Sunday, Lovely Sunday

Everyone's been emailing me, asking for pictures.  So...  photojournalistic essay time!  

Really I'm killing a few birds (so to speak) and giving people what they want.  Some of you will be able to live vicariously through my vicarious living.  The rest of you will (hopefully) get your entertainment fix for the week, in the form of my blog. 

See how good I am to you all?

Sunday morning started with a writing session at Bar de Cao, the café across the street. 

I've been going there most days to work.  It's quaint inside, the waitresses are friendly and leave me alone, there's plenty of seating, and the doors aren't tricky.  All pluses.

After a couple hours at the laptop, I decided I'd walk to the Feria de San Telmo to see what was going on.  Mostly I just wanted to work off the medialunas I ate.

The walk is roughly twenty blocks I'd say—twenty-five minutes if you trek like I do.  At one point, I had to cross Avenida 9 de Julio:

I've been wondering what happened on the 9th of July that warranted having such a big-ass street named after it.  The picture doesn't really show how huge it is—the sucker is twenty lanes across (ten each direction).  Yeah, I could look up to see what historical significance the date has, but I've been having too much fun speculating each time I cross the road.  (Today I theorized that it was named after the day the first Starbucks opened in Buenos Aires.)

Anyway, I walked on to the Feria.  A feria is basically a street fair.  The one in San Telmo is each Sunday and the largest one in the city.

Lots of artisans selling their wares.  Also lots of musicians and tango dancers, though the dancers didn't impress me (my sister has raised my bar).  There were a couple flamenco guitarists who were awesome though.

To the left, there's a square where people have strange booths set up, selling not just antiques but weirdness.  Like there were these two old women dressed up as babies or dolls or something.  What was up with that?  And there was a man dressed as a big eyeball.  (I'm not clever enough to make that up.)

See the hordes of people?  It's like that for blocks and blocks:

But there's plenty of opportunity for respite.  You can pick up a cold beverage and grab a curb, like the people above. 

Jugo de naranja (fresh-squeezed orange juice) is very big here.  There's an orange juice vendor every five feet.  So if you have a thing for OJ, Buenos Aires is the place to be.

And lastly...

Me, happily disheveled at the end of the day, looking forward to the next morning's medialuna fix.