January 3-5 - Buenos Aires

Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

We arrived in Buenos Aires about noon on January 2. It doesn't matter how urbane and sophisticated the passengers are; after a 12-hour flight, any airplane is a flying slum. I'm convinced they just take the seats out and hose it out with a fire hose.

I don't know what I was expecting when I got off the plane, maybe "here I am in romantic South America." But we boarded in winter in New York, with the sun always low in the sky and piles of dirty snow everywhere, and got off with the sun almost overhead and the temperature about 85 degrees. And the very first thought that hit me - I remember it because it surprised me so much to think it - was "son of a gun - the seasons really are reversed down here!"

I certainly wasn't expecting a megalopolis of 8 million people spawling across 100 kilometers, but that's what Buenos Aires was. It's bigger now. Argentina, and for that matter its neighbors Chile and Uruguay, aren't really Latin America. They are pieces of Europe detached by cultural continental drift and attached to South America.