The Once district

Today we visited the Once (OHN-say) neighborhood of Buenos Aires. While not officially a barrio of the city, the area houses a large garment district and is where several departments of the University of Buenos Aires are located. It also features the largest concentration of Jewish people in the city. After lunch, we went to a Sephardic synagogue. The security presence was tremendous, and it apparently has been since the mid 1990s when there was a rise in terroristic acts committed against Jews. We weren't even allowed to take photographs for reasons of security. It's sad. We think we're going to return tomorrow for Friday evening services and then try to go to someone's house for shabbat dinner.

Afterwards we briefly visited the rather dumpy Museum of Foreign Debt, located in the basement of one of the U of B.A. buildings. As its name suggests, the museum chronicles Argentina's series of fiscal crises. We were able to obtain English language headsets to guide us through the exhibit, but we became so bored that we decided to leave midway through the recording.

The weather here has been great--cloudless blue skies everyday. Our Spanish fluency has been improving daily, but we fear it will become crappy once again when we return to the U.S. C'est la vie, we guess...