Colonia, Uruguay

A syndicate was formed with $800,000 capital to start a bull ring at San Carlos. It would have undoubtedly been a great money-making transaction drawing innumerable people from Buenos Aires, but the socialistic government of the Banda Oriental, as Uruguay is frequently spoken of, very wisely put a ban on this cruel sport.

CHAPTER II
BUENOS AIRES

Buenos Aires which should have been named Malos Aires, on account of the enervating, depressing humidity of its summer climate when the thermometer sometimes registers as high as 104° Fahrenheit, and when not a breath of air is stirring, is a city of nearly 1,750,000 inhabitants and rivals Philadelphia towards being the third in population in the New World. This capital of Argentina, built upon the west bank of the muddy La Plata River in latitude 34° south is the entrepôt and distributing point for all merchandise and goods that enters and leaves the vast territory which comprises the La Plata system and in fact of all southern South America east of the Andes. It is a city of marble statues, of elegant public buildings, of sumptuous palaces, of parks and boulevards, and is often spoken of as the "Athens of America." It is also a city of narrow streets, of conventillos (poorer class tenements) teeming with Hebraic and Sicilian life, of confidence men, lottery ticket vendors, Greek and Syrian peddlers, fugitives from North American justice, bewhiskered Irish bums, and Galician Jews reeking of garlic, adorned with corkscrew sideburns. Down its avenues parade the same sort of crowd seen in Naples, also the pompous banker, the bespatted fop with slender cane, the staid business man, the artizan, beggars galore, and a galaxy of prostitutes, both Iberian and criolla.

The most remarkable thing about Buenos Aires is how fast one can get rid of one's money with so little received for it in return. Everything costs half as much again as what it should, with the possible exception of clothes and shoes. Meals, hotel rooms, beverages, lingerie, photographic material, drugs, theater admissions, and in fact nearly everything under the sun is sky high. The entertainments for a stranger to indulge in are but few and mediocre. It is every day the same routine after the first week of novelty of sight-seeing has worn off. Unless in Buenos Aires on business, the stranger absolutely kills time unprofitably by getting into a rut from which he does not extricate himself until it is time for him to sail for home. He finds himself two or three times a day at the same table in front of the same café, watching the same people promenade by, the only variation being an occasional visit to a burlesque show, the race track, the post office, or to the zoölogical garden.

Congress Building, Buenos Aires

This is the finest building in South America. It cost $20,000,000. All the marble for its facing was imported from Italy

In a previous book, I stated that the sycamore trees on the Avenida de Mayo were sickly and did not think that they would live. I first saw them in January, 1913. In December, 1915, when I again beheld them, I was astonished at their appearance. They were a third again as large, and they begin to show prospects of becoming elegant shade trees. The subway was completed in 1914. It begins at the Plaza de Mayo, on which square the Casa Rosada, or Capitol, faces, and continues underneath the Avenida de Mayo to the mile-distant Congress Building, thence underneath the next parallel street to the north, Rivadavia, the bisecting thoroughfare of the city, to the Once railroad station, the terminus of the Western Railway. An extension runs three miles farther to a section of the city named Caballito. Caballito is the name that the Naón estancia went by years ago before the city grew up. The part of the city where the estancia once stood still retains the name. Compared to subways in other cities, this one of Buenos Aires is poorly patronized. It resembles the Budapest subway, more than it does the New York or Boston ones, and its cars make but little better speed than do those in the Budapest tube. Cab fare and taxicabs are cheap, which are undoubtedly some of the primal causes of the subway's not excessive patronage.