Yesterday I walked down to Av de Mayo to witness the inauguration day parade of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Scores of buses that had carried people in from the province were lined up along the part of Av 9 de Julio south of Av Belgrano. If the Kirchners’s hadn’t bused in supporters then the crowd for the later fiesta in Plaza de Mayo would have been very small. It seems like most porteños found something better to do on a very pleasant afternoon. I’m a sucker for pomp and ceremony.

Even along Av de Mayo it was very easy to find a spot along the fence that the police had installed on Av de Mayo. For most of Av de Mayo the crowd was only one person deep along the barricade.

Coming along first was the colorful military unit on horseback along with their band. I’ve not seen these guys since Perón’s reburial. They had a nice sound. I didn’t bring a real video cam but caught a few seconds of grainy video with my Sony digital camera.

And here’s the video of Cristina riding in the back of the car, waving, and asking one of her security detail to give her a rose tossed by the crowd.

I’m glad I went. Afterwards I made my way down to Plaza de Mayo for the Fiesta de la Democracia. Tomorrow’s blog posting will have photos from the plaza.

I’ve prepared a free e-book on Buenos Aires pulled from the archives of my blog. The e-book is 57 pages. There is still a lot more content in the archives that did not make it to the e-book. I have at least 150 more pages of content that easily could be converted to book form. If there’s enough interest, then I might do that.

The e-book is not just a reformat of the archives. The material has been edited and arranged in a different order than the archives. Many of the posts reflect a specific part of my time in Buenos Aires and I tried to retain that perspective in the e-book for those sections. In many ways, think of the e-book as the first few chapters of a much longer work. The rest is in the archives and might someday come to book form. Plus, I still have a lot more to write about Buenos Aires.

Ok, this will be the last in my recent postings about demolished houses and new construction in Barracas. That is, unless I come across some other ridiculousness as I’m walking around tomorrow.

So, here on Av Montes de Oca was this building. Nothing extraordinary but nice, very pleasant. (The photo is again from the city’s mapping site, taken a few years back).

And here it is today:

The future site of construction project by a Spanish real estate developer.

And what’s up with that hideous blue paint job on the ground floor of the building next door?