Corner of Paraguay and Ayacucho

Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.30.04

Back at the hotel. Where everything is as unfamiliar inside as the city outside. The first thing you warm to in a foreign city is the cross streets near your hotel. When you amble in from side streets the city gathers itself around this focal point. And the landmarks that signal your arrival, back to a vague home, are beyond their intended purposes. All good hotels should find themselves near a strange monument, an old church, a decadent building. You leave sweat-clung through a dead heaving sigh of hotel air to the street, and there it is. A baroque palace to nothing. Don't learn what it is for the duration of your stay. It's like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam except you didn't go in and see Rembrants. You saw it surrounding the palm trees lining Avenida Paraguay and you let out a sigh of relief: "The middle of everything, where evenings and mornings and the in-betweens begin." If the surrounding architecture has no purpose you can discern, then you don't need one either.