The pores of Buenos Aires

I love living here. 9 de julio is the widest road in the world, but there are islands of trees between the streams of traffic that soften the urban landscape. Here and there, you spot a mattress or perhaps even a chair belonging to someone for whom one of these green strips between the grey stripes is home. I wonder how they feel about living here. As I walk back from a Buddhist meeting, I feel the first hint of an autumn chill on the evening breeze and hope the mattress owners have a mean Plan B for when it rains.

I stop for a moment to take in the last purple flourishes of the jacaranda on 9 de julio and the pink blossom, which has survived through heat and thunderstorms on the green corner, where the Independencia subte has its entrance. The teenage couple I saw kissing under the trees on my way to the meeting are still exactly where they were. Small boys and a dad are playing football with a plastic Coke bottle in the playground by the subte entrance, against a backdrop of Palo Boracho, my favourite pot-bellied trees. There are numerous green islands in this city, many with spectacular trees. If the great parks are the lungs of the beast we know as London, these funsize parks must be the pores of the Buenos Aires.

Yesterday, Gesa and I went to the Glorieta to dance the evening away in one of these parklets. It was a punitively humid evening and the porteño mosquitoes just love their meat, especially mine, but still, we came away satisfied with the quantity and quality of the dancing. It is handy living with a tango dancer. We had a practica this evening at home.

I danced every night, this week – in addition to the daytime classes and places I’ve already mentioned, I went to Maipu 444 on Thursday to the Mano a Mano milonga and met up with Swedish Jens I met at the Maldita milonga on Wednesday and saw my first ever performance of malambo, which is a thrilling Argentinian gaucho dance, which requires extraordinary flexibility, strength, stamina and dexterity and recreates the sounds of horses riding. I also went to a milonga at Peru 571 with Jeff on Saturday, where I saw José Halfón and Virginia Cutillo perform. I am in awe of the way her legs float and fly, like ribbons wielded by oriental acrobats.