La Plata: Week 13 / Day 90 / April 10
Buenos Aires, Argentina: Today we headed out to “The City of Diagonals” – La Plata. So named for obvious reasons shown below, the city was designed to be the capital of Buenos Aires province – a province that, oddly enough, does not contain the city of Buenos Aires.
As seen in the map, the city is a nested grid with diagonals running through them. Also clear, are the numerous parks and green spaces spread throughout the city.
Although La Plata seemed like a simple destination, getting there proved to be a challenge. We left the apartment and requested an Uber. After getting a driver and waiting 5 minutes, the driver cancelled. We then got a new driver and he picked us up. We made it about a half mile in his car and then his car died at the side of the road. We then requested another car. This one pulled up and asked if we wanted to use cash or credit card. When we replied “credit card”, he decided not to drive us and left.
We finally secured a driver on our fourth attempt who could take us to La Plata. Or at least it seemed promising at first. However, it quickly became apparent he was a less than confident / competent driver. We drifted back and forth between lanes on the road, drove past the main obelisk in Buenos Aires twice (on the same road and heading in the same direction), and cruised at low speed on the freeway with the engine screaming (it appeared that the manual transmission was a bit new to him as well – we often stayed in fourth gear on the freeway for long times until he remembered and then shifted to fifth gear). Adding to our excitement was the fact that halfway through the trip he was perilously low on gas. He pulled into a Shell station, but, after speaking to the attendant, pulled away and back on the road. As the road went by, Linda and I began to discuss the distance we may need to walk to get to town.
Eventually, we pulled into the town of La Plata, but there was still more adventure to come. Our driver took a slight detour for a gas station after asking at a street corner where he could find one. It turned out that his car ran on compressed gas, so he needed a special station to fill up. Leaving the gas station, he then drove along slowly (and looped around a couple times), and ended up asking three different pedestrians for directions. All with the navigation app on his phone open and with the cathedral we were heading to in sight. Finally, we arrived and were dropped off.
Getting out we then saw the Cathedral of La Plata. Although work began on building this cathedral in 1884, it was halted in 1932 for fear that the foundation could not bear the weight of the building. It was finally completed in 1999 and stands as the sixth tallest church in the Americas.
As we went up to the entrance, we definitely noticed the figures on front that are typical of gothic / neo-gothic cathedrals. While usually quite dour in appearance, these appeared amused and happy.
Once inside, the dimensions of the cavernous interior could be appreciated (Hartsough for scale beneath window in last picture).
The stained glass was beautiful throughout the church.
We continued to move around the entire church, which was mostly empty on this day.
As is typical in most cathedrals, there were depictions of the Stations of the Cross.
Of course, since visiting Jerusalem, I now always look at Linda and say, “Yeah, I was there” whenever we see one of these scenes. She has lost any sense of amusement about this ages ago (if she ever had any) – and this has only served to increase my enjoyment of a profoundly lame joke.
Leaving the interior of the church, we headed outside and reentered to go into the museum and tower. First we headed up into the tower which gave us a better view of the square below and the rest of the city.
After the tower, we visited the museum briefly.
Leaving the church, we crossed the main square (or diamond, depending upon your perspective) towards the town hall.
On each side of the town hall were tree-lined boulevards with many more government buildings on them. Surprisingly, one of them is a brutalist style abomination that is able to rival Boston City Hall for sheer hideousness.
Walking along this street we eventually came to a park. This park was filled with people lining the sidewalks criss-crossing the park selling used clothes.
Also, in this park we saw the same symbol that had been all over the main square in town. However, this time it was captioned, so we could see that it was the symbol of the Madres de la Plaza – Mothers of the Plaza.
The Mothers of the Plaza were women who had children “disappeared” during the military dictatorship of 1976 – 1983. They began to organize and march at the Plaza de Mayo across from the presidential palace in 1977.
Moving further down the boulevard from this park, we arrived at a much larger park.
Contained within this park was the La Plata Museum – a natural history museum. We spent about an hour going through this museum.
Finally, it was time to head back to Buenos Aires. This time our Uber driver was confident, efficient, and an excellent driver. We gave him a hefty tip upon the return to our apartment.
