Oh, What a Weekend

When I was in 2^nd and 3^rd grade, my teacher made us write a summary of our weekend and turn it in every Monday. I absolutely hated it and it became a joke that “Oh, What a Weekend” was the bane of my eight-year-old existence. Last week, my dad suggested that I start updating my blog at least once a week and he joked that it would be just like writing my weekly assignment of “Oh, What a Weekend.” So here it is Dad, my first installment of the second edition of “Oh, What a Weekend.”

This past weekend started on Thursday. Argentina has a wonderful rule that if a holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday you get off Monday or Friday to make it a four-day-weekend. The U.S. should adopt this policy—it’s great. Thursday was the 24 de marzo, the federal holiday commemorating the beginning of the last military dictatorship. We went to Buenos Aires for a march/demonstration/protest which was really awesome. Argentina is such a politically charged country and the march was unlike anything I’ve been too. People from all sorts of political groups of all ages including children and grandmothers were present to show their support for justice for the crimes committed during the dictatorship. We walked around trying to find the “Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,” a group of women who protest each week (from the dictatorship-present) to find out more information about the “disappeared.” They are an incredibly strong group of women who hold so much respect in the argentine culture. As we were walking around behind the Madres, people would stop their chanting and start applauding the Madres as they walked by. It was really awesome to see such admiration for the women that have devoted their lives toward recovering the memories of their loved ones.

After the March in Buenos Aires, Ruth Ann and I stayed in a hostel in Buenos Aires because we were headed to El Tigre early Friday morning with our family. El Tigre is a river delta near Buenos Aires that really is like a city of different rivers, “The Venice of Argentina.” We took the train and a boat taxi to a house on the river and met up with Eli (my host mom) and her family and friends. This included about 20 people in two different houses. It was a great family weekend with lots of great food (including a barbequed pig and homemade pizza made on the grill) charades and lots of stories. We were able to swim, sit out in the sun and even go out on the boat. I tried wakeboarding but to no avail but the highlight of the weekend was definitely taking the boat to the mouth of El Tigre to see the Buenos Aires skyline. It was awesome to see the whole city from the water—it really is enormous.

I loved spending time with Eli and her family and friends but it definitely made me miss Grady family vacations (plus, charades with Argentine movies was really hard… Mosquito Coast and Without Anesthesia are really hard to act out). It was a beautiful weekend and I hope to return to El Tigre when my mom and aunts come to Argentina to visit in a few weeks.

Back to life in La Plata this week (which hopefully means finalizing classes)—plus, U2 concert on Sunday! I hope you are all doing well at home, I miss you!

Con cariño,

Caroline

Memory Sites in Buenos Aires and La Plata

As many of you know, the program that I am doing in La Plata is focused on human rights, specifically with respect to the last military dictatorship from 1976-83. I am taking classes and doing an internship at the Comisión Provincial por La Memoria (CPM) which focuses on education and research of “los desaparecidos” or the disappeared. Thousands of people were taken from their homes and tortured during the dictatorship and many are still “disappeared” today.

In the past week, we’ve had the opportunity to visit a few memory sites both in Buenos Aires and La Plata. In Buenos Aires, we went to El Parque de La Memoria. It’s a big park with different sculptures and a memorial for the disappeared. Not only is it a beautiful park but each sculpture also represents a different part of the horror of the dictatorship. The wall of names is similar to the Vietnam Memorial in DC but it also lists the ages of the disappeared and notes if any of the women were pregnant (embarazada). It was incredible seeing the vast array of victims including children and university students. We also saw the name of the brother of the coordinator of our program. It’s easy to think that this happened a long time ago but the majority of the population has memories of the dictatorship in one way or another and it’s very much still affecting people today. Here are a few pictures: a few names on the wall and a sculpture that reads “To think is a revolutionary act.”

Next we went to Olimpo, a detention and torture center in Buenos Aires. The most remarkable thing about Olimpo to me is its location in the city. It’s in a populated neighborhood where prisoners can hear the happenings of the neighborhood on the other side of the wall. I cannot imagine the psychological torture of being so close to a “normal” life while being tortured and held captive. It’s also remarkable to me that people in the town didn’t say anything or try to stop the incredulous breach of human rights happening in their neighborhood but if the police, government, and military are the perpetrators, who could they turn to? We saw the cells, bathrooms, and torture rooms and visited the library/museum that had biographies on most of the prisoners. It was definitely unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before and I kept thinking about “if these walls could talk” the stories that they would tell. Many of the people who were detained here were later dropped in the river to drown and the whereabouts of some people are still unknown. There is still an incredible gap in the knowledge about the identities of the disappeared and people are still actively looking for them today.

Later in the week, we went to a dedication ceremony at La Casa Mariani-Teruggi to mark it as a memory site in La Plata. In November of 1976 the house was bombed by and 5 people were killed and a baby of three months was taken by the military. The house was the center of publication for a clandestine newspaper during the beginning of the dictatorship. It was crazy to see a residential house just completely destroyed with such violence. We also had the opportunity to meet Chicha, the grandmother of the baby (Clara Anahí) who was kidnapped and still missing today. Chicha helped start the “Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo” a group of grandmothers of the disappeared who protest in the Plaza de Mayo. Chicha is an incredible woman and it was awesome to see so many mothers and grandmothers who have never stopped pressuring the government to find information on their loved ones. It is also wild to think about Clara Anahí today—most babies who were taken were then given to military families to adopt. Theoretically, Clara Anahí is alive today with absolutely no knowledge of her past and the efforts of her grandmother to find her.

These memory sites are incredible but definitely hard to see. The history of the dictatorship and the disappeared are still very present in recent memory. Many people have personal connections with disappeared people and the presence is still very strong in the culture. It’s so interesting to learn about all this history and I’m excited to start our internship at the CPM. I think I’m going to work with the Police Archive at the CPM to help them categorize and digitalize the records. The archive is now public and there is so much information available about “subversives” and “radicals” in the past 50 years.

Wow, this is a long post… classes start this week at the university so I’ll let you all know how that goes. As always, I’m loving life here, I miss you and please send me mail.

Con cariño,
Caroline

Oh yea, I’m here to study—right?

After Gualeguaychu we had our first final in our Spanish class at the Comisión. It was fine—nothing compared to W&M finals but still a reminder that we are taking classes here in Argentina.

We have finished our Spanish class (2 credits) and almost finished a history of Argentina in the 20th Century (3 creidts). We just started a new class on Tuesday about the construction of memory and its place in Argentina after the military dictatorship. I really like the professor (his style is similar to the professors at W&M) but it’s a little too theoretical for me. I feel like I’m back at school taking Intro to Hispanic Studies discussing “interpretive power” and “collective memory” (no mention of “imagined community” but I’m sure it will come up soon). However, if there is ever a place to study historical memory it would be in Argentina with the Comisión so it’s definitely a unique opportunity here.

The remainder of our credits will come from the University of La Plata. I finally signed up for classes at the University last week but they are still not set in stone. Here, public higher education is completely free. Thus, you can take however many classes you want and drop them at any point before the final exam. I have thus signed up for 5 different seminars and I’m waiting to see which one I will end up taking. After going to all the classes next week I’ll decide which one to take based on three criteria: the schedule that allows the most time to travel, the professor whose Spanish I can understand the best, and finally, the class that has the least amount of work/a written final instead of the traditional oral final exam that is customary in many classes. Maybe I’m slacking off a bit this semester but it’s hard enough to think in Spanish all day that I’m not really looking for more of an academic challenge.

I’m excited to finally nail down my schedule at school so I can start planning trips around Argentina. So far, my must-see list consists of Cordoba, Mendoza, and Bariloche with maybe a trip to Patagonia pending time and money remaining.

Overall, I’m still really enjoying the culture and it feels a little more permanent after a little more than a month in Argentina. I’m so lucky to be living here with wonderful people and I’m excited to see more of the country and meet more Argentines in the next couple weeks.

With love,
Caroline

Ps. Please send mail if you can! I promise to write back. My address is:
Caroline Grady
Calle 60 N 318
Entre 1 y 2
La Plata CP 1900
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Carneval 2011: Gualeguaychu, Argentina

Carneval in South America is huge and Argentina is no exception. We went to Gualeguaychu with almost our entire group from W&M (Maya was with her parents in BsAs).

This trip was very haphazardly planned (we didn't have a place to sleep) and we departed from La Plata early Saturday morning with tents and the bare essentials and boarded the best bus i have ever been on. Argentina has an incredible bus system and the seats on the buses made a 15 hour bus ride to Mendoza seem like a possibility in the future. We got out of the bus in Gualeguaychu and it finally hit me how many people came to Gualeguaychu for Carneval. We took a taxi to the river and were instantly surrounded by lots of people on very small beaches

However, we had more important things on our mind than joining the party, mainly finding a place to camp. We crossed the river to the less popular side and walked around for about two hours asking different campsite if there was room before deciding to stop at a restaurant and ask if they knew of any places we could camp. I was so amazed at how willing the owner was to help us. He jumped on his motorcycle and returned in about 20 minutes with the name of a campsite that still had room for tents.

After setting up our campsite and checking out the beach for a while, we returned to the restaurant that we stopped at earlier in the day for an early dinner. We had a killer parrillada with more meat than you can imagine. We had the traditional pork, chicken, beef, chorizo and then a few meats that I’m not really sure what part of the cow the came from. Not all of them were great, but it was a uniquely argentine experience. The best part of the meal, was by far the puppies that the waitress brought out. There is nothing better than a puppy break in the middle of a delicious dinner.




The rest of the weekend consisted mostly of going to the beach, eating whatever we could find close to the beach/campsite and a combination of going out/sleeping at night. It was fun and the beach parties are crazy (here are a few pictures, including the boys dancing on stage with the DJ/party starter) but I think I could have done Gualeguaychu in 2-3 days rather than 4. I’m glad that our group was able to experience Carneval and get to know each other a better but the comfortable seats on the bus and finally getting home felt great after 4 days of camping in the heat and eating whatever we could find in convenience stores.

Buenos Aires: Part I

I knew that I shouldn't have started a blog-- I'm so terrible at updating it! Since i last posted, we have made two trips to Buenos Aires and it is an awesome city. That being said, I'm really happy I'm living in La Plata and BsAs is just a short bus ride away. It is an enormous city and definitely feels more touristy than La Plata. Our first trip to the city was with the Comisión with our entire group and our wonderful tour guide Juan Ignacio. We went to all the historical parts of the city and were able to learn a lot about the different parts. We started in La Boca, near the mouth of the river and checked out the Caminito. The Caminito is a really bright neighborhood with lots of vendors and tango galore. On Sundays there is a street fair through San Telmo and we saw lots of art/souvenirs to buy.


We then went to Plaza Mayor which is kind of in the center of BsAs. There's a cathedral and la Casa Rosada (the Pink House) where the president works, and its been a center for political gatherings and protests. This picture is from inside the Casa Rosada with one of the guards and looking out onto the plaza.


Next, we took a subway to Congreso (where the legislative building is located). The subway was built in 1913 and the cars look really antique. They also used different colors for all the stations so people who couldn't read would still be able to navigate the system.



One very unique place that we saw was El Cemetario de Recoleta. Its an enormous cemetary with big mausoleums of the rich and famous in Argentina's history. It's kind of weird but also really beautiful. We saw the grave of Evita which has lots of flowers and a constant stream of visitors. However, the mausoleum next to hers was for sale so if you want to be buried next to Evita-- check it out.


Finally, we went to Palermo. It's a very young, artsy, shopping-based neighborhood in the northern part of the city. We walked around and peaked inside some stores. There were groups playing music throughout the streets and its definitely on the list of places to return.


Overall it was a great introduction to Buenos Aires. It's a beautiful city and I'm really excited to take advantage of being so close to it. The bus ride from La Plata to Buenos Aires is about an hour and costs about $2-3 each way so it's very accessible and convenient. This past weekend we went in for another day trip but I'll write more about that later. For anyone interested... my address here is:

Caroline Grady
Calle 60 N. 318
entre 1 y 2
La Plata CP 1900
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Love,
Caroline