Large pizza and two draft beers: 10 pesos (USD$3.33)
Full dinner at a nice restaurant, with bread, two entrees, two desserts, and two bottles of wine: 70 pesos (USD$23.33)
Tia Maria coffee liquor, usually $25 or so in the States: 14 pesos (USD$4.66)
Anticipated return to a country where the rare nonsmoking sections aren´t entirely ignored: Priceless.

We´ve been in Buenos Aires for six days now, and are mostly eating and drinking the days away. The excessive smoking is relentless and repulsive, and this blogger is not interested in the nonsensical cultural relativism of those who will defend it as "the Argentine way." It´s merely a triumph of the tobacco death merchants.

The museums suck: as bad, and sometimes even worse, than Balboa Park´s terrible museums. The only decent one is the Museum of Fine Arts, which has some second and third tier Renoir, Picasso, Monet, and other similar paintings. The National Historical Museum is truly an embarassment: it is the most myopic and blindly nationalistic house of propaganda either of us have ever seen.

The one room between the late 1800s and the present is dedicated to the 1982 Falkland Islands war, or, as the Argentines prefer to call it, the war of the Islas Malvinas. To look at the proud displays, photos, and flight suit, you wouldn´t ever guess that the Brits handed the Argentines their asses on a plate in about 72 days, after the Argentines invaded what most other countries agreed was British territory. Unluckily for them, Maggiepoo was having a tough political spell in GB at the time, and the Falklands provided a lovely opportunity for her to flick away a fly with a batallion of fighter jets, and gain some cheap political capital.

The Museo do Arte Moderna de Buenos Aires was pitiful. The main exhibit was a large room of photography from half a dozen or so charlatans, whose only unifying themes seemed to be that badly composed German scenes and poor focus. It did give me good hope for exhibiting my own photography, though, since it was of the quality I was taking with a 120 disc camera in the mid 1980s before I ever took a photography class.

Perhaps the best done museum was the one of architecture and money, though the subject matter was exceptionally boring.

Our hotel is on one of the largest streets in downtown Buenos Aires, Avenida 25 de Mayo, and just a block from what the book correctly calls a "pedestrian nightmare", Avenida 9 de Julio: eight lanes of traffic in both directions, and two fonrtages of three more lanes (sometimes four, when the angry and erratic drivers feel like it, or six when taxis are present.) It´s a but dingy and amazingly loud, but has consistent hot water and a small balcony for storing our empty fuzzy water and red wine bottles.

We are planning a soccer (futbol) game for Sunday of two teams in Argentina´s First Division, River Plate vs. Estudiantes La Plata. Should be interesting. I proposed to the Good Senator at lunch yesterday that the real reason that soccer hasn´t caught on in the U.S. is that it lacks sufficient corporate propaganda (oops, commerical) breaks.

¡Más pronto!