In the last few days I have started adding the most popular blog in Latin America to my blogrolls. As some of you know, I have created a Latin America blogroll, focused on blogs that cover the whole region. The number of blogs in that blogroll is relatively small, given the fact that there are only a relative number of regional blogs. However, there are far more blogs that are country-focused or even city focused in Latin America. I am adding them to my personal blogroll and cleaning blogs that are no longer relevant to this blog.
If you have a country or city blog in Latin America that you think should be added to this blogroll, please leave a comment here. I will do my best to quickly give you an answer. A link back as a courtesy will be nice to keep our network of blogs alive.
Here are some of my most recent additions to my blog rolls:
- RegioBlogs (Monterrey, Mexico)
- LadyBug (Sao Paulo, Brasil)
- Blogueando (Mexico)
- Chiva Congelado (Mexican living in Europe)
- Fuego y Agua (Latin America travel)
All of them are very interesting, please check them out.
I just loaded a group of pictures of the lovely Tango show at Piazzolla's a very nice Galeria at downtown Buenos Aires. I hope you enjoy them. Click on any picture for its flickr page. There are more great pictures about live Tango on my flickr account.
Passion is there, on every movement on every step on the dance floor.
Women look confident as the show starts at Piazzolla's.
This dancing couple seemed so confident and relaxed as they executed perfectly their routine.
They still looked confident and elegant as they were about to finish a great Tango routine.
From one side of the Pedestrian Crossing of a busy downtown Buenos Aires street. Click on any picture for its flickr page.
I am in the last few days of my two-week vacation and I wanted to leave you all with a bit of a taste of what I did. I spent the time visiting cities in Brasil and Argentina with my father and Patricia. The last and longest stop was in Bariloche where we had the opportunity to visit the wonderful ski areas such as Cerro Catedral, make lots of photos of the Andes and the neigboring lakes (including of course the gorgeous Nahuel Huapi) and visiting beautiful neighboring cities such as Villa la Angostura.
I am starting to download my photos to a new flickr set on Bariloche, please visit it here. I also added many photos to my Rio and Buenos Aires sets.
Skiers go down the mountain off the Condor Peak, one of the many attractions of the wonderful Cerro Catedral ski area. Click on the picture for its flickr page.
For business reasons I am in Caracas this week. It has been very nice to see how this country where the national passion has always been baseball is quickly becoming a fan for the world largest sport. The whole country was very supportive of "La Vino Tinto" they way the national team is called given the color of their main uniform.
Last night I saw the great game that Uruguay and Brasil played. The whole restaurant was completely engaged in the game in which Brasil became the first finalist. Uruguay played a great match... actually the score was tied and the definition was done in penalties, which are basically a coin toss.
The second finalist will be defined today between Mexico and Argentina. Unfortunately, the game will not be played in Caracas, but I guess the environment will be as great as last night's. The only thing is that I will miss watching the game with my Argentinian friends in Sao Paulo. Don't miss it tonight -- it promises to be a great match.
I toured South America this week spending two days in Sao Paulo, one in Bogota and one in Buenos Aires. As you go through the region is inevitable to see the signs of the recent progress of Latin America. Pretty much in all of the three markets consumer purchases are going through the roof. The continued boom in commodity prices, of which the region is a champion in its production is keeping all of those economies running fast.
The same level of enthusiasm towards buying durable goods for the homes can be sensed in shopping malls around the region. It was as strong in Bogota's AlKosto as it is in Brasil's Casas Bahia. Seeing so many people raising their living standards and investing some of their income on technology purchases was very encouraging for me to see.
But at the same time that I was very happy to see end feel the economic progress I was sad to be sobered by the reality. In this case, the reality was brought to me by how much our infrastructure continues to lag. It was as evident in Guarilhos as it is in El Dorado. It was also evident on the huge delays I had to suffer in my way back, many of them quite avoidable. In short, the rapid economic growth is quickly absorbing the installed capacity and the new investments are very slow or inexistant.
It is critical that the region starts to take its future economic growth more seriously. The boom on commodities is not going to last forever and if the investments to keep Latin America competitive do not arrive everybody will suffer. Because at the end the way to adjust an uncompetitive economy without investing much is very simple: the currency devaluates really fast. And that is a way to erase the progress of the last few years quickly. We cannot afford to do this -- let's demand the infrastructure we need to grow.
Some images are so powerful that they don't require any explanation to get them, to feel them. I shot this on a flight from the US to Argentina last year. Please click on the photo to see its comments on its flickr page. I posted it a couple of hours ago and it already has a live discussion.
Javier Saracho is a young photographer that has an excellent photo stream in flickr. Javier was born in Spain but nowadays lives in the United States and travels through Latin America doing business for a technology company. If you go and visit Javier's photos you can find photo sets of some of the most beautiful places in Latin America and the United States. You can go and admire the majestic Iguazu Falls, the elegance of Buenos Aires or the Government Buildings and memorials of Washington D.C.
As a small token of what you can find in Javier's photostream, here are two magnificent shots of New York City. These pictures show just how powerful a well taken image can be even without color.
Freedom on a Steel Cage
This is a very powerul shot. Not only the elements in the picture are very stong, but Javier plays nicely with the illusiuon of having the Statue of Liberty trapped in a cage. Note that both the foreground as well as the background elements are very sharp.
Manhattan Bridge
On this second image Javier plays again very nicely with the foreground and background. Both elements are crisply defined and presented on high contrast B&W. The relatively peaceful nature of the bridge is joined by the vitality of a partial skyline of the city.
Click on any of the pictures to access its flickr page. Both have dozens of great comments, as they fully deserve.
After a 24 hour trip with three legs to get from northen Mexico to Buenos Aires I landed at Ezeiza International Airport this morning. I was not able to upgrade for the long haul flight between Miami and Buenos Aires. To top it all off I was in the second to last row of a packed 777. I was exhausted by the time I got there.
And my trip was not over, I still had to take a 2 hour flight from Buenos Aires to Salta, a very nice city in the north of Argentina. I had a lay over of close to four hours at Ezeiza, so I wanted to be productive online... now comes the story of how can we, by adding beurocracy on top of technology can screw up an infrastructure that can and should be up reliably 24 hours a day.
First, I was a bit trapped since my continuation flight was a domestic one. I couldn't just go to the Admiral's Club (which is in the International area) and get connected. The airport is set up for International flights and has a very small infrastructure for domestic flights, isolated from the rest of the gates. Despite this, wireless is available at a couple of coffee shops in the general area. I had a very string signal but the services provider there Arnet WiFi (owned by Telecom) would not give me an option to pay on a credit card or roam on an international SP. The only way to get it was to buy a prepaid access card. The prepaid access card was not available at any merchant in the general area, it was available only at a merchant inside the International departures area, an area that was off limits to me. So they have a footprint in the general area, but no merchant there?
But there was an Internet Cafe by Telecom too. The cafe was basically a somber place with a few phone booths and and several desktop PCs connected to the Internet. People attending the shop were very rude and seemed to be doing a favor to anybody who cared to ask. If anybody complained, they basically told you where the complaints book was with a defiant attitude. I asked them if I could get connected to the internet with my laptop. I received a very cold NO! and no explanation of why I cannot connect using my laptop there. This is of course another failure by Telecom that blew me away. How many people pass through Ezeiza with Laptops? Why should they assume that you will want to connect with one of the fairly old, Windows 95 desktops available there?
Anyway, the third attempt was to go out of the terminal to the closest Petrobras gas station. The gas station is about a couple of hundred meters from the terminal and the worse part is that the street there is not ready for pedestrians. You basically have to walk on the street with your bags to get there. But it was the place to get WiFi, so I would not stop just because it looked risky. I got to the Petrobras station and was told by the attendant that yes, WiFi was available. I got a chair at the convenience store, a coke and an alfajor (a local delicacy). I fired up my notebook and located the WiFi network. I was thrilled!
However, after about half an hour of trying I realized that while I was getting a signal, an IP address and everything looked normal, but things were wrong. My browser took a long time to try to connect to the service provider there and never manage to do that. After trying on and off again, I decided to work standalone, maybe to remember the good old times. Later on, a person approached me and asked me if I was connected wirelessly. I told him that I couldn't connect and that I had told the store manager that the net was not working. He told me that the net had been like that for two weeks!
I really don't get this. We make a good idea an awful reality. Have you been through connectivity hell too? Where and how? What do you think that can be done to improve connectivity at airports?
The Inquirer is poking fun at Intel's General Manager of Southern Cone, Esteban Galuzzi. Esteban said in a presentation at Argentina's Expocomm, that the PC Power on button is hard to find. The whole episode is hilarious.
Sometimes you end up saying things that you really didn't mean to say. The problem is when that happens under the limelight.
Floralis Generica is a beautiful sculpture located in United Nations Park in Buenos Aires. This Park is right next to the Recoleta district (actually across the street from the Recoleta flea market on weekends). It is next to the Law School.
Floralis Generic is a giant, 23 meter sculpture made of steel and aluminum (its weight is 18 tons). The structure of the flower is made of steel and the shiny panels in the petals are made of aluminum. The sculpture moves, closing its petals at night and opening them during the day. It has some lighting for special ocassions too.
The sculptue is the work of Argentinian architect Eduardo Catalano, who also was a Professor Emeritus at MIT.
Here are some pictures of Floralis Generica. Note on the third one that there is a bus in the background, so can get an idea of the size. Also, I wasn't there in the park at night, but you can see a beautiful image of the sculpture at night here in art.com .
Related Posts:
I took a good number of photos over the weekend in Buenos Aires. Argentina's capital has so many beautiful areas to look at that it going to take me a while to show them. Here is my first delivery: pictures of the working neigborhood of La Boca. La Boca is world famous for it soccer team, Boca Juniors and the colorful houses and stores in its street called Caminito (small road). Stay tuned for more deliveries this week. You can also look at this and many more pictures in my flickr Buenos Aires set. For the pictures below, pass your mouse over the picture for an explanation of the image.
Next delivery: the giant metal flower.
When Evo Morales announced last week that it was nationalizing the oil and gas assets of Bolivia, including all facilities from foreign companies, it sent waves of shock throughout the world. Beyond feeling like an action of the 1930’s, it was a clear resurrection of the spirit of blaming “the powers that be” for your own domestic problems and not assuming the responsibility yourself.
Superficially thinking, one might expect that Bolivia’s decision should have affected interest of American and European Oil companies, but it didn’t. The biggest hit was taken by Petrobras, the state-owned Brasilian oil company. Petrobras was the largest oil company operating in Bolivia and it had invested about $2B USD to extract Natural Gas from the Bolivian soil and to transport it by a large gasoduct all the way to the state of Sao Paulo, the heartland of the Brasilian industry. So all of the sudden, the most impacted are not the shareholders of an American oil company, but the taxpayers in Brasil, who collectively own Petrobras.
But the impact didn’t stop there and is likely to continue to go on for months, perhaps years into the future. Lula’s reaction to the decision of Bolivia was at first a very respectful and diplomatic one. Lula basically respected Bolivia’s sovereign decision and avoided taking a hard position on the issue despite the direct hit on Brasilian interests. Lula’s position was seen by the Brasilian public opinion as weak. However, as the story has been developing this feeling has only gotten worse and worse every day.
The most infuriating point is the very visible hand of Hugo Chavez behind Bolivia’s decision. Chavez has been ostensible visible in key points of the process, which of course has raised many concerns since he should not (at least in theory) be deciding on Bolivia sovereign issues. In a recent summit after the nationalization announcement (whose goal was to lower the tensions between the countries) the participants of the meeting in Puerto Iguazu were Lula, Kirchner, Evo Morales and... Hugo Chavez. One can easily understand the presence of the first three, since both Argentina and Brasil are heavy consumers of Bolivian Natural Gas. But Chavez? What does he has to do on this summit?. Is he just a friend of the other leaders or is he calling the shots behind Bolivia’s action? It is hard to understand him as a friendly participant on such a delicate subject affecting other nations.
Even if one subscribes to the argument that Chavez is just a friend of Morales, the presence of Chavez on key meetings is at least a very imprudent act of the Venezuelan leader. It does feed the theory of a black hand of Chavez behind the whole episode, it hurts Lula’s credibility on the issue and it doesn’t help at all to contribute to the always sensitive issue of Latin American integration. In summary: it hurts Latin America as a whole and we all should reject this.
Alexa is an organization who tracks traffic into the main websites in the world. The publish the website http://www.alexa.org who has information on many websites in the main languages represented on the Internet around the world. Going into its Spanish-speaking ratings offers a fascinating and sometimes surprising view of what works and what doesn’t on the Internet. Alexa is an Amazon.com company.
The listing of the top 100 Websites in Spanish can be accessed here: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang=es
Some of the interesting sites and their rankings on Spanish language are the following:
1- Google EspañaThe list goes on and on but I wanted to highlight some interesting surprises. First of all, outside of the search websites like Google (which is one of the most visited sites in pretty much any major language) most of the rest of the top sites are portals and newspapers. Newspapers around the world have seen a big transformation as circulation for the paper editions has been shrinking (especially in mature markets) but the trend is going to hit emerging markets as well. As more and more readers shift from the print edition into the Internet edition of major newspapers, basically two business models have emerged: free content supported by advertising and subscription-based access.
I think that Alexa shows us a great lesson with how major newspapers audiences have evolved. Sites that are open to the public and supported by advertising have very large audiences like El Mundo and El Clarín. In a stark contrast, newspapers which have closed most of their content to fee-based access are not enjoying the large audiences their advertising supported counterparts do. One very notable absence in the Top 100 Spanish sites of Alexa is Reforma.com. Reforma.com is the web version of one of the key newspapers in Mexico. Its website is very well designed and its content quality is quite high. Mexico is the largest Spanish speaking country in the world and Mexicans can account for around 120 Million people if you count the Mexican-American people living in the US (versus less than 40 Million people in Argentina and about 45 Million people in Spain). So where is Reforma? Reforma is not even in the Top 100 sites on the Spanish language!
Reforma and other major sites with closed content have done a very reasonable action to protect their business but are generally falling in the Internet based world. Why? If you look at the way the Web is used today, closed sites end up isolating themselves from most of the dialogue on the web. Among other things:
I certainly hope closed sites realize the isolation they are falling into and change their strategy. There are alternatives to the fully-open content philosophy: you can keep most of the regular news free (they are free on many websites, blogs and RSS feeds anyway) and only close access to premium content like special articles or research papers. In any case we do need more great content in Spanish en la red. The gold mine opportunity is there: Are the current Spanish players going to grab it or let anybody else come and get it?
I got into Buenos Aires yesterday morning. The day was beautiful with some clouds in a blue sky but mostly sunny and with a nice temperature. This is the start of the fall in the Southern Hemisphere. The days in Buenos Aires become a bit chilly from now on, but yesterday was still very pleasant.
Since it was a sunday, I got sometime to go sightseeing with a small group. We strolled through the different Plazas, including Plaza de Mayo. We went to spend sometime in San Telmo, an area very close to downtown and one of the spots you cannot miss when you are in BsAs. On sundays its cobblestone streets are closed to the traffic and you can walk though the flea market in the streets or visit the many antiques shops or cofeee bars in its different streets. While your walk though the street market you will hear the Bandoneon, the type of accordion they use to play Tango. On several spots you will see street performers dancing Tango in front of rather large audiences of tourists and locals. You can also walk into one of the old houses of the neigborhood, now repurposed as little shopping malls within their large spanish patios.
We also went to walk in Recoleta. Recoleta has a younger crowd than San Telmo, many of them sitting along the slopes of its plazas. You will notice that the majority of them are sipping Mate (a very popular type of tea) as they listen to street performers dancing, singing or just playing street comediants. The atmosphere is very pleasant as people go through the afternoon in the City. Recoleta also hosts a rather large fle market where you can find anything from clothes to jewelry to fine crafts.
We ended up the tour passing through Palermo Chico and just barely going outside of the Rosedal (this is a beautiful park filled with many different types of Roses). We also passed through the local 5th Avenue, Alvear street, as we had to go back to our hotel. Later on were were treated to very nice Argentine wines and a wonderful dinner at a local museum. The whole tour (except for the dinner) was planned and executed by Friendlyvisit. They did an awesome job to provide a city tour that was highly customized to our time and interests. They also were very knowledgeable about the culture of the city and the history of its different boroughs. They got us safely and pleasantly thorugh the different car and walking trips. They are very highly recommended, you can find them in english at: http://www.friendlyvisit.com/Eng/Home.asp .
More details on dinner and the museum visit coming later.
