Wilkie went to Uruguay for a day trip today, and I went on a surprisingly entertaining but interesting walking tour. It was put on by bafreetour.com, a great organization that puts on free walking tours of Buenos Aires. Tours are offered daily, and anyone who is interested shows up here, at the plaza outside the congress building, at 11am.

Our tour guide (below, center, in green) was a very animated and energetic girl who knew more about a city than anyone I’ve encountered. This is our group, in front of a statue that looks like Rodin’s Thinker, which is in front of Argentina’s congress building.

While strictly not part of the tour, we saw this tall building with Evita’s face painted on it, and on the way back, the opposite side of the building had another picture of her, this time with her singing with a microphone. Or, as someone from the group said, “that dude eating a sandwich.”

Below is the Palacio Barolo building. It wasn’t particularly impressive, but then I learned it was originally built to house the body of Dante (as in Dante Alighieri, of Divine Comedy fame); I’m reading The Inferno right now so I actually found it timely and interesting. His body ended up remaining in Italy, but the building was still built according to the Divine Comedy “standards”: it is 100 meters high (one meter for each canto of the Divine Comedy) and the 22 floors are divided into three sections, one each representing hell, purgatory, and heaven. Neat. OK let’s move on.

This is the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in Buenos Aires, which since the revolution in the 1800s, has been a spot of intense political protest. The photo below shows some structure surrounded by white symbols on the ground. The symbol is the shawl of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that to this day still meets here every Thursday to protest the 1970s military regime that made 30000 people — anyone with real or suspected leftist ideas — disappear (they were kidnapped, tortured, then murdered). They are known as Mothers since some of these 30000 were babies who were simply related to the suspected activitists.

Finally, pictured below, is the street leading to the obelisco. Or, as I like to call it, a miniature Washington Monument. Weighing in at a whopping 200 feet high, this is the main source of pride of portenos (Buenos Aires residents).

Overall this was a really cool experience, and I feel the need to plug bafreetour.com again, since they only operate on tips and rely on word-of-mouth. Join them next time you’re in BA!