„In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days, you can … fly round it nonstop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating… Then the world is immense. The best you can do is trace your long, infinitesimally thin line through the dust and extrapolate. I drew the longest line I possibly could, that could still be seen as following a course.“ T.Simon, Jupiter’s travels
Well, the situation consolidated when I found a safe place to leave the bicycle in the town center’s hostel. The only way to really discover a city is to walk. I walked a lot, I walked for hours, I walked for days. I walked the streets of copple stone in the tango quarter San Telmo, I went to the modern district of Puerto Madero, skyscrapers along the former city harbour, and to the rougher neighbourhood of La Boca, where just some blocks from the picturesque touristic scenery of colourfully painted houses elflock children play in the foul gutter. I crossed the residential areas of Monserrat and Balvanera, with their deep and dark urban canyons between the highrisers (see the impressive aerial photos 1 and 2), and the more cosy places of the Paris-like Palermo Viejo and the wealthy Recoleta with their 19th century buildings. I’ve seen people sleeping on cardboard mattresses in the streets, people with tired time-worn faces who since long have given up to fight, elegantly dressed ladies pushing the buggy on the green playgrounds in the sunny afternoons, business men running in the streets hounded by their loneliness, elder women selling flowers on bus stops and men in old-fashioned suits sitting around in bars sipping an eternal cup of coffee.
But the evenings found me in what I may have missed these last months, in the theatre, in the cinema (with a poignant Argentine movie) and, of course, in a tango show: a highly virtuosic presentation of various aspects of traditional and modern tango, with fancy dresses and a precisely dosed erotism. I could have watched that for the rest of my life.
But I somehow cannot resist the temptation to reassemble the completely dismantled bike to head for a last back-country trip in South America.