San Telmo - the heart of BA

Today has been threatening rain throughout, so I did not take as many pictures as I would normally, the light being rather poor. However, as promised, I spent most of the day strolling around my new adopted neighbourhood of San Telmo, one of the oldest parts of the city, and rumoured to be where Pedro de Mendoza founded the city many moons ago (BA is currently celebrating its bicentennial, but I'm not sure how long it was between founding, in the colonial sense, and becoming an incorporated city, in the formal sense). It is a charming place, full of cobblestoned streets and leafy green parks where folks sip beers and watch tango dancers perform "spontaneously".

I spent most of the day popping in and out of the numerous antiques stores around Plaza Dorrego, some of which specialize entirely in art deco and art nouveau. Sadly, I did not in the end purchase anything, mostly because the things I really, really wanted - sideboards, entire silver tea sets, dining room chairs - would be difficult to transport. It pains me beyond belief to leave things in the store in the $50-100 range (the most expensive item was the sideboard, a fabulously rounded and shaped item big enough to fill a proper dining room, on for $563 - pesos, not dollars. There are about 4 pesos to a dollar currently). Yes, the sideboard would cost less than an IKEA chair back in Canada. Hence, the pain in leaving it behind.

Unfortunately for me, my interest in art deco has never really been manifested by the smaller items, the jewelry and tiny personal items that would fit easily in a suitcase. However, I am poised to buy something, and I will know it when I see it. It is actually hard to spend money here - for example, I am just back from a big dinner, with beer, that ran 40 pesos in total. When I gave the waiter a 50 peso note and indicated I did not want change, he nearly fell over. That still brought the cost of dinner to less than $15.

One of the things I have remarked upon so far in this neighbourhood is the ornate ironwork present on virtually every balcony of any building of a certain age:

 

Ironwork meets the Italianate style at Mercado San Telmo, a spectacular 1897 building that houses a number of individual stalls, on one side specializing in antiques and books, and on the other, on fruit and veggie sellers, butchers, bakers, etc. You can wander through there and shop item by item, stall by stall, and build an entire menu. Everyone entering the building is greeted by a rather romanticized vision of the place, handsomely crafted in filete:

 

A large part of the fun of this sort of vacation, wandering as I am on no fixed schedule, is finding the little gems along the way. BA is renowned for its graffiti -in fact, before going out to dinner, I watched a pair of young men cover over old graffiti on the building across the way from me, and paint something entirely new in its place. Even the graffiti is more elaborate and stylish than one might expect: