go to the Te Deum at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Buenos Aires, where he would've had to listen to the de facto intellectual leader of the opposition, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio; and then Julio Cobos, governor of Mendoza and K Radical, is a likely candidate for the vice-presidency along with First Lady Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, or, as some like to abbreviate her, CFK.

Enough of politics... After a few much-needed glasses of water and an aspirin, I sat down with my folks to eat some extremely heavy empanadas, as tradition demands, and then set out to my next task — going to the movies. Pirates of the Caribbean III was a very good movie. Mind you, I liked the first two issues, but they weren't exactly earth-shaking for me. I don't quite understand the fanatic devotion of many people for these picturesque characters. But PotC3 was different: much darker, more dramatic, longer, and more complicated and complex (those two are not the same). The characters were less cartoonish, more developed, more troubled, and at the same time they didn't lose their freshness; the movie was still clearly an adventure-comedy, not a depressing personal drama. If you haven't seen I and II, go get them and then see this one (you won't get a thing if you don't).

Well, a couple of misunderstandings later, I was left without suitable plans for the Saturday and Sunday, so paradoxically, I took the greatest advantage of the long weekend on Thursday night and Friday afternoon... Saturday afternoon, however, was not a complete loss. The sun again came out in full glory and the freezing cold abated a little. I took my bike and went first east, then north, then a bit west, to reach an old train station I was determined to photograph, the last one: Sarratea Station.


Sarratea Station is in the north of Rosario, in what I think is still Barrio Alberdi (though the area looks definitely poorer than the typical middle-upper-class Alberdi), about 1.5 km west of the river's shore. The railway was part of the Ferrocarril Mitre company, back when the state-owned railway covered all of Argentina. This line ran north–south. Sarratea was closed down and more-or-less abandoned in 1977, like most other passenger stations. After talking to a lady who was doing her sobremesa (post-lunch relax time) inside, and who came out to see what I was doing (possibly), I learned the building is now the home of railway personnel of the Nuevo Central Argentino. I'm not sure if any trains are still going down this line, but it looks well-maintained. Of course the train, if there's one, doesn't stop here anymore. The old station sign is still there, but rust and the trees' shade make it very difficult to spot:


I've been reading up a lot on railway history, as I told you once already, and I tell you the nostalgic, bittersweet feeling that I get from unearthing these old stations is very special. If this country needs something, it's a renewed railway system. Cheap, safe, spacious, comfortable trains — not bullet trains that plunder your pockets and blur the landscape and seem a bit ridiculous in a country where millions are starving, and not buses, no matter how luxurious. It's very difficult to explain where this feeling of mine comes from, since I've never travelled by train that I can remember. Sure, I went on the Rosario–Buenos Aires line several times with my grandpa, but that was ages ago and I have no recollection of it. I don't live near a train station either; I have never had the rhythm of my activities marked by the noisy arrivals or departures of trains. Must be some sort of preternatural memory, even though I don't believe that's even possible.