La Recoleta Cemetery - 02/02/2011

02/02/2011
We woke up the following day ready to explore this cemetery for the rich and famous. We had heard so much about it but yet we had no idea what to expect. As soon as we entered the cemetery we were instantly amazed. Unlike anything else we had seen, graves and tombstones were inexistent. Instead, these excessively grand tombs replaced them. At first we were so amazed just by these grand and intricately decorated structures that mark the life of these once famous people. Then we had a closer look. Expecting the doors of the tomb to conceal some kind of shrine or altar, we got the fright of our life when we peered in and saw the coffins just sitting there. An arms length away. They were literally modern-day mummies.
As we explored the streets of the dead, it took us a few hours to even begin to get used to what we were seeing. 
While we found it an extremely weird and exhibitionist way of burial, it did have a nice family aspect to it. Each tomb was designed to house a whole family. You could look down and and see endless racks for coffins going deeper and deeper into the ground. A lot of them were still well maintained, but lots had been forgotten about and had fallen into disrepair. The windows had smashed and fallen in on the coffins and water had got in and started to rot things away. Some coffins had fallen down and the lids were prying open. Extremely creepy. We spent the whole day exploring these streets, so amazed but so creeped out at the same time.
 After we had had enough in the cemetery, we moved onto this floral sculpture nearby. It was a massive, mechanical flower. It's steel petals open with sunlight and close when the sun goes down. Very cool. 
That evening we went on a pub-crawl through buenos aires nightclub district that the hostel organised. Thinking it would be a small group of people from our hostel, we weren't entirely impressed when we realised there were 100 odd people on it. It took away from the legitimacy of the clubs because everyone was tourists so we decided to split our ways  from the group.