The Paris of South America, part 1

                                     Perú con Belgrano, Buenos Aires.

    "San Telmo, it's so much like Paris, isn't it?" the British traveler said. Not only the architecture, the avenue-facing apartments with balconies and wooden shutters, the towering monuments in between eight-lane highways.  Also, the weeknight gatherings at 1 a.m. shrouded in cigarette smoke, the street life. And its general attitude of irreverence. Indeed, the city was modeled in the Parisian style to establish that it was not a Spanish colony, the Australian said, who then went on to talk about red and white spiders smaller than his cupped palm that'll kill you in the outback. "You don't have a chance."
    These kinds of non-sequiter conversations among people from far-flung places are pretty normal at a hostel in San Telmo. There are lots of artisans and musicians here, street art, graffiti, people like the Brit and her fiancee, traveling around the globe.
    I notice peripherally on the short walk over from my apartment that there are more people meandering on the street than usual. "This happens every summer," my friend, who I've forced to accompany me the four-block walk home, says. "They let people out of the prisons like this." An annual purge. I've never heard of this or read about it. Like so much of what is rumored here, it could easily be true.