Today was a very interesting and inciteful day. We toured the city of Buenos Aires, specifically the neighborhoods of La Boca and San Tolmo along with the Plaza de Mayo. While in La Boca we walked around the stadium and saw several local artists and vendors. In San Tolmo we visited several older houses and shopped in a local market. In the afternoon we did a graffiti tour of Palermo and looked at numerous examples of local street art and culture.

The focus of our day to day was more cultural than the other days of the trip and purposefully so. We got to see several very distinct and unique parts of the city and learned quite a bit about the history of Buenos Aires and Argentina as a whole. In both nations, Immigrants played a significant role culturally. The United States and Argentina were the two largest receivers of immigrants during the early 20th century, and the mixture of cultures is evident. The neighborhood of La Boca was an immigrant community and many of the houses and building are similar to the tenement housing that was found in New York. Going further back in time, the Spanish influences of Argentinas colonial past are visible in the historically wealthy neighborhood of San Tolmo. Furthermore, while the nation itself was a former Spanish colony there are heavy French and Italian influences on the architecture of the city that present themselves in very unique ways such as in the Pink House, which serves as the nation’s executive offices.

While there are similarities between the two nations, several key differences exist as well. The United States has experienced extreme political continuity that Argentina has not had. Argentina gained its independence in 1816 and sense then the nation has experienced several periods of political instability. The most recent period being in the 1970’s when there was a military government in place for over two decades. Argentina also still remains a very agriculture heavy society and is only recently truly experiencing large scale modernization of its economy. Because of the political instability, Argentinas economy has been experiencing mass turmoil and hyper-inflation.