In Buenos Aires, where I can never sleep well and wake up in the morning to the hot and humid weather, I take to the streets hoping to find a cool corner. I search for a secluded corner in the shady streets of the Palermo neighborhood where I am staying. I dream that maybe I will find a café or a bar that I haven't discovered in the neighborhood I've been wandering for days, and I'll crouch in the corner, work a little and watch Argentinian people. As I take 2 steps, I’m already starting to sweat. I decide that someone should tell the Argentinians that the weather in Buenos Aires, which means "good weather," is not that nice in summer.As I eat my empanada, the South American pastry, at the buffet I go to every morning, I think about my first visit to the city. Why do I love this city so much? In fact, considering the misfortunes that befell me from the very first minute, Baires, as the locals abbreviate it, could even be considered inauspicious for me. However, this city, which sometimes gives the impression that time stopped there 20-30 years ago, made me feel good every day I was there, and quickly became my favorite city on the continent.<img src="https://images.aposto.com/2022/7/2/1660032695678.jpeg" style="display: block; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: center; width: 100%; max-width: 550px; border-style: none; position: relative; cursor: pointer; padding: 0px 1px; box-sizing: border-box;" width="550" ratio="1.34" fr-original-style="display: block; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: center; width: 100%; max-width: 550px;" fr-original-class="fr-draggable">In the streets of Baires, the wall of the house where Borges spent his childhood<hr fr-original-style="" style="height: 0px; overflow: visible; border-bottom: none; clear: both; user-select: none; break-after: page; box-sizing: border-box;">Why is Buenos Aires so beloved?Is it the Mediterraneanness brought by Italian immigrants who flooded the city in the early 1900s, is it the nostalgic feel, or my good friends who live here? This city makes me dream of retiring as an urban elderly who moves slowly in the streets, wakes up late in the mornings, reads newspapers, and sips wine in cafés in the afternoons. I wouldn’t miss musicals or plays, and wouldn’t eat before 9 pm.After the thoughts pass through my head like lightning, I remember getting lost and drifting through the streets that inspired a genius like Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges&nbsp;Acevedo. I visualize spending a day following his footsteps, discovering his childhood home a few blocks away, walking up and down the street trying to step on the same places he did. Then the rain starts, and I walk through the majestic buildings on the city's wide Libertador Avenue and arrive at the National Library.I want both to escape the rain and to enter the library where Borges was once the director and breathe in its air. As soon as I enter through the door, the curious gaze of the attendant turns to me. My broken Spanish meets his broken English. We get along.When I turn my head, I realize I hit the jackpot: Borges' handwritten texts are on display in the exhibition hall. I rush to the elevator and enter the exhibition hall, a little wet and a little sweaty. The air conditioner is blaring, I feel cold.I approach the glass cases: long A4 pages are written in Spanish. My eyes are not on the texts. I get excited when I see the familiar signature just below the texts. It's as if I'm seeing a rare creature I've been watching in documentaries for years. It is as if Borges, in whose labyrinths I have gotten lost, in whose pampas I have wandered, is in front of me.<img src="https://images.aposto.com/2022/7/2/1660032880091.jpeg" style="display: block; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: center; width: 100%; max-width: 550px; border-style: none; position: relative; cursor: pointer; padding: 0px 1px; box-sizing: border-box;" width="550" ratio="1.34" fr-original-style="display: block; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: center; width: 100%; max-width: 550px;" fr-original-class="fr-draggable">Kerimcan in front of Borges' house<hr fr-original-style="" style="height: 0px; overflow: visible; border-bottom: none; clear: both; user-select: none; break-after: page; box-sizing: border-box;">Where is the childhood home of Borges?As I eat my empanada, I feel as if I am reliving this wonderful day. Despite the heat, a thrill runs through me. I finish my last bite and decide to go back to the beginning of this route, to the house where Borges spent his childhood. As I walk through the streets of Palermo like a preying lion, I move quickly toward a single target without caring about anything else around. I arrive at the same street I arrived on exactly 2 years ago. The street is the same, the address is the same.I walk up and down about 3-4 times from the spot where the old two-story red brick house should be. But the house I know so well is nowhere in sight. "Have I come to a parallel street?" I wonder, and then I remember that the name of the street is Borges. "There must be a mistake," I say, and go back home.A few hours later, I turn on the computer and start checking the address on Google. I can't believe my eyes about 15 minutes later when I see that the building was demolished shortly after my visit and a modern apartment building was built in its place.<img src="https://images.aposto.com/2022/7/2/1660032904742.jpeg" style="display: block; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: center; width: 100%; max-width: 550px; border-style: none; position: relative; cursor: pointer; padding: 0px 1px; box-sizing: border-box;" width="550" ratio="1.52" fr-original-style="display: block; vertical-align: top; margin: 5px auto; text-align: center; width: 100%; max-width: 550px;" fr-original-class="fr-draggable">🕵️ After the Google search<hr fr-original-style="" style="height: 0px; overflow: visible; border-bottom: none; clear: both; user-select: none; break-after: page; box-sizing: border-box;">I feel like I have lost one of the pieces of my connection with the city. It hurts me that the home of the man who took me away from the world and took me to other places with his words no longer exists. Maybe I can't digest the fact that the destructiveness of the world is confronting me in one of my favorite cities. It annoys me that the rapid transformation I experienced in Istanbul is repeated on the other side of the world. Maybe I am not ready for the destruction of my hopes for change.I think about the fact that the legacy of this man who whipped me up with the exquisite paragraph he wrote at the beginning of his&nbsp;Atlas describing his travels is not being taken care of. I decide to leave the house and go to El Ateneo Grand Splendid, the most beautiful bookstore in the world, where I always feel good. I wander around the shelves of El Ataneo, which resembles Borges' description of paradise consisting of a giant library, and collect a few books. Then I sit on one of the wooden chairs of the café that used to be a theater stage.I try to calm my nerves by immersing myself in books about Patagonia, the southernmost part of South America. Despite everything, the beauty of discovery haunts me. One progresses as one discovers not only the beautiful but also the wrong. "Maybe Borges made me realize this today," I think - the lines Borges wrote in Atlas come to mind:<blockquote fr-original-style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); border-color: rgb(255, 206, 20); border-width: 4px; font-style: italic; padding-left: 10px;" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); border-color: rgb(255, 206, 20); border-width: 4px; font-style: italic; padding-left: 10px; margin: 0px 0px 1em; border-left-style: solid; box-sizing: border-box;">“To discover the unknown is not a prerogative of Sinbad, of Eric the Red, or of Copernicus. Each and every man is a discoverer. He begins by discovering bitterness, saltiness, concavity, smoothness, harshness, the seven colours of the rainbow and the twenty-some letters of the alphabet; he goes on to visages, maps, animals and stars. He ends with doubt, or with faith, and the almost total certainty of his own ignorance.”</blockquote>

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Ace ile ilgili hikayeler