Sketching Argentina: In search of symbols in Buenos Aires

“There are patterns which emerge in one’s life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme.”

― Jacqueline Carey

Earlier this summer, when I first decided to spend some time in Buenos Aires, I did what I always love to do on the brink of visiting a new place: I went to Google Images, typed in the name of the neighborhood I was thinking of staying in—San Telmo—and glanced through the results, giving myself a swift glimpse of what was to come.

Not surprisingly, there were countless photos of couples dancing the tango, often outdoors on a cobblestoned street. There were just as many photos of a certain bar with dark green awnings over its windows—the Plaza Dorrego Bar, which would become one of my favorite haunts in Buenos Aires. And other photos showed the Sunday fair in San Telmo, of markets and street musicians, and a mural bearing the neighborhood’s name.

But none of these was the photo that got my heart racing this summer, the one that made me sit up a little straighter at my desk. No, that photo showed something far more unexpected for Buenos Aires. In a collage of images from Wikipedia—which showed tango dancers and the Sunday fair in San Telmo, of course—there also was the photo of a Russian Orthodox cathedral. It had five sky blue onion domes, topped with golden Orthodox crosses and raised golden stars encircling each dome.

My eyes widened at the image, feeling as though it were just the confirmation I needed in that moment:

This was a journey I was meant to take.

*   *   *

This summer wasn’t the first time Google had got my heart racing about a place I was soon to visit.

Eight summers ago—just as I’d graduated from college and was on the brink of moving to London with two dear friends, Kim and Emily—we decided to spend ten days in Scandinavia before arriving in London. We would start in Stockholm, and as Emily had a friend in Helsinki, travel from Sweden to Finland. And then, the idea was put forth, why not a jaunt to St. Petersburg?

Russia, it turned out for us, was not the kind of place you “jaunt” to at a moment’s notice. The visa process seemed daunting, as did the thought of mailing our passports away weeks before our departure.

But then Kim called me one night and asked: “Candace, what about Estonia instead?”

Estonia. That was a new one for me.

With Kim still on the line, I opened my laptop, went to Google Images, and searched for Tallinn, the country’s capital. Again, one of the first images that appeared showed a Russian Orthodox church—the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral—and again, the church had five onion domes topped by golden crosses, only this time the domes were black.

There was just something about the domes that spoke to me once we were in Tallinn, something about their symmetry and shape. They were evocative; they drew me in; they spoke of the difference we’d sought to experience in Russia—and so much more.

*   *   *

Despite how fast my heart began to race this summer—after glimpsing that first photo of the Catedral Ortodoxa Rusa in Buenos Aires—knowledge of the cathedral faded from my mind as the journey grew closer, replaced by my efforts to find an apartment, sign up for Spanish classes, and deal with the thousand other details that can surround a season of life change.

When I finally landed in Buenos Aires, the first thing I did was take a nap—a five-hour nap, to be truly honest with you. I felt lost in a fog of jetlag and disorientation; although I had arrived, my mind was still in transit.

On my second day in the city, I didn’t leave the house until that evening. It was dusk, the world was swiftly darkening, and as I was still unfamiliar with Buenos Aires, I figured it was safest to stay close to my apartment. I remembered my taxi driver passing a nearby park the day before and made that my destination.

I entered the park—Lezama Park in San Telmo—at the corner where a monument to Spanish conquistador Pedro de Mendoza watches over the walkway. I turned right first, wandering down a path lined with palm trees and listening to couples talk side-by-side on concrete benches. Then I turned around, passed the monument again, and went left, thinking I’d do one more loop of the park before returning home.

And it was then, about halfway down the path, that I looked up through the branches of a jacaranda tree and was suddenly stopped in my tracks. There, a mere two blocks away from my new apartment, were five sky blue onion domes that I’d completely forgotten about, with the same golden stars scattered across their surface as I’d seen in the photo on Google.

How, in a city as large as Buenos Aires, was such a coincidence possible? I asked myself, as I held my cell phone up to take a grainy photo of the cathedral.

I walked home that night shaking my head in disbelief, feeling the fog that had surrounded me begin to lift—and I walked back to the park two weeks later, on my last full day in Buenos Aires. This time, I brought more than just my phone to document the cathedral with; this time, I brought my sketchbook.

For four hours on a sun-drenched Sunday morning, I sat cross-legged on a brick wall enclosing the park, stared up at the star-studded domes, and felt a rare sense of flow as I sketched their evocative shape—first with pencil; then with pen; and finally with paintbrushes soaked in sky blue paint. It seemed like no accident that, eight years after my first journey into the world, onion domes had somehow found me again, at the start of another new journey and mere steps from my temporary home in the city.

There was much that my time in Buenos Aires taught me. It reminded me of how important it is to be patient with ourselves in transition—and that it’s okay if we don’t always hit the ground running in a new place or phase of life. I was reminded that it can take time to feel a sense of flow and faith in our journey, just as feeling a sense of flow while sketching is a gift, not a guarantee.

Most of all, it taught me to keep looking for patterns, for the symbols and motifs that recur in our lives—so often in just the right place, and at just the right time.

*   *   *