Apr-Jul: I'll be in the South Pacific.
Posts about argentina
Buenos Aires
It’s the end of summer here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The air is warm and sticky, but today, it’s pouring down rain. Buenos Aires is about as far south as Sydney, Australia, and Capetown, South Africa.
We’ve spent the last few days visiting with Leo Vartanian, director of LETRA Argentina. LETRA is short for Latinoamericanos en Traducción y Alfabetización, or Latin Americans in Translation and Literacy.
The organization is fairly young, and as its name indicates, is focused on involving Argentines in translation and literacy work both here in Argentina, in nearby countries like Paraguay, and in far-flung locations like Papua New Guinea.
Buenos Aires is a huge metropolitan area with a population roughly equivalent to that of Los Angeles, California (approx. 13 million). There’s a subway system (here called the subte) that we ride sometimes, and the streets are busy with cars, buses, and pedestrians.
The city is diverse, home to immigrants from all over Europe and the rest of the world. So you see last names like Schramm, Bianchi, and Li, but the uniting language is Spanish. Designer pizza is one of the specialty foods here, and all civilized people eat it with a knife and fork — knife in the right hand and fork in the left. It’s really delicious.
This evening, we’re hopping on a bus for Paraguay, where we’ll spend the next week before returning on to Argentina and continuing to Chile.
categories argentina
posted by david | permalink | comments (2)