Ain't Sayin' He a Grave Cleaner...

We were woken up by Mark banging on our apartment door at 10 to 12, shouting 'Chicos! We should cook steak sandwiches!'Now as watching Sacha Baron Cohen's film 'Bruno' is a test of how conservative you are, a long trip to Argentina is similar except a test to see how long you can go without vegetables (to date I have only seen them three times, and one of those was at a distance)and how much steak you can stomach before you have a massive heart attack. So far I am passing the test with no cardiac issues surfacing.

After forcing down a healthy breakfast of pure meat, we ventured into the Recoleta district where we stumbled upon a large, outdoor market. Within seconds of entering the market Ritchie stops, turns around and with an important tone of voice announced 'I can smell weed'. So we all, including Mark, went forth to find the source of this curious scent, and on the way discovered some fairly interesting, non intoxicating, products. There were the typical products there to lure tourists and those born with a similarly low-level of taste like Ponchos with 'BUENOS AIRES' woven into the chest in large, red writing. There was also a guy sat behind his stall with a mass of old newspapers. Great, I thought, some hobo has nicked this poor bastard's stall and has spread his mighty collection of old rubbish around it, in a slightly more acceptable version of a dog pissing on a tree. However, it turned out that upon closer inspection, this dirty little chap was not homeless and this mass collection of paper was part of his trade. How, I hear you say, can someone make a living from old paper? I shall tell you, this chap sifted through his pile of paper looking for certain shades of colour and then proceeded to twist it in a particular fashion so that it became possible to fashion a little statuette out of them. This doesn't sound very impressive in writing,but when you become face to face with a massive, brightly coloured, surprisingly robust paper goose in the middle of a market, it does become slightly hard to ignore. But, that didn't make me want to buy it. You'd have to be a right nonce for that.

As we emerged from the mass of vendors, weird models, strange leather faces and Brazillian tourists we came up to the Recoleta Cimeteria, which is one of the city's main attractions. At first it looks a bit disappointing, just a rather crumbly red brick wall with a few images of Jesus staring down at you in a rather condescending fashion. However upon entering you get that atmosphere descending down on you that always happens at some point or another when you go into a fairly historic graveyard. This was momentarily lifted again when Ritchie blurted out 'Since when the f**k does being dead become a f*****g tourist attraction, if people came up to my town and started taking pictures of dead people, we'd think they were f*****g weirdos'. However, I separated from the group and went around taking what I hoped would turn out to be some pretentiously moody and maybe even arty photos. Which I cannot say was a great success. However in doing so I learned that Recoleta is the resting place of Eva Peron who was the second wife of President Juan Peron. There was a throng of tourists surrounding her grave and I must admit I was not overly keen to see it so I moved on. Besides, at least 50 per cent of the crowd were Americans. In fact, instead of suffering from an invasion of German, speedo-clad, tourists, Argentina seems to be plagued by very annoying Americans who have no concept of respect or culture or, Brazillians, whom I will come to complain about in due course. However, the tourists were a minority in comparison to the enormous cat population, who seemed to occupy every other tombs, which I must admit I found a little disturbing.


Recoleta Cimeteria is in some ways similar to Brompton Cemetery in London, and fortunately, does not have a reputation for being popular amongst certain members of the gay community. It is essentially quite Victorian in appearance, all the graves are elaborate and evidently quite well looked after. Despite the constant presence of death which surrounded me I didn't actually get the impression that I was in a place where people were laid to rest. This may have been due to the way the cemetery was laid out, effectively in blocks, like the rest of Buenos Aires, and that there was a lot of greenery around, and a good amount of trees which provided sufficient contrast to the cold, grey of the tombs. I was also surprised to see that there was actually a team of tomb cleaners, who went around with a little trolley containing cloths, polish for the coffins, feather dusters and the like. They seemed to be perfectly at ease in the tombs, however one of them wasn't quite as placid when I tried to take a sneaky photo of him, which caused lots of shouting and brandishing of fists. I escaped being locked in a tomb for eternity by gesticulating in sign language that I was 'taking a picture of the bird on top of the grave'. I don't think he was entirely convinced.


Afterwards we all followed Mark out of the cemetery who was running around the courtyard with a contraption he called his 'maddy-cam', something made out of brown plumbing material with a camera crudely attached to the end trying to film a pigeon, which drew a crowd and caused people to take photos, at which point I suggested it might be a good time to leave.

That night we went out for dinner, just around the corner from the apartment. Again we had a sumptuous steak feast washed down with many bottles of beer. I remember having a 'spanglish' conversation with Mark's girlfriend about George Orwell and whether, in all my knowledge of teaching prepubescent teenagers English, it was too hard for Argentine 12 year olds. At this point I was feeling horribly tired and the combination of a heavy meal and copious amounts of alcohol was not helping. I was not providing much coherent conversation. But at least I was better than Ritchie, who was drunkenly trying to obtain directions to the nearest toilet in very loud English with a slightly frightened looking waiter. Whilst walking back to the apartment, on the way to ending a fairly incident free day, I was promptly targeted by one of the local drunkards and had some horrid concoction from a plastic bottle poured over me when I told him to piss off and that I wouldn't give him any money, I hope to God it was just coke.

We went back to Jess' room, promptly buggered the air conditioning and went to bed. Expecting hangovers and a hair of the dog mentality to be the order of the ensuing day.