Buenos Aires

Two days after Christmas we got in the Suburban and drove to Buenos Aires. Kevin has a friend and collegue who lives there and offered his house to us while he was spending the holidays in the United States. It was very generous, we really wanted to visit, and so we took advantage of his offer, hoping that we (or he) didn't live to regret it.

We were happy that the roads were good, and the countryside was pretty. It looked like the Midwest: flat, fields, farms. There were fields full of sunflowers that were beautiful. Acres and acres of golden yellow happiness. If I ever become a farmer, I will grow sunflowers. I'll tell my friends, "I grow sunflowers, rainbows, and happiness, right here next to my unicorn ranch." How awesome would that be?

Anyway, we drove from Asunción to Rosario, Argentina, where we spent the night in a Holiday Inn, ate at McDonald's, and heard a rumor of a Subway. We also left Noah's blankey in the hotel, "my favorite blankey, with frogs, that cost four hundred dollars!" It didn't cost quite that much, but it does have some sentimental value. I didn't discover it missing until we were a half an hour outside Buenos Aires and Kevin was not going to turn around to go and get it. Fortunately, when we called, the hotel had the blanket, and we were able to retrieve it on the drive home. Noah rode with it over his head the whole drive home, he was so happy to get it back.

Buenos Aires was fun, it is a beautiful city, with plazas, and green space, and statues, and cool old buildings. We visited the Casa Rosada, where I really wanted to go and sing from the balcony, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." The boys told me that I couldn't and shouldn't. We also saw Eva Peron's grave in the cemetary at La Recoleta. It was an old cool cemetary, with vaults made of marble, granite, and a colony of wild looking cats. I could have wandered in that cemetary for hours. We visited La Boca, a colorful, fun place, with street tango dancers, cool arts and crafts, and painted buildings. We drove on the the widest street in the world, Avenida 9 de Julio, past the Boca Juniors soccer stadium, and alongside the Rio de la Plata. We took a trip to a zoo, swam in the pool at the house, and had a relaxing time. It was a good trip, and traveling to Buenos Aires from Asunción is like taking a time machine from the past to the present. The internet was fast, the people (mostly) obeyed the traffice rules, and the streets were mostly smooth, wide, and nice. One thing I have noticed while visiting South American cities is that the painted traffice lanes seem to be a guideline at best. Where there are four lanes in the road, the drivers make five or six. I asked Kevin if maybe I was approaching the whole painted lanes issue completely wrong, and that instead of assuming that we were supposed to be between the lines, we should be straddling them.

The Missions

We took a nice weekend trip to see the Jesuit ruins in the south of Paraguay and also in Argentina. They were very interesting, I love old, crumbling bits of history, so they were perfect for me. They boys seemed to enjoy them as well.

This picture is of Nuestra Señora de Santa Ana, in Argentina. It was the most ruined of all the sites we visited, the walls were all fallen down or held up with wooden braces. There is also a cemetery that was still being used up until the 1980s.

The next five pictures are of San Ignacio Miní, also in Argentina. The first is a view across the plaza to the church, and the second is a close up of one side of the entry to the church. This was an amazing ruin, there were many outbuildings still standing, and much of the carving in the church was intact. The third picture is of the original floor. The fourth is of carvings over the side door of the church, and the last is carvings along the bottom of the wall.



We spent the night in a cute little cabin in the town of San Ignacio, then got up the next morning and drove back to Paraguay. We visited two ruins in Paraguay, La Santisima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue.

La Santisima Trinidad de Paraná:




Jesús de Tavarangue:


There is a good movie from the mid 1980s called The Mission, starring Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro. It is a fictionalized account about the end of the Jesuit Missions, and the film is beautiful, but depressing. There are some scenes that feature Iguazu Falls, so you get to see the two coolest thing in Paraguay in one film. Marcus, Sam, and Chris watched it after our trip to the missions. I think that the movie helped them see how the people might have lived in the missions, and how they looked before they were abandoned and ruined.

I am going to put all the pictures we took up at Shutterfly, if you want to see all of them, go to: http://sunproductions.shutterfly.com/

Information on the ruins, or Jesuit Reductions, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_Reductions