Buenos Aires, Argentina: Bleary-Eyed Acclimation
By Jennifer Anthony

10 a.m., and the spring sunshine is mild and affable—a smattering of rays that poke tentatively through the residual winter gloom. I’ve chucked my bags in the hotel room and taken a quick shower to rinse off fourteen hours worth of airplane grime. Shoes laced and frizzy hair tamed with a coat of hairspray, I head down Avenida Nueve de Julio, the thoroughfare in Buenos Aires that Argentines refer to as the widest avenue in the world.

High-rise buildings sandwich Nueve de Julio’s twenty lanes and the famed Obelisco at their center. Cars and taxis and buses dutifully follow the giant white arrows painted onto the asphalt. The street burps cars from a mysterious underground parking lot. And professional walkers deftly maneuver packs of ten or more dogs across the walkways.

It is frenetic and exciting, but I have only had three hours of sleep. My eyes are as pink-rimmed as the carefree, off-leash Dogo Argentino – Argentinian Mastiff – who just passed me in the last batch of dogs. I turn away from the avenue, toward the soothing allure of grass and trees that my guidebook promises can be found in the Plaza San Martín. I go seeking what I think will be rest, planning to save the adventure for the next day, when I’m more refreshed.

I hear the plaza before I see it. Shouting. The beating of drums. And loud cracking sounds, like the repeated backfiring of cars, but as I draw closer they turn out to be gunfire, reckless people firing bullets into the air. A crowd of people is marching past the south end of the park, shouting, waving flags, and firing rifles. I witness a stray bullet ricochet off a wall and nick a man’s cheek, he looks astonished as the blood trickles down his skin.

In this pocket of the city, the sun has elbowed the haze aside and shines down on its various worshippers dotting the swatch of grass that slants toward the street. The blue and white striped national flag flies over the park, flapping and cracking in the breeze. Some people watch the demonstration with varying levels of interest. Others huddle over books. A few couples are intertwined, their kissing uninterrupted by the hurly burly below them. Just before the palos borrachos (drunken trees), a white-haired man dressed smartly in gray slacks and button-down sweater shows his granddaughter how to fly a handmade kite.

The manifestación—demonstration—is a protest against unemployment and its associated ills. And because the economy has suffered for years now, it is as much a part of the landscape as the graceful jacaranda trees that line the plaza’s walkways: some people choose to pay attention while others walk past, seeming not to notice. As a tourist, I find the nonchalance calming. And as a human, distressing.

My walking slows and I clutch my bag tighter for some false sense of security. It is my first day in the country. I am alone, and still wary. As with every time I’ve traveled to South America, I’d been warned—almost delightedly—about the different and creative ways I might be robbed. I glance around the park for demonstration protocol, determined not to look like a tourist.

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