Mid-term elections are coming up quickly & if you live here then you can’t escape the media blitz by all the politicians.

Even today when I went to my RSS reader and opened up the San Francisco-based literary blog Conversational Reading I came across an unexpected feed ad for Margarita Stolbizer.

Obviously a targeted combination of georeferencing and Google’s algorithm detecting that Conversational Reading does on occasion mention Argentine literature and, every now & then, include some Spanish-language excerpts, though not at all on this particular posting. Now, I’m wondering which Argentine political ad I will see next in my feed reader.

This afternoon Ceci & I met up with Robert to stake out a spot on Av Callao to watch the funeral procession of former President Raul Alfonsín .

After the procession many in the crowd flowed onto Av Callao to follow the coffin to Recoleta Cemetery, but we decided to take a side street and come up to the cemetery via calle Junín where we found the mounted honor guard lined up outside the cemetery walls.

We assumed that there was nothing else to see but we wandered up toward the cemetery anyway. Then we got swept into the surging crowd as an entourage surrounding Alfonsín’s son moved towards the entrance of the cemetery. Then Ceci & I got separated from Robert. Never saw him again.

The police were pushing through trying to form a passage so that the coffin could make it to the cemetery. At this point I just held up the camera and turned on the recording mode as the flag-draped coffin moved by. Actually, for quite a while, the coffin just sat there. Not a very good video but definitely a typical Buenos Aires in-the-crowd moment. I love that! But, I later learned that while I was recording this video someone in that very packed crowd stole my wallet. Fortunately, I never carry much money or anything valuable in my wallet, so the theft doesn’t bother me too much.

Perhaps the person with the best vantage point of the funeral was this dude in the crane.

I stayed up till early morning watching the Argentine senate debate and subsequent vote on the agricultural retenciones. Since I generally stay awake till 3am anyway and I’ve always been a news junkie, not falling asleep wasn’t difficult. Besides, it certainly was dramatic, finishing at 4:30am.

The VP Cobos, who had to cast the deciding vote in a tie-breaker, definitely looked like he wanted to be anyplace but in that position. It’s not often that a Vice President votes against his President, so the political fallout should be interesting to watch over the next few days. Of course, Argentina is a constitutional republic and not a parliamentary republic, so Cristina has several more years left as president. Next year’s mid-term elections should be fascinating. Despite Argentina’s checkered history of insurrections in the last century, the great thing about republics is that – over time – they survive political divides and unpopular presidents.

During this year’s political crisis in Argentina I tried to stay away from blogging about politics, and work demands kept me away from Tuesday’s massive demonstrations. Somehow, though, a part of me does wish that hundreds of thousands of people would gather in support of improved education, health care, or fighting prejudice and discrimination. (But that doesn’t happen in my own country either, though Obama is turning out good crowds). Ultimately, politics does so much come down to economics.

The other night I had a dream

…..I had gone into the small grocery in my neighborhood…you know, one of those Chinese-managed supermercados all over Buenos Aires. I brought my bread, eggs, salchichas, & Coke up to the counter. The cashier, rather than being Chinese, was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner….she rang up the prices on the register, which all seemed much more expensive than my last visit to the market, and passed the items on down the counter to the bag boy, who turned out to be Néstor Kirchner….but as he sacked my groceries, Néstor kept breaking the eggs……..I’ll let that image sit with you for a moment……………for those readers who don’t know… eggs, huevos, in Spanish has a double meaning.

That’s a true dream, seriously…..though I guess now it’s Cobos who is doing some egg breaking.

So, if I’m dreaming about this, then what do Argentines dream?