Daniel Tunnard at GrinGo Stand Up (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his MAJOR PLUG ALERT! THIS TUESDAY 5th JUNE THE WORLD-FAMOUS GRINGO STAND-UP COMEDY SHOW IN ENGLISH (FEATURING ME AND FOUR OTHER WONDERFULLY FUNNY PEOPLE) MOVES TO SAN TELMO, BECAUSE LET’S FACE IT, NO ONE WANTS TO GO TO CONGRESO ON A COLD TUESDAY NIGHT. SO COME DOWN TO CAFÉ RIVAS, ESTADOS UNIDOS 302 (CORNER OF BALCARCE) ON TUESDAY AT 9PM FOR THE BEST ENGLISH-BASED COMEDY EXPERIENCE IN THE COUNTRY. 30 PESOS, DETAILS HERE ADVANCED BOOKINGS HERE.

Ahem. Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 22.

Millions of things are happening in Buenos Aires at this very moment. A man in Villa Devoto places a bleach bottle with this phone number on top of his Peugeot 504 and wonders exactly when Argentines decided this was the most effective way to sell a car. An old man in San Cristóbal throws crumbs to the pigeons, oblivious to the fact that the pigeons find this quite patronizing, as if they were incapable of finding their own food. And on ‘Salven el Millón’(known elsewhere as ‘Million Dollar Money Drop’), the best programme on Argentine TV (the fact that this is far and away the best programme in Argentina speaks volumes about the sorry state of Argentine programming) Susana Giménez asks which province the town of Londres is in. The competing couple bet $40,000 on Santiago del Estero. The answer is Catamarca.

For the first time in Colectivaizeishon I go past Plaza de Mayo and the Cathedral. I’d love to know the meaning of so many of these architectural references to be found in the buildings in the old part of the city, but the philosophy of Colectivaizeishon is that you can read about that kind of thing elsewhere and Colectivaizeishon can stick to making sarcastic jokes about the quotidian minutiae of Buenos Aires life. One of the few architectural references I do know is regarding the frontispiece above the Cathedral entrance. This depicts the reencounter between Joseph and Jacob (or was it Abraham?) in the book of Genesis, which symbolizes the reunification of Buenos Aires with the rest of Argentina in 1860 (or was it 1862. So of all the curious stories that exist about Buenos Aires architecture, I’ve managed to commit to memory one of the least interesting ones and can’t even remember its most salient points. (Pub quizzes in 1850s Britain often ended in tantrums and name-calling when the question ‘What is the capital of Argentina?’ was answered correctly as ‘Paraná’ but the quizmaster had been using an outdated encyclopaedia and arrogantly insisted it was Buenos Aires. Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ attests to such a dispute.)

The 22 is one of the few buses that connects Retiro with the south without just going straight down Paseo Colón, which is good news for the present author who was running out of things to say about said Paseo, except to say that its name in English could facetiously be translated as ‘Colon Stroll’. In my first years in Buenos Aires I thought Paseo Colón was a tree-lined pedestrian walkway next to the Colón Theatre. This is patently not the case. Only now is such a walkway being built, and it’s called Vatican Square. I am as oblivious to the reasons for this name as am I to finding a punch line for this paragraph.

Starbucks on the corner of Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Instead of doing the Colon Stroll, the 22 takes me through San Telmo. For many years, when I lived in Palermo and any bar, restaurant or shoe shop more than five blocks from my house was a bar, restaurant or shoe shop not worth going to, I used to go to San Telmo but once a year and every time I did it was a letdown. You know when you go to a foreign city that’s supposed to be really cool, but you spend all your time wandering round the main square bored off your tits because you’re too tight to shell out for a guidebook and so haven’t got a clue where all the groovy people in town hang out? That’s what San Telmo was like to me for many a year.

But then we made friends in San Telmo and with that came the sad obligation to have to visit San Telmo more regularly. One of the things I do like about San Telmo is Av. Caseros, basically because it’s British, with the old British railway workers’ buildings and the Bar Británico a few blocks away. All the same, we came to San Telmo late. According to my spies in the south, San Telmo is just the same as Palermo today, they even have a Starbucks, and Plaza Dorrego’s only purpose is to rip off the tourists. A few years ago I read part of a travel book by AA Gill in which he writes some such nonsense as: “Porteños dance the tango on every corner of this city. The señoritas won’t sleep with you unless you marry them, but they will instead allow you one dance of the most sensual tango.” I can only imagine that AA Gill spent the entirety of his stay on Plaza Dorrego or Florida, and that he was really rubbish at picking up women. (But then AA Gill also described the British as “an embarrassing, ugly race […] lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd” so he’s not a completely rubbish writer.)

I’m surprised to discover that Av. Montes de Oca is named after a man called Manuel Montes de Oca, and not, as I had always imagined, a great mountain of ganders, which would be the literal translation of ‘montes de oca’. What a mountain of ganders is and why a major thoroughfare of La Boca should be named after such a concept are two questions that clearly never occurred to me.

It is on this avenue that I see a man sharpening a knife on his special pushbike. Round about 2005 I was talking to a student who was saying that one of the things she loved about Buenos Aires was that it was a city where men cycled round sharpening whatever blunt instrument presented itself for grateful housewives. I nodded and didn’t tell her how much it bothered me that these people came round buzzing all the intercom buzzers in the building at siesta time. But I decided to go along with my student’s starry-eyed take on porteño life. Two days later, I’m having a nice nap when some idiot buzzes all the intercom buzzers in the building.

Angel, on his converted bicycle, sharpening a knife. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

‘How much?’ I ask.

‘Three pesos,’ says the chap on the intercom. I go downstairs with a chef’s knife, and the old man proceeds to sharpen it on his pimped-up pushbike. He’s done in five minutes and I give him my three pesos.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Thirteen pesos.’

Thirteen pesos! To sharpen a knife that cost me twelve pesos! Now, I know I have a tendency to zone out a bit when spoken to in Spanish, but where money is concerned I sit up and listen, and this man clearly said three pesos (‘Tres’ and ‘trece’ sound alike in Spanish. So do ‘dos’ and ‘doce’. It’s an imperfect language, really. They have no word for ‘flick’ either. They make great show of the fact that they have one word for ‘the back of the neck’ and we don’t, as if that was something, but instead of ‘toe’ they say ‘foot finger’. They really haven’t given this language any thought at all.) I only have a $100 note on me and this man, obviously, doesn’t have any change. I have to cross the road to the Chinese supermarket and spend ten pesos to get change. I cross back and give thirteen pesos to the sharpener, who doesn’t even say thank you, the git. He cycles off and I look at my knife. He’s buggered it. I could have sharpened it better myself, and with a normal bicycle.

Besides, what do we need knife-sharpening men for in this day and age? What is it that you’re cutting, Madame, that requires such a sharp blade? I say, if you’ll forgive me my impertinence, instead of throwing away money on these rip-off artists, why not spend your money on better-quality meat? Unless you, Madame, have murdered your husband and need to dispose of the body, in which case carry on.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 33.

Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo in Ciudad-Universidad (Photo: ha +)

The 33 leaves from Ciudad Universitaria, or UniverCity as it will be known hereon. To get there I have to cross a park with the refreshingly unreconstructed name of Parque de la Raza, on a bank holiday formerly called Día de la Raza, which used to be a celebration of the superiority of the Spanish race in overcoming a load of scantily-armed Native Americans, but is now called Day of Respect and Cultural Diversity, but is still basically a commemoration of Columbus’s arrival in town and the sound of shit hitting indigenous fans all across the continent.

UniverCity wasn’t designed with hardened pedestrians like me in mind, probably because everyone knows how lazy students are. After crossing White Supremacy Park, I have to negotiate my way across two motorways and locate the only pedestrian bridge, next to Scalabrini Ortiz railway station. In the typical modern architectural style of Buenos Aires, where anything built in the last two decades looks decrepit and rain-stained within two years, this bridge has a Nahuel Huapi-sized puddle in the middle of it that can only be crossed by building another bridge on top of this bridge. But you just know that once you’ve finished building the second bridge, it’ll rain again and you’ll have another big puddle which you’ll have to build another bridge over, and so on interminably. TIA, as certain annoying ex-pats say. This is Argentina.

I eventually stop faffing about, walk gingerly through the puddle and make it to UniverCity. Having graduated in England before I moved to Argentina, the university experience in Buenos Aires is one I thankfully avoided, but I have a fair idea of what it’s like because my first wife broke a telephone and computer keyboard in her frustrated attempts to tramitar her anthropology degree. Tramitar is an Argentine verb meaning “to waste hours or days of your life carrying out a procedure that is automatic in most civilised countries.” TIA.

The 33 leaves UniverCity and goes down the Costanera Norte, and I remember that I live in a city that has a river the size of a sea right next to it, something that I’m otherwise oblivious to much of the time here, not least when stuck on a bus somewhere in Liniers. Elsewhere in Argentina the river is a central part of the life of many a town, but the bit of river that Buenos Aires has been left with is no great shakes, with a great steaming port in the middle and a fair bit of pollution. I’ve swum in the River Plate. I wouldn’t swim in it again. Then again, far worse is the Costanera in Quilmes, downriver from all the toxic waste of the Riachuelo. I’ve seen people windsurfing there. You have to be really, really keen on windsurfing to end up doing it in Quilmes.

Choripan vendor (Photo: Jakobien van der Weijden)

On the Costanera Norte are the famous stands selling choripán and morcipán and large-slab-of-beef-pán. This is pretty much all the street food Buenos Aires has managed to come up with in its exalted 431-year history, so people make the most of it. Buenos Aires’ food bloggers blog a lot about these places, and according to them the best choripán stand in the city is Cocacolero, opposite the city airport on the Costanera. Now, I know there’s a difference between a good choripán and a choripán that leaves you in hospital, but I really don’t get how much difference there can be between one edible one and another edible one. If you said that such-and-such a stand was manned by Faena chefs using only Kobe beef flown in from Japan and with organic chimichurri sauce served on a brioche, then fine, write up your chori Top Ten for Joy magazine. All I see is a sausage sandwich. And a sausage sandwich, I hasten to add, with no bacon.

Something I’ve always wanted to know during many years living in Buenos Aires is what’s behind Retiro bus station before you get to the river? Thanks to the 33, I now know: there’s a shitload of containers.

By the port there is also a building which I’d wanted to know for years what it was, a building with two large towers that can be seen from any tall building in Palermo with a river view. Thanks to the 33, I now know. It’s a power station. This is one of many beautiful brick-built power stations of the Compañía Italo-Argentino. If you have a penchant for the brick-built power stations and substations of Buenos Aires (and who doesn’t?) you’d do well to click here.

33 along Paseo Colon (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

The New Port was opened eighty-three years ago but they still call it the New Port. Football club Newell’s Old Boys, meanwhile, has a mostly fresh-faced team. TIA. The port of Buenos Aires was originally going to be Puerto Madero, which opened in the late 19th century, only to close ten years later when the agriculture export boom went “boom”, the boats grew in size and Puerto Madero’s dinky little docks could no longer accommodate them. Classic Buenos Aires clusterfuck! So the government then commissioned the engineer Luis Huergo, whose original idea the government had rejected ten years earlier in favour of Eduardo Madero’s, to build a port that, you know, worked. Puerto Nuevo is his baby.

Puerto Madero and Puerto Nuevo caused a major political brouhaha, dividing the city’s governors. They were also both built by British companies, which makes them somewhat representative of the history of Buenos Aires, whereby a load of Argentines bicker with each other while a couple of foreigners make a tidy profit. If the Colectivaizeishon book becomes a bestseller, it’ll perpetuate this pattern.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The No. 47.

Buenos Aires school children (Photo: Buenos Aires city government)

Some primary school children get on the bus in their little white lab coats. These are standard school uniform in Argentina, because they’re cheap but, at the same time, aspirational. In my first year in Buenos Aires, it was always a cause of minor amusement to see these little people in their little white lab coats, since in England and most other sensible countries the only people who get to where such garments are scientists and their ilk. How I marvelled that here was a country so developed that by the age of six, these gifted children had already qualified as biochemists and astrophysicists and were on their way to the lab to fuse some more atoms.

I’m starting to like Liniers and the surrounding neighbourhoods of Versailles and Vélez Sarsfield. The 47 goes pretty much the length of Alejandro Margariños Cervantes, a pleasant tree-lined street with well-presented houses and PLO (People Like Oneself). I have no idea where I am, but I like it, and I know it’s not Villa Devoto, because it lacks anonymity.

One attractive thing about my fleeting idea of moving to a barrio like Liniers is seeing how people have turned their own houses into little steakhouses. You ring the bell, walk through their living room and have a meal in the back yard of a stranger. It’s a bit like the supper clubs and closed door restaurants you get in Palermo and elsewhere, but without them charging $200 per person. In fact, the home parrilla that the 47 goes past has a sign promising “Pork belly w/chips $30”. It’s like travelling back in time to pre-inflation 2005.

By the time I get home at night, I’ve got a whole house-moving plan to show the wife. After a brief conversation, it turns out we probably won’t be moving to Liniers in the near future. “Ni en pedo” were her exact, if somewhat predictable, words. “Not even if I was drunk.”

This is a great shame because there are little things in Liniers that I’m starting to like, on this my third visit to the barrio in two weeks. Little things like the butcher’s called El Rey del Carne (The King of Meat), whose logo is a photo of a random butcher with a garish crown badly photoshopped onto his head. Little things like the way the acronym of the football team Club Atlético Nueva Chicago spells out “C.A.N.CH.” and I can only lament that the founders did not add an “Argentino” or “de América” to the end of the name so that the club’s crest spelled out where the club played, “cancha” being the Argentine word for “stadium”. And little things like the big shop on Juan B. Justo and Gana that sells dining tables that turn into pool tables, in addition to a wide array of other indoor sports goods. As a native of a country that invented indoor sports and considers them sports so that you can say you play a sport without having to go to any more effort than picking up a dart and throwing it six feet, I love indoor sports and want to live in a barrio where I can pass by the biggest indoor sports shop in Latin America and stare into the window, drooling.

Amid so many minor things I begin to lose my major and irrational fear of the breezeblocks. Near the Club Deportivo Español stadium, where Parque Avellaneda turns into Villa Lugano, I begin to see hundreds of monoblocks which a few weeks earlier would have instilled great panic in me. And yet, the people I see around here are normal folk, teenagers mucking about at the bus stop, kids coming home from school, people who while not exactly PLO (People Like Oneself) are at least DWP (Decent Working People). I see very few marauding bands of murderers or kidnappers. In fact, if I’m honest, I see none. There are couple of shifty-looking youths, but that’s nothing to me. I grew up in Stockport, the town that invented the concept of the shifty-looking youth.

Under construction (Photo: Matías Garabedian)

In Villa Riachuelo, the barrio with the arguable fortune to be named after the third-filthiest river in the world, I see new monoblocks being built, modern buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in Palermo Viejo, where they demolish impeccable mansions so that trendy people can have their expensive flat with rooftop swimming pool and function room on Humboldt and Nicaragua. [Humboldt and Nicaragua are the names of two streets in Palermo. Don’t be imagining a German botanist and Central American republic being razed to the ground for the sake of luxury apartments.] It occurs to me that here lies the key to stop so many grand old buildings from being demolished in certain areas of Buenos Aires for the sake of building enormous, faceless buildings without providing an adequate provision of running water and parking and other provisionables. My idea is this: gentrification for Villa Riachuelo, Villa Lugano, Villa Soldati and other Villas which are not villas  in the shanty town sense of the word even though many people think they are.

All it takes is for a group of capital investors and estate agents to build in these Villas the following premises: some bars where they charge you $40 for a stingy shot of whisky that costs $40 the bottle in the supermarket; some parrillas where they charge you $20 just for the honour of sitting down in the premises; and some clothes shops with hilarious names like ‘¡Vete al Diablo, chévere!’ and ‘Las Chabombas Mágicas’ where the saleswomen wear skintight jeans and sell you clothes whose durability is inversely proportional to their price. With these simple capitalist gestures, within six months all the people who typically move to a different barrio simply because it’s “in” will be queuing up to buy themselves a loft in Villa Lugano. That way, the south of the city gets developed and they can stop screwing with us who like Palermo Viejo (PS. If you say Palermo Soho, you’re a twat) as it was. That is, as it was around about 2000, not as it was around about 1980 when it was more dangerous that Villa Soldati and not even the most daring of hipsters would dare set foot in it.

Chori vendors in Liniers (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Sorry about calling you a twat just now. Back in Liniers, I decide I’m going to show how comfortable and safe I feel in this barrio by eating a choripán at one of the stands that inhabit the thin strip between Avenida Rivadavia and the railway tracks, with their cumbia and their plastic Quilmes napkin holders and their ignorance of hygiene standards, where the only fridges are for the drinks and all the other ingredients are left out in the open air. The chorizo in question is one that one might describe as “picado grueso”, which would be fine if it was coarse-cut salami, but which in the case of the present choripán means huge chunks of indigestible gristle. I end up leaving half the chori on my plate, and the men at the stand look at me like a fancy gringo who can’t appreciate a proper Argentine chorizo and should go back to fancy Palermo. It’s at this moment that I know, even before my wife rejects my great plan to move the family to Liniers, that the people of this barrio will never accept me as one of their own.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The No. 184.

By early October in the Colectivaizeishon project I’m already exhausted. In the last fortnight I’ve taken 15 of Buenos Aires’ bus lines from start to finish, plus two other buses I had to take due to wandering around La Boca with an outdated street map book. I’ve written 20,000 words about the journeys including the first two columns for La Razón. I’ve walked 200 blocks. I’ve taken 15 buses, but I’ve still got 126 to go. After the first day on the buses, I got home and wrote for five hours straight. By the fifth day of this nonsense, worn out from the physical and mental strain, I get home and don’t even want to see another bus, never mind make up sarcastic jokes about them.

Several different bus lines from puente saavedra line up along Av Cabildo (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

It’s the third time in a week that I’ve walked the 30 blocks to Puente Saavedra to take the bus that then takes me back along the 30 blocks I’ve just walked. I know I could easily cheat and start the journeys at Cabildo and Juramento and no one would know any different, but I’d know. As my mum used to say when I was a boy, and she still says it because she’s transmogrified into a really nagging conscience, when you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself. Clearly, my mother forgets a certain Maradona goal in 1986.

I wish I didn’t have to cover these 30 blocks because there really isn’t much to say about Av. Cabildo in Núñez, the northernmost barrio of Buenos Aires. Four years ago, this area was completely foreign to me and I was scared of what awaited me whenever I crossed under Puente Saavedra to go to piano classes in Florida, which is a town in the province of Buenos Aires, not the place where old New Yorkers retire to. Being afraid of the wealthy Zona Norte is up there with being slightly afraid of my neighbour’s barking poodle on the list of things I discreetly show to people still labouring under the delusion that I am a real man.

But later I got a job as a scriptwriter for a producer in Núñez, and I liked the barrio so much that I moved closer to it (I’m one of many people who live in the skankier part of dreadfully unhip Belgrano and say they live in Núñez in a desperate bid to look cool. I like to call this area Belgrúñez.) It was this producer, Faivre Hermanos, who gave me my first gig as a writer, the first to believe in me as a writer and pay me to write, and I will be eternally grateful to them for giving me this start, not least because it saved me from having to complete an unnecessarily labyrinthine novel that made Liberace look unpretentious.

An everyday scene of a fabric store along Av Cabildo. (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

As a consequence of living the last three years a few blocks from Av. Cabildo, I find it harder to write about Belgrúñez than some other barrio on the other side of the city, because I’ve stopped seeing it through the eyes of a foreigner. This is partly why I’m writing Colectivaizeishon now, before the whole city seems so terribly quotidian and I have nothing original to say about it. I know that in the eyes of the Argentines I’ll always be a foreigner, because even though they famously think of themselves as a country of immigrants, they very much see things as “us” and “them”, where “them” is immigrants from the last 30 years and “us” is anyone who can trace their Argentine lineage back to the French Basque royal family, a dirt-poor Sicilian village or some sixteenth-century Syrian family who once owned a whole northern province (and very often all three of these at once.) An English friend moved to Buenos Aires thirty years ago, during the last military government, and still has to answer the same three questions that Argentines always ask us, the not-really-Argentines.

These three questions never vary, and I know this from conversations I’ve had with thousands of foreigners here. The first is always “where are you from?” and the second “have you been here long?” So far, so good, most of us would ask the same. But then comes the third question: “do you like Buenos Aires?” Note, oh patient reader, that you have just told your interlocutor that you have lived in this city for 10, 20, maybe 30 years, and it still occurs to them to ask whether you like it. Now, there are obviously things we don’t like: the cordilleras of dog shit on the pavement, the inability of the average Argentine motorist to understand that beeping his or her horn will accomplish no more than making every person in that block hate the average Argentine motorist, and the fact that the simplest bureaucratic procedure takes up half your working week. But do you really think that a foreigner with the means to go anywhere in the world would stay in Buenos Aires half their life if they didn’t like it? I know some cases, but they are very scarce and very embittered. In general, it’s the Argentines who hate Buenos Aires. Us foreigners love it, which is why we come here and end up staying, even though the fourth question in this inevitable litany is “do you like dulce de leche?” My own response to this will require a whole chapter of its own.

Going back to where we were before the fifth paragraph got all tangential on our arses, what can anyone write about Belgrano? I think it’s one of those barrios where you rarely hear people say “my barrio” with the kind of exaggerated pride you find in the locals of, say, Villa Crespo or La Boca. Moving to Belgrano is like having sex when you’re married: it’s functional and safe and you don’t have to put much thought it into. You’re never going to see a sign on Av. Cabildo, such as you see in La Boca, declaring “Welcome to the Republic of Belgrano”. At most, in Colegiales (trendy-without-trying-to-be-trendy barrio between Palermo and Belgrano) there is a sign pointing forwards to Belgrano and back to Palermo, in case you have second thoughts and want to go back (we passed this sign the day we moved from Palermo to Belgrano, and had a moment’s hesitation.) Not even the biggest club in the Argentine second division boasts about being from Belgrano. Although River Plate’s stadium is within the limits of Belgrano, they call themselves el Club de Núñez. To look cool, probably.

Flower seller along Av Cabildo. (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

But, however and notwithstanding all the abovementioned, I like Belgrano. I like how, unlike Palermo, there are hardware shops and fishmongers instead of chi-chi shoe shops and restaurants twisting semantics to push up their prices. It’s true that the only time I entered a hardware shop in the last three years was to buy wall plugs so that my father-in-law would do a 400-mile roundtrip to put up some shelves for me, but I do find their presence comforting. I like being close to Chinatown and the kitsch shopping galleries on Avenida Cabildo with their tobacconists and record shops. And I like the fact that it isn’t a cool barrio, so you only have to make the slightest effort in order to become the coolest person on your street. A natty hat, perhaps, or a pair of coloured socks.

And I like how I have the same birthday as Manuel de Belgrano, after whom my barrio (feel that pride!) is named. Here’s a story I love telling because it makes me look important: During the Falklands War, the Belgrano was sunk on 2nd May, and on 4th May the HMS Sheffield was sunk in retaliation. I was born in Sheffield, but live in Belgrano. I studied Spanish at the University of Sheffield, and taught English at the University of Belgrano, where I told this hilarious anecdote to my students. None of them laughed. It was their first day of classes, and they didn’t speak English. If I ever die in Belgrano, one 16th June like Manuel de Belgrano did, I hope at least one of the mourners will say “ah, fancy that.”

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The No. 124.

Villa Devoto (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The bus goes down a street called Ramón Lista and I have no idea where I am, among the anonymous grey buildings and the abject lack of any distinguishing feature. I think it’s Villa Devoto, because it’s so anonymous that it looks like nowhere in particular, which is in fact Villa Devoto’s most distinguishing feature. I check in the map book. It is indeed Villa Devoto, the barrio where middle-class porteños go to die when they can no longer stand the thrill of achingly beautiful architecture.

As there is nothing to write about outside the bus, I’m forced to examine the urban fauna within it. A man sits down in the seat in front of me. He’s about forty and has long, curly greying hair in a classic Bryan May style. I like this in Buenos Aires’ men, their obliviousness to the fact that after the age of 32, long hair is no longer an option, least of all when it is accompanied by notably incipient alopecia. And yet, this man is clear evidence that in this city you can look like the unlikely lovechild of Isaac Newton and George Costanza and still have an attractive girlfriend. If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many average-looking foreign men with stunning Argentine women on their arms, there’s your answer.

This 124 is a very conversational bus. I do a head count and discover that there are nine different conversations underway. In fact, everyone on this bus is talking to the person sitting next to them, except me. The girl next to me is reading Lolita, and I’m tempted to strike up a conversation about Nabokov, just so she doesn’t feel left out, but I’m concerned that she’ll see me as the kind of person who starts conversations with strangers on the bus, and a conversation about a novel that deals with paedophilia sympathetically, to boot. A lot of people ask me why I don’t speak to other passengers on the buses, as if I was a journalist, failing to realise that if you’re a woman and some stranger on the bus starts asking you where you live and where you’re going, it’s a bit creepy. In twenty years’ time, when I write the inevitable 20th anniversary re-edition of Colectivaizeishon, then I’ll be able to talk to the passengers, when I’m old and a bit weird and the girls on the bus see me as a strange man, but a harmless and somewhat eccentric strange man, like a distant uncle only without all the groping.

Because I wasted an hour wandering lost around La Boca in a failed attempt to find the bus stop for the 8 or the 86, and then ended up taking the 53 and the 124, it’s now half past five and I’ve still got five hours’ more bus travel before I finish for the day. The clock is ticking as we crawl down Corrientes in that way buses do on Sundays. If I carry on, I’ll wind up taking the 152 in La Boca at the same time the Boca match finishes. I’m willing to withstand all kinds of discomforts in my quest to take all the buses in Buenos Aires, but spending two hours on a bus filled with Boca fans is not one of them. I could get off at the Law Faculty, take the 67 and be home in half an hour. Or, I could cover those sixty blocks to my house via the most roundabout way imaginable, taking the 124 back to Villa Devoto, the 53 to La Boca and the 152 to Puente Saavedra and then walking the thirty blocks home. I want to take the more difficult route, because a wise man once said the hardest way is often the most worthwhile way. But the wise man would have come better prepared for this nippy spring evening, and would be wise enough not to put himself deliberately in a situation of being surrounded by 40,000 Boca fans on a Sunday night. I go home.

I complete the return parts of the three routes the next day. I discover that the “Neotrans” electronic news boards still exist on those buses built around 2000, when Argentina was still deluding itself about its economy and people didn’t have mobile phones with better jokes and more up-to-date news. The “Neotrans” board is pretty crap (older readers may also fondly remember “Infotrans”, which was the same shite, like doing a taste test between Quilmes and Brahma). It tells us that a yacht has exploded in Tigre, some eight days after the fact. And it tells us the etymology of the word “testify”, which according to Neotrans derives from Roman senators’ tendency to touch their testicles while swearing an oath. This is a load of balls, no pun intended (yeah, OK, pun fully intended.) Both “testify” and “testicle” come from “testis”, the Latin for “witness”, from a root that means “third person”. If one testified, they did so as a reliable third person. “Testicles” was coined by the Romans as a joke, as a way of saying that one’s nuts were “witnesses” to the “feats” of the member. Of course, this is a bit more risqué to be putting on a Neotrans news board, even though no one pays it the slightest heed, because everyone’s bought Blackberrys for their renowned superiority in matters etymological.

We go past a bar called “Cosmos 69 Bar Wiskería”. I learnt very recently that a “wiskería” is not, to my chagrin, a place where one goes to savour a range of fine imported whiskies, but is in fact a euphemism for “knocking shop”. It would be great if I had an anecdote about the terribly embarrassing way in which I uncovered this small truth, but I haven’t. My wife told me, after seeing me gazing longingly at the whiskerías that line Route 14 to Entre Ríos. My apologies for the lack of a more mortifying anecdote in the present paragraph.

Corrientes during a weekday is a bit different than on the weekend. (Photo: Edgardo Milla)

The difference between taking the 124 on a Monday instead of taking it on a Sunday is that on Sundays the bus goes at about five blocks a minute, while the next day the bus gets caught up in the Monday traffic and goes at about five blocks a minute. I entertain myself by looking at all the cotillón shops in Once. Cotillón, one of my favourite words in the Spanish language, is a catch-all term for all manner of party hats, wigs and other accessories. As much as I like the word, looking at shop after shop of the stuff is not the most entertaining way to pass the time on the bus. I get to wondering why there are so many cotillón shops in Once. It’s not like the barrio has this great reputation for partying.

Here’s something else I get to wondering: Is Lavalle the ugliest street in the whole city? The observant reader will know that Lavalle’s route takes in the pedestrian street where the high society once took in moving pictures but where today the low society gets taken in by fake sports gear, the crowded streets around the law courts, the tat shops in Once, the waste coming out of the back end of Abasto Shopping Centre and ending with five pot-holed blocks in Almagro, before it gets swallowed up into Avenida Córdoba. What kind of person was Lavalle to deserve such a homage? I try to think of everything I know about Lavalle. First name: Juan. Sent Dorrego to the firing squad, or Dorrego sent Lavalle to the firing squad, or maybe they just duelled with pistols. I remember he pops up a lot in Sabato’s On Heroes and Tombs, but I read the book about ten years ago, when my Spanish and understanding of Argentine history were sketchy at best, and can remember little or nothing. There were some elms, or someone called Elms, or a place called Elms. That’s about it. 

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography. This time he takes us on a wander around Chacarita.

Rat going through a maze. (Photo: Melissa Baldwin)

One of the fathers of 20th century psychology, Edward Tolman, claimed that psychology boils down to what makes a rat turn left or right in a maze.

But what about the human turning left or right in the city? What does this infer about how we interact with cities, how we find our way, consciously or unconsciously through these labyrinthian structures?

Wayfinding is something that has captivated me since moving to Buenos Aires. Despite the fairly consistent grid system, I have lost my bearing on numerous occasions and my partner has frequent bouts of spatial disorientation.

According to current navigational theories, some of us rely on a compass bearing and navigate accordingly, relying on, for instance, ‘east and west’ to find our way around. However, others rely on cues that cannot be geographically categorized – typically, landmarks, thus finding their way by linking together identifiable objects, ‘right at the Baroque church, follow till abandoned building, and left at the red apartment.

Arguably, Buenos Aires is not a great city for navigation-by-landmarks. Straight proportional streets, discrete churches, and scant public squares add up to a fairly cue-less landscape, making it quite plausible to walk the same street several times without knowing it.

Google Map of Buenos Aires showing one orientation.

And if you’re the type who navigates through compass bearings, Buenos Aires can also prove confusing. Why are there so many maps of the city rendered according to different axes? After a simple Google image search of Buenos Aires Map I located at least 5 maps aligned to different axes (north/ west/ north by northwest etc…). I suppose this is why it’s common to avoid using bearings to discuss navigation in Buenos Aires. It’s so much easier to just say ‘down Santa Fe towards Retiro’ than to have to figure out if your mental map has a north-south axis or some mutated variation.

But this is all digression. The purpose of this walk is not to wayfind or navigate but the opposite. I am seeking to get lost, allowing my spatial senses to blur and fade out, in order to better take-in my surroundings and allow them to guide my ‘lefts and rights’.

Abe, a friend visiting from Canada, and I decided to get lost in Chacarita, a part of the city I had had no experience of. We wanted to test out the purest form of psychogeography’s derive (drift) – the completely aimless stroll. Up till now my pedestrian experiments have used constructed drifts to explore the city, such as walking Linea D of the metro, walking home from the airport and walking in the shape of a crucifix between places of worship in Palermo. This drift was intended to enable us to lose ourselves within the city.

39 bus in Chacarita (Photo: Francis Mariani)

At random we exited bus number 39, unaware of our location and began to walk. It was within a minute that we realized the challenge at hand; we stood at an intersection and couldn’t decide which way to go. Should he decide, should I decide, should we vote, how do we proceed? What does it mean to be aimless when there is another person? If we both don’t have aims how do we decide where to go?

We stumbled through this process, bit by bit. As we grew less conscious of decisions and eventually found a rhythm with both our walking and with each other, our decision-making became increasingly fluid.

The truly aimless walk was first pioneered by the French Surrealists in the early 20^th century. They took the practice of automatism, which, like automatic writing, they applied to walking and thus set locomotion free from consciousness. Through dispassionate strolling, they sought to discover places that have no reason to exist but simply are; through this process they stumbled upon odd juxtapositionings, coincidences and embarked on unplanned diversions.

As Abe and I ambled onwards, I began to spot the developing patterns in our choices of direction. At crossroads, there was a clear trend of choosing to venture into areas that were partially covered or obscured, whether by foliage, a turn in the road, or an obstructing building. Curiosity and intrigue were throttle and steering wheel. Green areas such as small parks, abandoned lots and informal parks led us onwards. Graffiti and abandoned buildings stopped us in our tracks; we investigated closer, pried through fences and pondered over building’s fates and the messages conveyed in spray paint.

The aimlessness evolved into wonder. The places we passed through were full of narratives, nearly all of which were out of our reach. At one point we came across a large concrete foundation with nothing more than a single dilapidated wall left standing. Upon closer inspection, we found a tiny laminated note on the wall, which simply stated that at a previous time this was a helado factory. Abe and I were transfixed with this idea, we tried to visualise what it would have looked like, how the neighbours interacted with it (free ice-cream being snuck out from the backdoor?) and the impact of its closure.

Some of the seemingly insignificant sections of neighbourhood that we passed, such as the abandoned lot or rusty bus shelter, may in fact retain a lot more emotional value to the block’s inhabitants than the majestic town hall down the road. But this is not recognised, accepted, or valued. We are surrounded by countless informal public monuments; each one has an impact on our lives and yet they commonly remain unrecognised and under-appreciated.

Guy Debord, one of the founders of psychogeography, believed that through the aimless stroll it was possible to identify emotional zones in the city. Psychogeography, as he saw it, was a pure science enabling identification and distillation of urban ambiances.

From our perspective, it would take a lot more walking to achieve something like this in Chacarita. In many ways, the identification and distillation that was achieved was an internal one. It required an effortful switching off of the intentional button, turning down the pragmatic dial, and listening to the dialectic between the surrounding space and ourselves.

The surrealists saw the derive as playful aquiescensce to the subconscious and the Situationists mixed submitting to the unconscious with radical politics. Abe and I mixed exploration, wonder, and hunger. It’s hard to deny the extent to which both our conscious and unconscious was guiding us towards streets where it would be possible to find a hearty lunch. It’s hard to be aimless when hungry.

Abe felt that by taking away the objective behind the endeavor, his senses were heightened and he was able to extract the extraordinary from the banal. Indeed, drifting brought us face-to-face with places and situations, which were curious, out of our control and novel. Being lost helped with establishing a sense of wonder and purposelessness.

Over a period of six hours and covering 13km, we nearly completed a full circle.

What makes a human turn left or right in the city? 99% of the time it’s to achieve an objective, go to work, meet friends, buy food etc… The other 1%, from Abe and my experience, tends to be propelled by the city itself subconsciously guiding us left and right by its spaces of imagination, curiousity, and wonder.

Daniel Tunnard, the Brit taking all the buses in Buenos Aires, continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 32.

As today is Rosh Hashanah, I have half an idea to write about the Jewish community of Buenos Aires. But despite travelling on the 19 between Belgrano and Once, the most heavily populated parts of Jewish Buenos Aires, I don’t see any of this. On reflection, I don’t know what I expected to see, lots of men in black hats dancing to “Hava Nagila”, I don’t know. I see lots of colectivos but very little of the colectividad, which is a fine joke in Spanish, rest assured. In the first days of Colectivaizeishon I go out with a vague idea in my mind of what each bus chapter is going to be about. By the third day, I give up on the idea and let the 32 show me its surprises, which are not small in number. They are zero in number.

The 32 starts its route in Plaza Miserere. During the second British invasion of 1807 (although many maintain that this so-called “invasion” was a mere misunderstanding, and that it was really just a case of typical Brits abroad, drunk and yobbish perhaps, but hardly an invasion) there was a battle known as the “Combate de Miserere” which took place in the Miserere Corrals, part of which is now Plaza Miserere. While many squares, avenues and streets of this city are named after battles (Caseros, Ituzaingó, Maipú, and something like a hundred more, but I haven’t yet been bored enough on the buses to count them all), Plaza Miserere is the only square, avenue or street in Buenos Aires which did the opposite and gave its name to a battle.

In the plaza, a group of Andeans play a prerecorded version of Abba’s “Chiquitita” on their sound system. I’m about to bemoan the loss of so much culture that in the name of entertainment the natives of the altiplano have now got rid of their centuries-old instruments and songs and resorted to playing ersatz renditions of a Swedish band’s songs over a PA made in China, but it turns out they’re having a coffee break, and they’ll be back shortly to play that Simon & Garfunkel song and “Lambada”.

There’s a school kid occupying my official Colectivaizeishon seat (at the back, next to the door), listening to music on his school laptop (all Argentine state school kids get free laptops, which sounds progressive, until you see the state the state schools are in.) This is the fourth time I’ve seen a school kid using one of these laptops, and none of them have been studying. But then again, like many boys I used to use my own school exercise books for drawing pictures of willies and writing lyrics for my imaginary rock band. “Hey girl, gonna make you sweat, your loving life ain’t over yet” being one memorable line written by this staunchly virginal 14-year-old listening to too much Led Zeppelin.

In the window of a lottery agency in Parque Patricios I read a sign that says “THERE IS NO MONTEVIDEO”. What happened to Montevideo? What’s filling in for Montevideo while it’s not existing, or is there just a void, a black hole in the south of Uruguay where Montevideo used to be? But if Montevideo is a black hole, is it not that Montevideo continues to exist, albeit in the form of a black hole? Or am I being facetious and deliberately confusing the Montevideo lottery with the city itself? Sounds like a facile explanation.

There’s something about the names Puente Alsina, Puente Pueyrredón and Puente de la Noria that fills me with trepidation. These are bridges towards the unknown, towards the Province of Buenos Aires, with its dragons and stuff. But I’m beginning to think that this attitude is down to my living in a mansion in Belgrano, imagining in the outskirts of town this subclass of delinquents and ne’er-do-wells. So to shake off this perception and prove to myself just how brave I am, I cross Puente Alsina, on foot, no less, and enter for the first time ever the district of Lanús. Check me out. The fact that there are hundreds of people doing the exact same thing as me at this very moment, and without the slightest indication that they are undertaking an act of the noblest valour, takes a little of the sheen off my achievement.

The River Riachuelo below the bridge is to perfume what Diego Maradona is to humility. I try to imagine what this river was like when it was a major waterway, highly navigable, clean and of great importance to the city. Now you get the impression that they could pave it over and turn it into a motorway and not even Greenpeace would give a solitary one. The world’s third-most contaminated river, in 1993 María Julia Alsogaray (Secretary for Environment & Embezzlement during the first Menem administration, when everyone still liked him and his comedy sideburns) submitted a plan to clean it up within 1,000 days. María Julia was missing a couple of zeros, and not for the last time.

Puente Alsina leads you to the town of Valentín Alsina, named after the chap who administered the construction of one of the original bridges. The current bridge, painted in that neo-colonial style that makes you wonder why the neocolonialists had such a thing for the colour mustard, was renamed after de facto president José Félix Uriburu, then renamed Puente Alsina again in 2002. Can you imagine building a bridge, and then a couple of years later they take your name off it and give it the name of an evil military dictator? Then again, I’m pretty sure that with a name like Valentín, Mr. Alsina didn’t get his hands dirty in the actual nitty-gritty of building the thing. That’s the good thing about being an administrator, someone else does all the work and you take all the credit. I should have “administrated” this book, instead of wasting my days examining the historic bridges of Lanús.

Michael Kaethler continues his Pedestrian Experiments series, in which he discovers Buenos Aires on foot using the concept of psychogeography, this time deciding to use his feet, rather than a cab, to get from the city airport home.

When was the last time you walked home from the airport?

The British author Will Self walked from his home in central London to Heathrow Airport and then upon touching down in New York, walked from JFK airport to his hotel in Manhattan. Why would he do this? It was an attempt to curb a sense of spatial dislocation.

With this in mind, I decided to test the walkability of Buenos Aires’ Jorge Newbery airport, what has to be one of the more centrally located airports in the world, a mere 5 km from residential Palermo. I hardly think Ezeiza is an option, some 40km south-west of the centre.

Walking to and from airports is about a lot more than fitness or fascination, it’s about grounding oneself after the strong effects of flying.

My first arrival to BsAs from Paris CDG prompted near Olympic-level mental gymnastics. My brain was running in high gear to process the new surroundings and sensations that my body was experiencing. My sense of direction was hopelessly lost, staring at the setting sun unable to accept its westward-ness. It took weeks to regain, and in a sense, relearn, my bearings.

This time, I decided to linger in the airport a little longer than usual, taking in the hustle and bustle before exiting the dark tinted sliding doors leading to the world beyond.

Spatial dislocation consists in the feeling that you are in a place other than the one where you actually physically are. It happens when the brain and the body have incongruent sensations and are fed distinct and seemingly contradictory stimuli.

Walking out of the JN airport, I can imagine anyone might experience some sense of spatial dislocation simply as a result of the sweat filled upper body crevices of the topless fisherman and of course the charcoal-infused smell of choripan mixing with car fumes. A blistering affront to the visual-olfactory, mixing the good, the bad, the wondrous and unsettling.

In general, a number of factors can contribute to spatial dislocation or disorientation when flying; this includes more than just distance covered but includes the mode of transport, as well as design and architecture.

Airports: Departure

It is hard for most travellers to describe the architectural, or for that matter, any differences between airports, with the exception, perhaps, of better amenities, cleaner toilets, or the rarity of benches without the annoying armrests. Originally extrapolated from train stations, airports have become increasingly sterilized conduits of movement. To use Rem Koolhaas’ term, they are ‘nowhere architecture’.

The airport’s nowhere-ness disengages our sense from whence we depart. Therefore, by the time I boarded my plane in CDG on my way to Buenos Aires, I felt as if I was no longer departing from Paris, but from a uniform portal that could be anywhere in the world, be it Tokyo or Cape Town.

Flying:

In the air we naturally suffer other forms of alienation. We hover deceptively motionless, oblivious to the wonder of air travel, the beautiful landscapes below, and the mundanity in which it is served up and packaged for us. I am perplexed by the lack of travellers’ curiosity with the views outside the windows, whether it’s the expansive lingering sunsets or patchwork topography. One of my favourite views is of Greenland when flying LHR to YVR, I cannot understand why there are not collective gasps and fanfare from amongst the passengers at the immense glaciers and dark craggy mountain peaks.

Arrival:

And then arrival, a mirrored experience of departure, the same transnational architecture, a mirror image of what we had just departed 12 hours earlier—almost as if we haven’t moved at all. Nevertheless, when we exit we are confronted with a new reality—the local; and in the case of JN, greased up men with fishing poles.

As I thought about these stages of spatial dislocation, I finally exited the doors of the air-conditioned airport and strolled over to the riverside and made my way southwards towards the rounded jetty. I found it unusual to see so much life so near to the airport; there were picnics, young and old men fishing, cyclists and even some travellers playing dice-games while sitting on their suitcases-probably waiting between connections.

I continued southwards along the Costanera Norte towards the giant pier and mock-Tudor clubhouse. My curiosity growing, I began to spot the odd person on the pier. From a distance it looked abandoned. I detoured from my walk to investigate further and came across the dignified world of the Club de Pescadores, founded in 1903. Here, some thousand members can fish uninterrupted. Claiming to be a journalist, I was given ‘special permission’ to walk the pier which is strictly for members only; it is an exaggeratedly long structure considering its limited use.

I continued south by southwest, walking alongside the fence that cordons off the well-kept airport lawn. It was empty of pedestrians but I did come across a statue remembering a 1949 air disaster, where a group of humanitarians who travelled to Ecuador to assist in relief work suffered an internal fire that brought down the plane into a farmer’s field, killing five passengers. The statue is captivating, an airplane in flames and out of the flames rise two nude women—likely to be the nurses who perished.

The solitude and constant motion of walking lends itself to introspection. Travel itself, particularly long distance, has profound impacts on the brain. The neuroscientist/ journalist Jonah Lehren’s work on travel and the mind puts forward some compelling arguments for travel, even if only to brighten ones’ thinking or ability to problem-solve.

In particular, air travel provides an unusually conducive environment for existential cogitation. Ironically, for many of us the airplane is a place of personal stasis, despite travelling at 900km per hour, time seems to slow down, often inducing self-reflection.

Having walked the length of the airport and turned westwards towards the Planetarium the sidewalk abruptly ended. The only thing that separated me from the green parklands of the Palermo Bosque was a large underpass with no shoulder to walk on and fast moving traffic.

After some scouting I noticed a well-worn dirt footpath in the dry grass. I followed it for a time, letting it lead me beside empty patches of dis-used tarmac, piles of rubbish, and finally to a barbed wire fence barring me from crossing a set of train tracks.

I searched the area for possible options amidst a cacophony of dog barks and the noise of trains screaming by. Finally, I found a hole in the fence that had been pried open, I crawled through, praying none of the dogs would follow. Luckily, a similar opening had been forced on the adjacent fence. Once through, the rest was a smooth walk into the city.

Later, upon discussing my journey to a friend, I was informed that there is, indeed, a walkway that sits elevated from the traffic but below this same underpass. Intrigued, I decided to reverse the direction of my previous walk and sure enough, and plainly to see from the other side, is a well constructed walking option. In the end, there was no need for any crawling through fences or evading rabid dogs.

The Jorge Newbery airport is an example of how airports can be walked-to. For good or bad it is part of the urban space around it, linked not only by road but also by foot and bicycle.

For many cities, walking to and from the airport means walking outside of the urban-planned parameters, which is an act of subversion. In this case, it is less so.

Next time you fly to Jorge Newberry or are meeting someone at the arrivals, you may wish to consider walking there.

Daniel Tunnard continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 2 – which brings recollections of the joy of youth and a phallic obsession.

Four teenagers with a single haircut get on the bus, shouting and opening a big bottle of Pepsi in such a way that it explodes over the jeans of one of the callow youths. At first glimpse they look like good boys who only drink fizzy pop, until one of them says “let’s do the wine here”. Don’t be thinking that they’re going to take off their shoes and start treading on grapes inside a big barrel on the bus. No, Missy. They’re simply getting rid of half the Pe’si (Argentines of a certain age/class are unable or unwilling to pronounce consonant clusters, hence Pe’si, pi’za and se’tiembre. I may have been influenced by my wife in such satirical language use. She’s a bit of a snob. From Conce’ción.) so that they can pour into the bottle the contents of the carton of Termidor.

(Unlike in England, where having a big carton of wine in your kitchen is the height of middle-class sophistication, carton wine in Argentina tends to be the exclusive preserve of children and tramps. It should be noted that these particular children’s choice of Termidor is the mark of a refined palate, given that carton wines Toro and the aptly named Crotta are more affordable. Crotta is an Italian surname and probable founder of Crotta wines. Small tip, reader: when naming your wine company after yourself, check beforehand that your name doesn’t mean “homeless woman” in your adopted country.)

It gives me endless joy to witness how these young people celebrate the simple things in life. “I’ve got ciggies!” says one, welling up with emotion. “Lez gaa naycha rserve” shouts one who wishes to visit the nature reserve but has poor diction. “Lez buy a chicken!” exclaims another. A chicken! Ah, the rebellion of youth.

As you may have realised, unless it is not common practice where you come from for high school students to celebrate the first day of spring by getting drunk in public places, today is Spring Day, or Burial Of Facundo Sarmiento in 1888 Day for the history pedants, and the streets are full of little people who really should be somewhere else. Meanwhile, I’ve been sweating since 7.30am because I put on an over-cautious jacket when I left the house because I didn’t dare go out in just a skimpy t-shirt at 7am with the winter still a nearby and frigid memory, and now I have to carry my jacket around with me all day on seven different buses, like an idiot.

As Spring Day progresses, various groups begin to appear of badly-dressed teenage girls with too much makeup. Such is the cyclical nature of fashion that these teenagers look exactly like my big sister and her friends did in their first attempts to dress up as grownups, some twenty years ago. The boys, in contrast, look five years younger than their sassier classmates. They all look so excited to be out on the town in their little group, laughing at the same inanities, looking on us adults on the bus with a big smile, as if saying “Look at me. I’m with my gang. Feel my self-confidence blossom so fleetingly.”

Wherever I go on this Spring Day, all the shop signs wish me a happy spring, especially florists, who make about half their annual earnings today. Even the kitchen supplies shops wish me a Happy Spring, as if I wanted to celebrate the change of seasons with the opportune purchase of a set of Tupperware containers.

As with every spring, adverts pop up all over the city for Tulipán condoms, insinuating that with the change of seasons the time has come to “stick it in”. This year their slogan is “In spring, we’re all candidates”. Don’t the condom advertisers understand how teenage hormones work? The change of season has nothing to do with teenagers’ urges. Even though I, in the days when my acne was acceptable for my age, finally managed to pop my cherry with the onset of spring, it was after five arduous months of courtship and hormonally-driven attempts, even if it was ten below in the damp back streets of Stockport Students’ Union Bar.

We’re going down Avenida Belgrano, crossing the Avenida 9 de Julio, when I realise that this is the reason why I wanted to undertake this behemoth project in the first place, because I love Buenos Aires in the spring and the summer. It was at this exact spot that I fell in love with Buenos Aires on my second day in the city in 1991. I was on a bus with another guy from the hostel, we looked to our left as we crossed the 9 de Julio and gasped “Wow, it’s so big!” I can’t remember if we were talking about the avenue or the Obelisk. I think it was the Obelisk. You could leap to the interpretation here that I’ve spent thirteen years of my life in one city because of a phallic obsession. So what? Shakira came to Buenos Aires for the drippy son of a presidential failure, Antonito de la Rúa. There are worse reasons.

Daniel Tunnard continues his Colectivaizeishon series with The 1 – Buenos Aires’ first bus, and shares with readers other firsts.

Long line for the No 1 bus in Liniers (Photo: Agus Carini)

The number 1 bus starts its route in Morón (stop giggling), so it’s full when I get on in Liniers. Now, this might sound selfish, but shouldn’t there be a seat reserved for writers? What are we supposed to do, write standing up? It should be a common courtesy to have to give up your seat to any person you see holding an A4 pad and pen. Or a novel over 500 pages, because they’re quite hard to hold open with one hand. I’m going to write to the bus company and suggest they put up signs that say ‘Reserved for Writers and Readers of Really Quite Long Books’ in fancy fileteado letters. I’ll let you know if they get back to me.

Deprived as I am of practicing my trade, I instead read the tabloid-tastic Diario Popular over the shoulder of the man sitting in the seat which in future will be reserved for writers. Here’s last nights news: Banfield regaled their fans with a ‘discreet’ 1-1 draw against Olimpo; Ricardo Fort’s former bodyguard and the Teen Angel went to a telephone vote, in what I assume is something to do with the racy Argentine equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing; and in the classic style of this kind of newspaper, on the page where the photo goes of the young lady showing her boobies, there’s a photo of a young lady showing her boobies. I’m not knocking it, I have fond memories of reading my grandmother’s The Sun when I was a toddler. Some things are the same wherever you go. But has anyone else noticed that Argentina’s equivalent of page 3 girls seem just a little less innocent?

Vélez Sarsfield stadium along the No 1 bus route (Photo: Agus Carini)

Coming out of Liniers, I spot the Vélez Sarsfield stadium. This stadium was the very first thing I ever saw of Buenos Aires, in a video of Queen’s first show here in February 1981, which I first saw as a geeky 13-year old in 1989. It’s fitting that this should have been the first thing ever that I saw of Buenos Aires, because one of the things I like most about Argentina is that, unlike in Britain when I was growing up, Queen are not the sole preserve of spotty schoolboys and plump housewives, but enjoyed by many normal people too. You didn’t hear it from me, but some people even think Queen are cool. Seriously.

If you went to primary school here in the early 80s, classmates would split into two gangs depending on who you liked best, Queen or Kiss. This easily beats my school, where classmates were divided into gangs of people who wanted to beat me up for liking Queen and people who didn’t. I was the sole member of the latter gang, except on those occasions when I was joined by Peter Jackson. Not the bearded film director, the ginger Queen fan from Stockport.

This trip turns out to be one of many “firsts”, if only because I’m trying to find a theme for each of these journeys and then crowbarring this into my narrative. The number 1 bus, as you would imagine, was the first bus in Buenos Aires, taking passengers from Primera Junta to Flores. The number 1 started running on 24 September 1928, when a group of taxi drivers decided to let various strangers travel in their taxis at the same time, hence the name colectivo.

But the last thing this book intends to be is a comprehensive history of South American public transport. I don’t even know if the first bus really had a number 1 on the front. As it was the only line in the city, there wouldn’t have been any need for a number to distinguish it from all the other lines that didn’t exist yet. They probably just stuck a sign up that said ‘Bus’. And then all the people would get on and ask “¿What’s a bus?”, with an inverted question mark because they’d be speaking Spanish, and the driver would say “This is a bus. Hop on, I’ll take you to Flores” and the people would say “Oh OK, eighty centavos, please” because they didn’t have SUBE cards in those days.

So the number 1 didn’t have a number 1 on its front in the early days. It simply was, and it would be a long time before some wit made a joke about its way of not being for a considerable length of time to then suddenly be three times all at once.

Nearby the Primera Junta stop is a street called Puan. Because the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires is on this street, “Puan” has become synonymous with said faculty, so I’ve always had this idea that Puan Street was named after a Señor Puan who was a fantastically philosophical and lettered individual, an erudite, bearded chap with a monocle and pipe and brass-tipped walking stick, whose first name was Juan, so he was called Juan Puan, and his friends used to call his wife Juana Puana, even though her real name was Bernard.

The No 1 bus trundles along the streets of Buenos Aires from Morón to Primera Junta (Photo: Augus Carini)

Sadly, that’s all bollocks. For history, you see, is far more boring, and there never was a Señor Puan. The street is named after a town of the same name in the province of Buenos Aires which gets his name from the Mapuche for “Souls of the dead” (although anyone who’s ever had an Argentine tell them that Montevideo is an acronym of “Mount 6 from East to West” will know to take Argentine toponymy with a fistful of sal parillero). It’s a shame, because if Señor Puan had turned out to be a genocidal, bloodthirsty warmonger, which is where most of the city’s streets get their names from, it would have been tremendously ironic in the context of the Philosophy Faculty and these two paragraphs would have been a scream. But he wasn’t, and you’re left with this impoverishment of wit in its place.

The bus reaches the end of its route in Primera Junta. It was a few blocks from here that I met my future first Argentine wife, on my second day ever in Buenos Aires, in February 1997. She was going out with an Italian but we English are nothing if not forbearing, and when I came back in July the Italian had fucked off and my life was about to change in a way I could never have imagined. I’m just scribbling this reminiscent nugget down in my pad when I look up and see that there’s no one left on the bus. The driver looks at me in his mirror and goes “I’ve finished, ¿eh?”, again with an inverted question mark. Some things never change.