![BA street sign](http://www.sitebits.com/images/2012/ba-sign.jpg)
Buenos Aires' street furniture is slated for a long-awaited overhaul. Starting immediately from the city's more affluent east and slowly expanding westward, throughout the next 10 months, thousands of bus shelters (
refugios de colectivos), street signs, signposts, and ad displays will be replaced with newer, clearer, more modern, and more vandalism-proof versions. This process was actually supposed to start way back in 2001, but was repeatedly delayed due to funding uncertainty, judicial objections, and other equally legitimate-sounding causes. Separately, in a further beaufitication effort, the city has scheduled the planting of more than 5,000 trees in June and July.
Source(s): La Nación, La Razón, municipal government (March/April, 2012)
![ILEE](http://www.sitebits.com/images/2006/ILEE-logo.jpg)
I was asked to write a short review summarizing my experience studying
Spanish at the Instituto de Lengua Española Para Extranjeros (ILEE) in Buenos Aires and
that's exactly what I am doing in my first article for SiteBits.
Read the rest of: "Learning Spanish at ILEE-Buenos Aires"»
![Moveable Fiesta](http://www.sitebits.com/images/2006/nym_moveable_fiesta.jpg)
You know you're already too late to the game when the New York Magazine
publishes an
article
(newyorkmetro.com) telling you that you should be living not in New
York, but in Buenos Aires, enjoying warmer temperatures, cheaper real
estate and "girls in bikinis".
Written by the
GoodAirs.com
guy, Ian, this article borders on advertorial in the way it unabashedly plugs the author's expat buddies with their
hobby-like business projects while simultaneously propagating this whole
myth of a warm, sunny, cheap New York (or Paris) on the other side of the
globe. If you're too lazy to follow the link and read it yourself, I'll
summarize it for you. The gist is that in Buenos Aires, even a "nobody"
from Manhattan can suddenly and effortlessly become
somebody.
And, presumably, get to hang out with "girls in bikinis" as a result.
The secret behind this miraculous transformation?...
Read the rest of: "Buenos Aires Dreaming"»
![El Ateneo Store in Buenos Aires](http://www.sitebits.com/imgsmallphoto/ateneo-buenos-aires-1_small.jpg)
On my last trip to Buenos Aires, I was pleasantly surprised with the book-shopping scene there.
Walking the streets of downtown B.A. was like traveling in a time machine - this must have been what New York
City was like in the 1970s: crowded, polluted, with lots of small bookstores...
Read the rest of: "Book Shopping in Buenos Aires"»
The Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo is known for many things -
for example, it enjoys the reputation of the world center of tango music.
A somewhat lesser feather in its cap, perhaps, is San Telmo's title as the home of the Sunday flea market.
It took me a while, but yesterday I finally overcame my dislike of flea markets and
people in general and took a stroll south in search of some good shots and possibly
a deal or two. None of that materialized, of course, but the atmosphere I found was
reasonably festive.
Read the rest of: "Sunday Flea Market in San Telmo"»