Love-Hate, part 1

I can say that we have left Buenos Aires in good spirits. We enjoyed the city and did a lot, but retrospectively we can say that two weeks would have been enough.

expresses our feelings best for this city

On the one hand Buenos Aires had to offer so many beautiful things: lots of beautiful parks in the city, the Botanical Gardens, a huge selection of museums, tango dancers, vibrant street markets, cafes, restaurants and shops were decorated with so much love and attention to detail, open and friendly people, great architecture ....
On the other hand, the city was incredibly dirty and loud. Yes, yes, I know, this characteristic applies to most cities and one can expect it. (NOISE + DIRT = CITY)
but ...

Sidewalks, Dog s... & Happy Flip Flops

Unlike in Florence, there were spacious sidewalks. Plenty place for pedestrians, fruit sellers, kiosks and most important of all dogs.

We were puzzled to see how many people had dogs, considering the apartments in the city are not really big and no one has a garden. It quickly became very obvious that the Argentine's are madly in love with their dogs. They got even jobs for dog-walkers, these people took the dogs from other people for a walk. It was quite entertaining to watch them walking the dog gang, from Rotweiler to Golden-retriever and Pudel. The record we saw was a guy with 12 dogs on the leach. Obviously all of the dogs need to do their business and the owners or dog-walkers didn't really care if that was in the middle of the sidewalk.... disgusting, even more because no one bothered to clean up afterwards....
Besides the dog sh.. (let me call it poop) there was also plenty of rubbish on the sidewalks. Firstly, because they hardly have the containers to throw in the rubbish bags, so the residents had no other choice then to put it on the side of the sidewalk and secondly because homeless people searched in the bags for food and in the process ripped the bags open. Straying dogs did the rest to the ripped open bags and you can imagine the result.

My flip flops were as a matter of fact on vacation, I only walked around in closed shoes.
Speaking of shoes, the young women wore quite unusual looking shoes. They looked like a "cross breeding" between Birkenstocksandale and Flip Flop, but high. The plateau sole was the same hight from the front to the back. We thought that they wore this ugly looking shoes, because of the waste and dirt on the sidewalks. When we asked them for the reason, we always got the same answer. It is fashion right now. -?- Ooookey.....
Apart from the dog poop and rubbish on the sidewalks, I should also mention that most of them were completely broken with big holes and broken tiles. However, this was actually not a problem for us, since we looked constantly were we were walking anyway.

Graffiti Mundo

Let me conclude this post with something nice about Buenos Aires. The rather unpleasant streets I just described, were decorated with many graffiti's. Buenos Aires greatly supports their graffiti and street art scene, there is even a guided tour by Graffitmundo to see the cities most famous graffiti. They are a non-profit organization and they work in close collaboration with the street artists to give a most authentic tour. Unfortunately we did not make the tour, but we tried to capture as many graffiti as possible whilst strolling through the town. (oops, just stood in dog poop .....)