Duncan's daughter, Charlotte, is currently living in Buenos Aires as part of a University placement year. An avid blogger, here's Charlotte's view on Buenos Aires;

 

Getting to know Buenos Aires

by twolonelygirlsblog

By Lottie Hanwell

So what’s Buenos Aires like?

Two months in and I still don’t feel entirely equipped to answer this question.

I could tell you about its luscious greenery, the huge trees with thick trunks and large leaves that line every street, the pastel blossom that spills over gates and balconies. I could tell you about its colour, with rainbows of intricately designed murals scaling every other wall. I could describe the local people, the porteños— as I have encountered them so far— with their unrivalled passion for red meat, seven inch flat-form sandals and mind-numbing reggaeton. Or perhaps the cosmopolitan mixture of French, Spanish and Italian people and architecture that leave you questioning whether you really ever left Europe at all. I could mention the mouthwatering smell of bbqing meat that wafts through the air at around 8pm in the evening, or the fact that Buenos Aires has more bookshops per inhabitant than any other city in the world.

But this romantic picture of Latin American vibrance and European elegance only goes so far as to describe the streets of the city where I have walked. Living in the so called ‘hipster’ neighbourhood of Palermo feels more akin to living in California than Argentina. Artisanal coffee shops, craft beer breweries, sushi restaurants and bars strung with fairy lights crowd its cobbled streets. Naturally, I settled very easily into this white girl utopia. For the first few weeks whilst frantically occupied with finding somewhere permanent to live and making friends, I barely clocked that there were hardly any rough sleepers on the streets. I quickly gained the confidence to walk home by myself at night: with policemen patrolling every other street, I saw little of the danger I’d been warned of.

It was only really a few weeks after arriving, when a family of young children came knocking at my gate begging for water, that I was forced to confront the reality of the wider city from which I’d been so purposefully cushioned. Directly faced with people from a very different Buenos Aires to the one I’d been inaugurated into as an expat, I realised just how much I’d been living within the gringo bubble. It’s unsettling how easy it can be to travel to the other side of the world looking for a different cultural experience and settle blindly into a routine and society so very similar to the one you left. Whether that’s meeting other English backpackers in a hostel and discussing the Premier League over cheaper pints, or moving abroad and hanging around with fellow international students in areas modelled on the cities of our homes.

Buenos Aires is certainly a city of fusion. Originally colonised by Spain in the 16th century, the 19th and 20th centuries saw the mass immigration of wealthy Europeans and consequently the migration of European culture to the South American capital. The ties between the two continents are felt in the architecture of Buenos Aires’ more prosperous barrios, which have seen the city to be called the Paris of Latin America, as well as in the faces of the locals, who so frequently embody a striking combination of dark, Latino skin and bright blue or green eyes. But though the city was built around the unification of cultures, it suffers a deep division between rich and poor. The neighbourhood of La Boca provides the perfect microcosm of the city’s two very different worlds. Home to El Caminito—the rows of multi-coloured houses you’re sure to recognise from the photos of any gap year traveller— and the Boca Juniors’ stadium, the area is one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. But walk the three or four blocks from one end of the tourist drag-way to the other and you’ll be met by police telling you not to venture any further. Beyond the streets of twirling tango dancers, rip-off steak restaurants and vendors of Argentine-themed gimmicks, lies a deprived, working class neighbourhood where people rummage in bins for food and pavements are minefields of dog crap.

It seems apparent that lots of the places recommended in guidebooks and travel websites—the much prettier, safer Buenos Aires— is very deliberately policed and maintained not necessarily to accommodate local people, but wealthy expats, international students and tourists. Of course, to an extent this can be said of any city, but never so notably have I experienced such a polarity.

Yet in spite of the efforts of local authorities and business owners, these trendy, modern, middle class areas aren’t— in my opinion at least— what make Buenos Aires the great city that it is. Gentrification hasn’t just made Palermo feel incongruent to the majority of Buenos Aires, but has given it a strange sense that it could almost belong to any of the world’s Westernized cities. With every homeless person moved on from the area, each new boutique hotel opened, and every tiny local parilla bought out by yet another glossy brunch bar, the barrio loses a little bit of its cultural authenticity. The resulting effect is streets upon streets of places designed around a homogenous, international understanding of ‘cool’, as dictated by food trends and Instagram feeds and almost always involving some combination of fairy lights, craft beer and avocado. As pleasant a place as it is to live, I didn’t move halfway across the world to sip £3 lattes in minimalist Nordic interiors, so in recent weeks have made more of an effort to get to know the Buenos Aires that exists beyond the sweeping tide of gentrification. In doing so I’ve realised that there is a much more honest beauty and individual character to be found when wandering around the city’s lesser-known residential neighbourhoods than strolling the manicured streets of Gringo-ville. In the following snaps, I’ve tried to capture some of the sights that particularly drew my eye.