Prologue: There’s a chance I may be able to post from Ushuaia. But for all intents and purposes, this may be my last post before I return from Antarctica.
I lied, just like everybody in the House, MD, narrative-verse. I couldn’t bring myself to run this morning.
Partly to blame for my lack of motivation this morning was my feeling of disappointment in the way yesterday’s post turned out. By the end of it, the prose became more a checklist “and then we did this… And then we did this….” It lacked any style and was an artless journaling. I think I rushed it, too. Truncation and ellipses were the order of the day; while that’s inevitable in recaps, I had hoped to transcend a few of the inherent problems with a pithier take. Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets the picnic basket. Is this an oddly placed callback to my Yogi Berra/Yogi Bear reference at journey’s start? Or lazy joke due to the 5 am time? Tough to say, other than it is 5 am as I type this. I came down to the lobby to see the Vavilov ship off to the airport and wish them a Bon Voyage!
Afterwards, I returned to the room and dozed for another hour or two. Today was a free day in Buenos Aires and neither Meg nor I did much in the way of prepping. We were tempted by the high speed ferry to Uruguay but it was a pricey proposition for a not-necessarily-stellar experience. We decided instead to hit a triumvirate of sights we saw but didn’t necessarily get to appreciate on yesterday’s city tour.
Navigating by map we only got lost six or seven times so that’s pretty good. And the added mileage in getting lost made me feel slightly less guilty about skipping this morning’s run. Nonetheless it remains my hope to grab an afternoon 5-10k to loosen the stiff muscles before leaving tomorrow for the Ioffe.
First stop on our triangle of tourism was the Paseo de la Historieta in San Telmo, a street lined with 3-D statues of famous Argentinian cartoon characters.
There’s no artful way to do this but to bullet point list them; I should say there’s no artful way that I can conceive of at this particular moment. But sometimes bullets are bitten and such is the case here.
We began our tour with Mafalda, a young girl seeking world peace in the land of adults. She’s sitting on her park bench and now so are Meg and I. I can get behind increasing the peace in this world, thus I sat behind the M-heroines. (Unrelated side note: in high school I was in a Mark Medoff workshop version of Stephanie Hero, a fractured fairy tale fable. There’s a line in the play that has Stephanie asking, “What exactly is the difference between hero and heroine?” Backstage we would always snicker and say to ourselves, “Street value.”)
Next was the man-about-town playboy Isidoro Cañones. Apparently he was full of verve and vim and was always surrounded by a troop of girls unattainable for any other man in Buenos Aires. So it makes sense that I’d snap a pic of Meg with him.
And then there’s Matias. Welcome Argentina.com describes this chance encounter thusly:
Right there, riding his fast skateboard along Balcarce Street, between México and Venezuela, Matías is waiting for us. That naughty, good-humored and witty child was created by Fernando Sendra in 1993 in the comic strip called Yo, Matías. He has accompanied us ever since with his perplexing questions about the grown-up world.
One of our last stops was at Don Fulgencio, a character described by our tour guide yesterday as a man with no childhood. As a result, Don Fulgencio has embraced being a kid in an adult world. I can relate.
But perhaps my favorite stop on our tour was this graffiti sprayed mural. We experimented with our iPhone panorama shooting and I couldn’t stop laughing at our myriad attempts to hold cameras steady and rush about the other to obtain a bizarre tryptic.
And we had to wait for a guy to finish smoking sitting next to this famed bee with no arms. But it was worth it I think:
From there we wandered over to the obelisk or Obelisco de Buenos Aires. Erected in 1936 to commemorate the fourth centenary of the original founding of the city, it’s a dead ringer for the Washington Monument.
Delightfully, it wasn’t too far from a Freddo’s. I know it was you Freddo. You had the dulche de leche ice cream locals said we MUST try. They weren’t wrong — super sweet and delicious, the kiddo size was 50 Argentinian pesos and almost too much to eat… almost. I mean, I pushed through the pain, just as I would in a marathon to get to the finish. That’s just the kind of guy I am. Sometimes we suffer for our victories…
The last triangle stop was the Eva Peron monument. We took a roundabout way to get there (hell, anytime I’m near a map it usually means we’re headed in a roundabout fashion to wherever we’re going), and actually bumped into a few fellow Marathon Tours people. En masse we visited the monument and I snapped a few great “all the women of the world united” pics, both at Eva Peron and at a tulip art installation.
A quick appreciation of a pink pedestrian bridge and we ambled back to the hotel. Meg convinced me to get out and run and rally. Between you, me, and the Internet, I’m super jealous and envious of Meg. While walking back to the hotel, we found out she had gotten into the NYC Marathon. I’m super happy for her, especially since her friend had to defer last year due to injury and now Meg can run with her. And I have a pretty amazing life, no doubt. But I’m still human and I’m jealous a variety of people here in Buenos Aires found out they got in and I, sadly, wasted my $11 once again on the lottery. This may be overcompensating but I am really happy for those folks who do get to experience NYC for the first, second, or even tenth time. They’re very lucky. I’m just jealous.
Meg wanted to do a 5K and then let me do my own thing. I couldn’t get my Garmin to locate its satellites so I was just kinda timing the run, figuring I’d do about an hour. We ran out to the Women’s Bridge, a rotating bridge over the water way that when ships need to pass spins to allow passage (as opposed to a drawbridge, this one rotates). Supposedly when the Women’s Bridge turns, it looks like a Tango dancer. I didn’t see that per se but it is a cool bridge. We were told that from the hotel to the Women’s Bridge was about a 5K so I ran out with Meg and then kept going down the Puerto Marco wharf to a dead end. I finally from there was able to get a satellite signal and ran back the way we’d come. I snapped a few photos along the way, including one I need to send to Meg as a “hey! what’s up?” photo.
Like any runner though, I wasn’t quite convinced the distance logged was sufficient. So returning to the hotel, I decided to do an extra mile to hopefully get me to a 10K for the run. As a result, I decided to run around the Plaza de San Martin, the Plaza in the Hotel Plaza where we’re staying. San Martin was the liberator of Argentina or at least a primary player in the process. Perhaps some day Lin-Manuel Miranda will write a musical about him.
Anyway, as a crazed runner needing my Garmin to hit a certain mile marker, I looped the plaza three times to ensure the 10K distance. Snapping a few photos along the way, I was struck by how the middle felt very Central Park, NY. And considering that this is the day of the NYC Marathon Lotto results, it seemed befitting. I may not get to run NYC again, but let’s be honest — I got to run here in Buenos Aires on my way to Antarctica! I’ve used this title before but seriously — don’t cry for me, Argentina! Or perhaps more appropriately, “Don’t Cry Kevin, You’re Being Stupid.”
Ah, but anyone who has ever flipped through TBS or was around in the summer of 1994 knows what Forrest Gump used to say: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
‘Course he also said “Life is like a box of chocolates” and so before the night is through Meg and I have to try the Argentinian chocolate of choice — the alfajore, a traditional confection that is pronounced “Alpha-Whore.”
Dropping the mic, that’s how to end if I DON’T get any more internet access.