That time I took all the buses in Buenos Aires in order to write a book about taking all the buses in Buenos Aires

That time I took all the buses in Buenos Aires in order to write a book about taking all the buses in Buenos Aires Daniel Tunnard (bio) Taking all the buses of Buenos Aires, a writer on a mission makes the city his own. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo of bus route in Buenos Aires by Carolina Jaramillo / Stock.adobe.com Around 2008 I made the unlikely decision to take all 140-ish bus lines in the city of Buenos Aires and write a book about it, after devouring A. J. Jacobs's book about reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and seeking a marathon project of my own. I had been gazing at the map of Buenos Aires on our kitchen door and contemplating how little I still knew of the city after ten years here. It is standard for the long-term expat to get to know two or three areas of their adopted city and draw a blank on the rest. I didn't want to be that guy. I took it upon myself to take all the buses in the city. I took the 1 and the 2. The 3 doesn't exist anymore. I took the 4, the 5, the 6. I spent half an hour waiting at a bus stop in the back of beyond waiting for the 7. It was cold. It was boring. My best friend's first son was born, and I wondered where my life had taken this turn. I gave up. I wrote a novel about a man trying to write a screenplay for a Freddie Mercury biopic who finds Brian May hiding in his cupboard (Freddiementary, still mysteriously unpublished). Clarín newspaper asked me to write an unpaid article for them as a foreigner living in Buenos Aires. I took the opportunity to promote my unpublishable novel and mentioned—only in passing, just one line—that I had once attempted to take all the buses in Buenos Aires. They titled the piece "The Englishman who tried to take all the buses in Buenos Aires." This, apparently, is how journalism works. Three radio stations interviewed me excitedly about this nonstory. [End Page 49] My wife, grimly aware of the economic limitations of my writing, suggested I put Freddie in the cupboard and do something useful, like taking all the buses in Buenos Aires. So I did. It took me seven months. The excitement of much of the media at the prospect of an Englishman attempting to take all the buses in Buenos Aires always baffled me. It took me some years to work out that it was a combination of their concept of Englishmen—1920s, stiff and umbrella-ed, five o'clock tea-drinking—and their concept of their own buses, more chaotic and dangerous and overcrowded in their minds than in reality. Add to that the oddity that the buses of Buenos Aires occupy a special place in the locals' (porteños) imagination of what makes them who they are. Sure, a porteño will list food, music, and football among the things that make them who they are, but the colectivos frequently sneak onto the end of that list. A lot of the buses are individually decorated by their drivers—teddy bear collections, amusing signs in the way that car stickers are considered amusing, an excess of Playboy memorabilia. Many are painstakingly decorated on the exterior in the Thleteado porteño style, those swirly colorful lines you might associate with La Boca, often painted by the driver himself, one hand holding his mate while he sorts out your change in one of those change machines, holding on to the wheel with his knee, chatting up the woman in the front seat. Such color is disappearing today as the buses edge toward the uniformity of other cities, but there was still some of it left in 2011, and, most importantly, there was a lot of it in the local popular imagination. Porteños would stop me in the street and empty their popular imaginations into my brain, telling me stories about how the driver used to drive the bus and give you your ticket. And how...