The side “walks” of buenos aires

The smooth flagstone tile sidewalks of Buenos Aires are a serious hip-breaking threat when it rains.  They turn snot-slick and if your shoes have little traction, you might as well be practicing your triple lutzes, because you are for all intents and purposes skating.  Recently, I wore my flip flops to take my nieces to school.  (It wasn’t raining when I stepped outside.) When we got off the bus to walk the remaining two blocks to their school, a steady rain was falling.  I swallowed back a lump of fear.  My flip flops…they are deadly when coupled with wet paving tiles.  In rainy conditions they actually create a cushion of water so that no matter how firmly I plant my foot, my leg will skitter one way or the other, shooting out from under me…hydroplaning flip flops.  I had to walk like a 90 year old man (yes, you may now insert your not-so-clever-oh-so-predictable-age-related joke here), taking choppy little steps as the girls skipped along ahead of me in sturdy-soled, well-tractioned shoes.  They got a hell of a kick out of my frequent “oh shit!” and “whoa!” cries, my flailing arms and my panic-stricken face as I slipped on every other tile.   A three minute walk took seven, and robbed me of at least a couple years of life.
This city should be ashamed of their sidewalks.  I’ve seen better ones in tiny Bolivian towns, one-burro villages….Hell, in ghost towns.  Here, for some logic-defying reason, they’ve seen fit to pave all of their sidewalks with several different varieties of tile; long, nearly polished granity things that are to be dreaded when wet, little corrugated squares that pop loose of the mortar about 2 days after being set, creating jumbled landscapes of what look like blank scrabble pieces, and then there’s the crosshatched paving stone that seems to break and crumble after little use, creating vast diveted crater lands…if you hit a solid 5 meter stretch of sidewalk in this city, it’s like nirvana, you find yourself tempted to just pace those 5 meters, back and forth.  Forever.  Who needs to actually get anywhere?
There’s one tile that seems, at first, to work.  It’s nicely textured for a good “no slip grip”, and it remains whole, nary a fracture to be seen.  It even seems to be well and firmly set into the earth.  But no.  These tiles are actually “floaters”.   Water trickles in between the cracks and underneath many of the tiles it forms little pools of rancid, dog-shit tainted, grime-infused water.
Woe upon he/she that doth step upon such a slab whilst wearing of the sandal or the flipper of the flopper.  The weight of your foot forces the nasty liquid up through the cracks between stones at jet speed, splorting (that’s the only word that adequately describes the sensation, the process, the event) your exposed toes, feet, calves, etc with a viscous, brown spray of effluence.  The feeling is decidedly unpleasant.  And because they look like solid slabs, you never know where the next “floater” will be.  It’s a veritable mine field.  After or during a good rain, you see dozens of splort-shy pedestrians cringing as they take step after tentative step.
Construction crews are in constant warfare with sidewalks here, hammering, spiking, and carving into them seemingly at random to get at gas, water, and electric lines.  Many times, when their work is done, they don’t even bother to replace the tiles, they just pack some sand or dirt down, or maybe the remnants of the tiles they shattered in their work.  As a result, every single sidewalk in the city has more scars than frankenstein’s face, and are in about the same sorry shape.
Then there’s the dog shit dilemma.  Canines here seem to be trained to drop a deuce smack dab in the most trafficked parts of a sidewalk.  The horizon of a pedestrian’s path is dotted with little tan, brown, black, off-green, and almost-orange piles of fecal matter.  Granted, there’s less of it here than there used to be.  Poop-bagging seems to be catching on here slowly.  But it is still not a good idea to lift your eyes off the sidewalk for too long or you’ll be “that” person in the café, bar, restaurant, movie theatre who emits that gaggingly ripe dog crap odor.  I’ve probably only seen about 10% of this city’s architecture just because I’m scared sh…well you know…of stepping in a big squishy clump.
Zelda, my youngest niece, has a very rich imagination and spends the greater part of every day with “her head in the clouds”.  Walking down a sidewalk with her is ever-stressful.  She unerringly swerves and sways toward every pile of dog crap.  It’s a small miracle that her shoes aren’t caked in the stuff.   I feel like a puppet master as I yank her arms first this way and that, pulling, pushing, hefting, and lifting her over little stinky dangers.
If you are aged, infirm, have any motor-related disabilities, poor eyesight, bad knees, hips, ankles or back, or actually anything short of a highly tuned athlete’s balance and musculature or if you have a skateboard, rollerblades, bicycle, wheelchair, or, for that matter, any vehicle short of a dune buggy…you’d almost be safer walking down the middle Buenos Aires’ avenues at full rush hour than braving the crumbling, jumbled, dogshit and “floater” mined wilds of her sidewalks.