Visit to Recoleta

     Ballets watched:  Nutracker x 6
                                 Onegin x 1
     Teatro Colon takes up an entire block of Buenos Aires.  And the blocks are really big here.  So of course this was the perfect time to forget my camera.
     Most of the theatre seemed to be made up of boxes, fancy boxes, but we booked yesterday and got 'partial view' seats.  The entire stage was in view only if you leaned a few feet over the railing but because of the potential hazards of this I spent the performance leaning forward as far as I could without actually running the risk of toppling and crushing people.
     The ballet was based on a novel in verse by the poet Aleksandr Pushkin who is, according to wikipedia, widely thought to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian poetry.  Eugene Onegin is supposedly so beautifully written as to be untranslatable.
      Pushkin was a notoriously touchy man, and fought a total of 29 duels before being fatally wounded.
     The ballet was another Tchaikovsky work, and the choreography was just gorgeous.  The theatre itself was also gorgeous, with gold-colored railings around all the levels of the seats, curtains at the entrance to the boxes, and a tremendous chandelier, however, the painting on the dome was strangely amateurish.  
      It was nearly 1 in the morning by the time we got home and ate dinner and we all slept in really late today before going out.  I got some pictures of the subway today while we were on our way to the bus station.  It took a while to get bus tickets for Bariloche but it looks like we are set to leave on the 2nd.  
     Trying to find lunch we got a little turned around, but made it to the restaurant that the guidebook raved about before finding out that they had nothing veggie on the menu.  At that point we took a taxi to a place that we could actually eat at.  Irritatingly, there was no plain iced tea on the menu (they only had some combination mint-lemon-tea thingy) so I ordered a pot of black tea and, with the help of some ice, turned it into iced tea.  The waitress didn't start giving me weird looks until I added the milk.
     We had to retrace our steps to reach the graveyard and then fight our way through the artisans' market.  The graveyard isn't headstones in the ground or even walls of shrines, like in Copacabana, but rows upon rows of crypts.  The coffins in some of the chapel-like rooms are surrounded by bits of roof and falling stone because of the damp, while others have fresh flowers.  Eva Peron's grave was quite nondescript compared to some of the elaborate affairs with marble angels and religious statues, merely being black and shiny, but it was surrounded by a horde of people.
      On our way out of the graveyard we came across a bunch of lounging cats.  One in particular was frighteningly memorable--it had no ears, squinty eyes, and particularly menacing and vicious look.  To illustrate, a tourist was having her picture taken by a crypt when said cat walked up to her.  When she noticed the cat she screamed and jumped away from it.  This was not me, or my mother. 
     Embarassingly we stopped afterwards in a Starbuck's for refreshment.  
     In the museum of Beaux Arts there are rooms upon rooms upon rooms of paintings and, though we diligently contemplated each painting at first, we began to skim them as time wore on.
     After two hours in the museum we flagged a cab back to the subway back from the Recoleta area and walked back to Santelma, where we are staying.  Stopped in a fresh pasta store, a vegetable stall, the market, and the supermarket for meals for dinner tonight and meals tomorrow because, since it's a holiday, most stores and restaurants will be closed.
     It was an 8-hour outing by the time we got home and we crashed for a little before making dinner, which has yet to be eaten.

Subway!

The inside of one of the more recently-tended crypts.  The grates in the floor hide the places beneath used to store older bodies.  The glass is what's making the picture look weird.

One of the more elaborate crypts

A view down one of the rows, with a statue belonging to a tomb out front.  I think people rub the dog's nose for luck.