6.46pm, Tuesday May 12 ....pickpocketed already?

Today I sat in a cafe with a blue and pink pastel ceiling, where I was served four different little biscuits with my $6 peso cup of tea. The cafe is in the Recoleta Cultural Centre. I was too tired to write. I certainly couldn´t keep up with Sartre, so I read Sarton, but only for a bit. After finishing my tea I lay down on a concrete bench in the gallery´s courtyard, next to a fountain. I listened to the falling water and pretended to doze.

I enjoyed very much the art at the RCC, new works - a retrospective of a project using cigarette vending machines to display small works by a variety of emerging artists; an exhibit of large resin and glass objects inspired by natural forms but also with an element of the built and technological - large objects, for example giant open pod-like structures - made of shattered glass; giant colour photographs of people at various South American beaches; comics, titled Tesorito, about a mother and her two children, one a baby.

The centre was originally part of a convent and the exhibits were housed in narrow rooms off a central hall, as was the cafe. I´ve never quite seen a gallery like it and it was unusually lax on security guards.

Before visiting the gallery I spent a lot of time walking around the Recoleta Cemetary, a miniature old city of mausoleums for the rich and important. I´ve never seen its like. Inside the mausoleums were shiny wooden coffins, Jesus wall statues, vases, glasses, dishes, flowers, portraits. Some were intricately cobwebbed, others losing sprays of plaster or offering loose planks of wood. Outside of Eva Peron´s family mausolem was a hill of flowers. There were many wandering cats in the cemetary, several peacefully lying under a small tree near a marble bench. I spent a couple of hours wandering around, lost in the plethora of lanes.


Recoleta Cemetery

Today I ate bread stuffed with cheese, olives, tomato and pesto, bought off a stallholder in front of the Recoleta church. I also lost something like $30 to $40 pesos. I may have been pickpocketed but I just as likely missed my purse when putting my money away. Sigh... that´s a fair chunk of pesos, though not that much Australian dollars.

Next, I must tell of the marble cathedral.