Notes from Abroad…

Well, after a month spent on a Brazilian-Argentinian honeymoon, I’m back in the office and back on the blog! Naturally, I kept an eye out for any interesting urbanist touches throughout our travels, and I’m happy to report that I saw many. We traveled to Salvador Bahia, in Brazil, and Puerto Iguazu and Buenos Aires in Argentina, and while Buenos Aires was incredible in so many ways that it merits its own post, here are the highlights from the other two cities:

Salvador Bahia – a beautiful seaside city, with a colorful historic district that would have been much more fun without the countless street hawkers, and random people tying ribbons around your wrist, then demanding to give you a city tour. That was the less-great part of our week there. However, other than the overabundance of people, the historic area (called Pelourinho) has been very well preserved, and forms a strong centralized gathering place for the city. There were tons of live music and sidewalk cafes, museums, shops…anything and everything.

That huge building is an elevator, which takes people between the Upper and Lower cities; other than that, the buildings are all original.

Salvador has also done an amazing job of preserving their beach front – rather than sell off beachfront real estate to the highest bidder, as we have a tendency to do here in the US, they’ve constructed a wide pedestrian avenue that runs from one end of the city to the other, all along the seaside. As long as you’re within three or four blocks of the coastline, you’ve got a perfect view out to the ocean. We could learn something here!

Puerto Iguazu, Argentina: home to the awe-inspiring Iguazu Falls, Puerto Iguazu is a little mountain town that basically survives on tourism from the waterfalls. Not much to say here except that their bus transportation from the town to the national park is excellent and fairly cheap. Also, the town itself has managed to evade colonization by any global chains, so it still feels pretty authentic. Oh, and the national park here was the first place we saw any attempt at recycling or composting, so that was pretty exciting.