Aparicion con vida.

La Plata, the provincial capital of Buenos Aires, is a small city located about a hundred kilometers outside of Buenos Aires. It’s famous mostly for having been renamed “Eva Peron” for three magical years in the fifties, and for its great natural history museum, built around the collection of explorer Francisco Pascacio Moreno (aka el Perito Moreno, or “expert Moreno”). We checked out the museum today. The train ride out to La Plata was somewhat uncomfortable, but at least the hard metal seats kept us awake the whole way, and we did not miss spotting the TURKEY at one of the farms alongside the train tracks. If we can’t find a turkey for Thanksgiving here in Buenos Aires, I’m bringing my swiss army knife back out to the suburbs and catching myself one.

Upon arriving in La Plata, we went over to the natural history museum, which lived up to all expectations. Our favorite space was what I’ll call “the bone room,” essentially a mass grave of every kind of animal ever. It’s a classic example of old school comparative taxonomy, and it’s muy, muy, muy lindo, and very peaceful. We also enjoyed the massive specimens of prehistoric Argentine animals, which are unlike any we’d encountered in U.S. natural history museums, resembling mostly armadillos of mammoth size.

After we had absorbed the beauty of the skeletons in the natural history museum, we ventured out to explore the rest of La Plata, where we saw the most massive cathedral in all of Argentina, which Nate found to be lacking in elegance. We also saw tons of graffiti, which might merely signify that La Plata has a lively student population, but I think is especially thick on the walls of La Plata now because of the general unhappiness about the apparent return of right wing death squads to Argentina. Much of the graffiti referred to the recent disappearance of Julio Jorge Lopez. One of the primary witnesses in the trials against those involved in the Dirty War, Lopez disappeared from his home in La Plata on September 18, shortly after delivering some of the most powerful and emotional testimony in the trial against Miguel Etchecolatz, a former police investigator. His disappearance is interpreted by many as a sign that the tactics and methods of the Dirty War are not totally consigned to the past. -EMW