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NORTHEAST ARGENTINA - TRAVELLING DOWN TO BUENOS AIRES… PART 2
Monday 13th July - Wednesday 15th July
"Sculpture lovers will wallow like pigs in mud in Resistencia" according to the Lonely Planet. From that description, I was expecting Resistencia to be interesting, maybe even quirky and quite contemporary, and with the ideas of nice parks and plazas to leisurely wonder around, I thought that our time here would be fun and exciting in this town.
I don´t think I - or the Lonely Planet for that matter - could have been any more wrong!
Resistencia was not that great. We arrived Monday afternoon after another stunning journey across a landscape that felt more like the prairie lands of North America, with large ranches, cattle and gauchos (cowboys). Yet, when we came into Resistencia, we were greeted with worn down, scruffy suburbs, a town that looked pretty bland and plain with only a couple of parks and plazas. As for the sculptures, they existed but not the 300 promised by the ´trusty´ LP and they weren´t elegantly displayed but, instead, dotted randomly, and at times hidden, around town. If Resistencia provided a better back drop for the modern art then maybe my views would have been slightly more optimistic.
We tried to salvage something by having a look at a few museums that were recommended in the book. It would have been helpful if the museums had been open (in general or in the sense of not being derelict and no longer existing!). We did on the Tuesday, however, manage to get into a museum. What was described, again by Lonely Planet, as something like the "driving force behind Resistencia´s art" was what could only be described as a room containing a loto f old junk that someone was collecting! Seriously, we spent 15 minutes in their and were done. There were no explanations about any of the "collections" in the "museum" and it just felt a bit weird and errie really.
If it wasn´t for meeting up with a friend from university, buying a bottle of Recistencia´s fino vinvo tinto, putting the world to rights on the Tuesday afternoon in the sun drenched park and then finding a very good icecream parlour then I think I´d have seriously lost the plot in Resistencia!
It´s all an experience, though. We now know not to go there again but we had to go there in the first place to find that out!
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