¨Bodies¨ The Exhibition, Barbie Store, Dog Poo
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
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Trip End
Ongoing
Buenos Aires, Palermo,
Argentina
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Portenos are big dog lovers.Whilst walking down Santa Fe Avenue in Palermo today we saw a professional dog walker (a paseaperro) expertly exercising a total of nine dogs of assorted breeds at the ends of leads. How they do it is without tangling the leads is beyond us. The lady we saw appeared to be collecting more well dressed hounds from apartment blocks and we can guess that the yuppie owners are at work
Argentina white and blue urban art
. The group took up the whole pavement as they made their way around. Portenos are obsessed with their dogs and often keep them in small apartments. They seem to walk them frequently though. The dogs on show especially in this area are normally well groomed to perfection and sporting designer hair cuts. True. We saw a shaved dog with straightened fringe and perm on top, the dog watching is just as interesting as the people watching. Gold. The portenos neglect to pick up the poo though and it´s all over the city. portenos have actually adapted a good poo radar and never step in it. Alright for them. We took a trip to the recently opened, world first Barbie store (the doll not the Weber variety). Unsatisfied with her Corvette and fed up with her tangerine toned boyfriend Ken, Barbie has set her sights even higher with her very own store. An enormous pink oasis amidst the exhaust fumes and grime of BA, the world´s first Barbie store is solely dedicated to the happiness of spoiled little girls everywhere. After checking out the Barbie Volkswagen beetle parked out the front we went inside and became Barbie girls in a Barbie world. The whole store even smells like Barbie with a sickly sweet cherry type fragrance filling the air. There are children´s clothes, a hair and make up salon, party house and a cafe that sells coffee and little pink pastries. Pretend money is not accepted there, everything was very expensive
dog walkers
. There is a range of clothing that is called ´Barbie and Me´. You can buy an outfit for the Barbie doll and one the same for the child. Crazy. Minuscule doll´s clothes are the same price as a decent meal and homeless people are collecting cardboard to sell outside. Fact of the day: Argentina registers the second highest rate of eating disorders in the world. ´Barbie Syndrome´is at it´s peak in BA.The highlight of the day with an Argentinian wine hangover, ´Bodies´-The Exhibition at Abasto Centre. This exhibition of real human bodies is so popular that it has been seen by over 4 million people worldwide. ´Bodies´ intends to show the complexities of the human body and the effect that certain diseases and addictions have on the body. Good job. The exhibition featured 16 human bodies and more than 200 organs. The signage was in Spanish but we got the general idea. There was basically whole bodies mounted upright with various internal parts of the body exposed, the whole lot preserved. They did not smell at all. There were bodies showing muscles, tendons, blood vessels, reproductive systems and the central nervous system. There were limbs cut off and cross-sections of brains and skulls. There were intestines and organs like the heart, lungs and kidney all on show. Some of the organs displayed damage from cancers. There was one exhibit showing a brain hemorrhage and another showing a set of lungs blackened from tar
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. Next to this last one was a box where you could throw your cigarette packet out. Nadine has not had a cigarette for a week anyway. Excellent work. There was a display that showed a stillborn baby fetus presented in glass bottles and others at various stages of pregnancy The whole exhibition was well done but you really wanted to get out of there, an unsettling experience to intimately see inside our physical selves.We decided to see the dark comedy film Tim Burton´s ¨Sweeney Todd- The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street¨ starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter at the shopping centre and were glad to know it was to be shown in English with Spanish sub-titles. It was a tale of revenge, murder and meat pies to die for set in 19th century London. We loved every minute of it despite the blood and violence. Loved it.
This being our last night in Buenos Aires, we decided to hit another restaurant late at night for dinner. This time we chose ´Bartok´in Palermo. The waiters were friendly, the music funky, the cocktails delicious, the beer icy cold and the cuisine of the good modern Argentine variety. We ordered the tasty bife lomo medallions. One day left in our new favourite city. I could live here for awhile or at least stay long enough to learn Spanish although Patagonia awaits us and we will be entering a world we have never known, a world of penguins, mountains, ice and glaciers. Excited? Of course we are.
