Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Report 1 ... PM


A little protest going on......


One of the interesting streets with trees and traffic


hows that for architecture and the old truck .....


see those yellow trucks


new development along the water front



see the base of the bridge....


more new development

Wed on foot - PM

At the corner of Lima and Belgrano, I sit here having my second cup of coffee and enjoy watching the people heading off to work. on foot, by car, by bike, by bus.....what ever means it takes. I wonder how the world meets our needs. I reach for my BB....Oh God!!! do i really miss it???

Social cultures are the same regardless if you leave in Milwaukee WI, Paris, Ottawa or BA...we all wear clothes, want to look our best....and as i sip my coffee how can you miss a street person looking for plastic bottles, cans and spare change.

Our cultures co-exist no matter where you are in this world. I gave the guy some pesos and he smiled back at me and we just crossed a culture barrier.

Other cultures were visible during my travels today.....how about traffic cultures? You would think we are all the same with respect to the traffic stuff other then driving on the other side of the road. Down here they do things a bit different and it make you think you are at the drag races waiting for the lights to stage so you can be the first one of the mark. Here they give you orange before green so get ready and go on GREEN. You can actually hear the cars, buses, cyclist....etc getting ready to jump on the GREEN.

In some of the picture you may see some people crossing the street on red and green. Even though you get green cars don't have the right of way. As you look at some of those pictures many time i wondered if people were going to be a victim of the green light. Well to my surprise...vehicle actually slow down and let pedestrians cross...without getting upset.....

Poverty is prelevant here and i am amazed at some of the creative ways they do at collecting money. I stood at one corner on Florida Avencida....where of course is a major shopping district. Its a street mall and most of the people you see and hear on that street are Brits, US, Asians...all nationalities. Anyway I noticed this young girl maybe 8 yrs old, she was begging for money but i also noticed she was collecting drink cans. As people entered the little store she would stop them and would show her bag of cans and indicating if she could get there can if there were buying any can drinks. I watched her follow people who were drinking can drinks and bringing them back and putting them in her bag.

BA is political central for Argentinians. As you can see in some of the pictures some people were demonstrating and it seems there are set times for those types of activities. Amazing that time slots for protest...11 am and 4 pm. If you look closely at some of those pictures...you see yellow trucks...there are response team trucks just in case if the demonstration gets out of hand.

Other picture you see in there are some interesting architecture, some areas where some new development is taking place.near the water front. The bridge you see is a swing pedestrian bridge and if you look closely you can see the base where the bridge swings as boats approach.

Tomorrow will be subway trips to the burrows of each subway line. This should show me more about what the city is made of.














No comments: