[BRIEF NOTE] Going South

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Salon.com, Patrick Smith has a travelogue describing his visit to Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Buenos Aires must be on any architecture buff's short list of must-sees, if only for the novelty: a distinctively, almost stubbornly European city in the middle of Latin America. I'm tempted to call it "stunning," but that's a word that implies a measure of new, bright and gleaming. Buenos Aires, for all its neoclassical monuments, carved facades and filigrees, does not gleam. It exists gloomily beneath a layer of grime and neglect, which at this point, depending on the neighborhood, treads the precarious ridge between old-word charm and dilapidation. A certain state of post-colonial disrepair would be ordinary in lesser-developed countries, but from a supposed world-class center of sophistication I expected more. So it goes in Argentina after years of corrupt governments, hyperinflation and economic free-fall. I was amazed at the numbers of homeless people wandering around B.A.'s busiest commercial zones. Not merely individuals, mind you, but whole families, sleeping on heaps of refuse and rummaging through dumpsters adjacent to chic clothing shops and banks.

It's worth reading, and not only because of the funny meditation on in-flight music at the travelogue's beginning.