Street murals in Buenos Aires

Graffiti is everywhere in Buenos Aires. Sometimes it is colourful and pleasing, other times political, and most often simply destructive and ugly.








More serious street art is also seen throughout BA. On abandoned buildings, walls, or under rail bridges. It can be truly amazing.

                                       

The porteros

Almost every apartment building has one. Office buildings usually do too it seems. A doorman, or, here in BA, el portero. A super of sorts. A friendly face, sometimes. A guy who watches the building, the street, and the other porteros.

And before most of us get up in the morning, an army of porteros is at work cleaning the sidewalk and driveway in front of the buildings. Sometime after 6:00, and certainly by 7:00, the hoses and brooms come out. In Buenos Aires, the sidewalks need cleaning every morning; the dog poop and garbage that collects through the day is amazing. This is a city of dog owners who haven't quite picked up the global memo about picking up. It's one of the truly disgusting things about this wonderful city.

Some larger buildings have video cameras and a bank of monitors for security. Our building is a somewhat simpler operation. In fact, most of the time our building of twenty apartments shares the portero with the building next door. He is a big, friendly guy. And like his companeros, not so friendly when having his photo taken, which your faithful correspondent discovered early one morning. The matter, a trivial issue to be sure, is now working its way through the Argentine legal system.

Washing down the street itself is important for a portero too, but only in front of his building.

All of this cleaning seems to happen every day. Weekends and holidays too. It's an important job and all of us should be grateful for the work of  the porteros, here in BA, and everywhere else it happens too.

Deja vu all over again...

Sometimes you can be walking along and something looks amazingly familiar. And yes, we have seen this thing before. Somewhere else. Even I can remember, I think.



In this case, along a busy street in Hollywood (yes, Hollywood is in Buenos Aires), we stopped in our tracks to look at what someone had done to several tree trunks.

It looks much the same as what we saw in Dawson City, Yukon (over 13,000 km and five time zones north-west). We saw it first near the town's centre and then at the Midnight Dome.



Here in Buenos Aires the display promotes a Peruvian restaurant called Astrid y Gaston. In Dawson it's the work of an unnamed but generous citizen adding colour, and warmth, to life in a northern town.