Day 2

Today was a very interesting day. One of the first things we did was catch a subway to the Brazilian Embassy to find out about gettting visas for when we are in Brazil, but they said it would take 3 days to process, and we aren´t going to be in Buenos Aires that many days so we decided to wait until we get to the Brazilian border. From there, we went to the Recoleta district, which is one of the wealthier areas of Buenos Aires. We just walked through it on our way to the Recoleta Cemetery, which has many amazing mausoleums. There are some famous people buried there, like Evita Peron, but mostly they house prominent citizens. We had lunch in a beautiful outdoor cafe under huge trees. The weather is nice and cool. From that cafe, we walked back in the direction of our hotel, stopping once to buy bus tickets from an agency. We are going to take a 20 hour, overnight bus ride to Iguazu Falls on April 27. The bus is a sleeper bus, which means it has beds, so we´ll see what that is like. After buying those tickets, we went to Plaza de Mayo, where we saw the mothers who meet there every Thursday at 3:30 to protest the disappearance of their family members during the 70's. As we walked back to our hotel, we saw a street that was totally congested with traffic, and then we saw why. There were a lot of people who were sitting down, right in the middle of the street, and they were surrounded by police!!! We found out that they were resident doctors who were protesting their salaries. We've seen several demonstrations of protest, and I forgot to mention the one we saw yesterday in front of police headquarters. Those people were protesting that they were being stripped of their right to exhibit their art in certain places. Also, yesterday, when my plane landed, you could hardly see Buenos Aires because it was so smoky, presumably from the fires that the farmers have set in protest of taxes that are imposed on agricultural products that they export.
Today the air is a lot clearer. Tonight we are going to the Palermo district to have dinner. Tomorrow we plan on taking a ferry across the Rio Plata and going to a town called Colonia, which is in Uruguay. That should be interesting!!!