Chris´ stag night was fun last night, although I felt a little fuzzy when I awoke this morning — and the fact that it was pouring with rain outside and there was no water in the hotel due to a burst water main didn´t help start the day too well either. However, watching the incredible Manchester United v Roma Champions League game in bed improved things somewhat.

After brunch with Nan this afternoon I took a private tango lesson in San Telmo. It was fun; I had a good and patient teacher who helped to break all the steps down into relatively simple components. It still requires a lot of concentration, though, and it´s difficult to remember what to do next and keep in time to the music simultaneously.

Chris & Martina´s civil wedding took place yesterday at the Registro Civil here in Buenos Aires, and it was a surprisingly funny and light-hearted event for a legal ceremony — both the registrar and translator were cracking jokes throughout, and there was a lot of laughter in addition to the formal parts of the ceremony.

Afterwards we went to a reception at Martina´s mother´s apartment in Recoleta, which was also very nice — we drank champagne and ate cake.

Afterwards I took a power nap before heading out for dinner in Palermo Viejo with some British and Argentinean wedding guests, followed by a trip to another tango place. The dancing was great to watch, but it was all a bit too serious and intimidating for a complete novice like me to try.

Tonight, in a somewhat belated and unorthodox fashion, we are having a stag night (bachelor party) for Chris.

The Velez vs Boca Juniors game on Saturday was great — it was a beautiful sunny day, and the Velez home crowd were in great chanting form before the match, singing songs and waving around inflated blue bags that were thrown liberally into the stands.

But even though we were seated with the home team´s fans, the legendary Boca supporters — Jugador (player) No. 12 — drowned out the Velez fans with their drums, trumpets, trombones and voices, and continued to produce a constant wall of sound throughout the entire game.

The home team´s mood fell early on when Boca scored an easy goal less than 3 minutes into the game, and their mood hit rock bottom after a terrible and humiliating error by a defender, who was robbed of the ball by a Boca player.

The star player on the Boca team was No. 10, Riquelme. He didn´t score any goals, but was always good to watch.

Velez did manage to rally a little, and had a few chances, but ultimately Boca´s victory was a foregone conclusion — the final score was 3-1.

It´s Sunday lunchtime here in Buenos Aires, and I´m writing this from the guest Internet terminal at the Art Hotel (a useful facility, although somewhat harder to use than it should be because the letters have been worn off many of the keys on the keyboard!).

Since my last post, I´ve had a leather jacket made to order, taken a tango class at the Cafe Tortoni (apparently the oldest coffee shop in Argentina), danced extremely badly at a tango club, hung out with many of Chris & Martina´s friends in and around Buenos Aires, changed hotels, been for a swim in a private pool, played soccer, eaten a large amount of good beef and drunk a lot of good red wine.

In a few hours we´re going to a football match — Boca Juniors vs. Vélez Sarsfield. I´m very excited about it, because Nan & I had a great time watching River vs. Colon last time we were here. Chris is a little more apprehensive, however, since the last time he went to a Boca Juniors game, he was tear-gassed by the Argentinean police!

Speaking of tear gas, there´s some concern that Chris & Martina´s civil wedding might be disrupted tomorrow by a teachers´ strike, which may escalate into a general strike in response to the police killing a teacher protesting about pay and conditions last week; apparently Police fired tear gas into the crowd of protestors, and he was killed when he was hit in the head by the cannister.

I´ve only been in Buenos Aires for a little over 24 hours, but already quite a lot has happened.

When I arrived yesterday, tired and dishevelled after an 11 hour flight from New York and a struggle to get any Argentinean currency at the airport (all the ATMs were empty, so I had to get a credit card advance), the Astoria Hotel on Avenida de Mayo, that I´d made a telephone reservation with a week earlier, told me that not only did they not have my reservation, but that they were completely full because of the forthcoming Easter holidays! Fortunately I was able to find a room for at least 2 nights across the street in the Novel Hotel.

Yesterday I met my soon-to-be-married friends Chris & Martina for lunch, then went shopping on my own on Avenida Florida for a leather jacket. I eventually found a place that would make a jacket to my exact specifications — I´m going to pick it up later today. I also bought some new trainers, and watched and videoed some buskers doing tango outside a C&A store.

In the evening Chris, Martina & I had dinner with some Argentinean friends of Martina´s, then went to a bar in the Palermo Viejo neighbourhood (where Nan and I stayed when we were here in 2004).

Nan´s arrival today was quite dramatic; I was having breakfast at a sidewalk cafe next door to our hotel when she arrived, so she joined me with all her luggage and ordered some food. After a while, a short stocky guy approached us and started asking for directions; I said “no hablo espanol” and Nan (who, conveniently, is Head of Spanish at a comprehensive school in Sheffield!) said that she didn´t know where it was. But the guy seemed strangely reluctant to leave, and then another guy appeared and also asked directions — it was a bit odd, and after they left Nan immediately noticed that her handbag had gone. I ran around the corner to see the guy who had asked directions walking away in the distance, but he didn´t have her bag with him.

However, across the street, Nan´s handbag was unattended on the corner of the street — it later transpired that one of the waiters at the cafe had seen the theft, shouted and given chase to the guy who had snatched the bag. The thief dropped the bag in order to make his getaway, but we could see from across the street that it had been opened.

Nan was worried that her passport would have been taken, but when the waiter returned with the bag, we were relieved to discover that nothing whatsoever was missing! Thanks to the quick thinking and response of the waiters, a major inconvenience had been avoided; they told us that the thieves were Peruvians, and were presumably familiar with their methods. Needless to say, we were very grateful to the waiters, and I left them a very big tip!

I´m back in Buenos Aires again, for the first time since 2004, for the forthcoming wedding of Chris & Martina. It´s hot and sunny, and it feels great to be back!

CJH Digital Collections was launched today, an online multimedia digital library from the five partners that make up the Center for Jewish History.

This is something of a milestone for me, since I’ve been working on it since I started with the Center for Jewish History almost two years ago; in addition to setting up and directing the Gruss Lipper Digital Lab, which generated most of the content within Digital Collections, I have also led the implementation of the digital repository and delivery system, based on Ex Libris’ DigiTool digital asset management system.

This kind of digital library is never “finished,” of course, but I’m pretty happy with what’s been achieved to date, and we’ll be continuing to add more content and improve the functionality and usability of the system. Check it out at digital.cjh.org.

I’ve been a bit remiss about posting blog entries recently, but I wanted to write something about my recent vacation in northern California at the beginning of the month (I’ll try to add some pics later).

It was great to see old friends in the San Francisco Bay Area — especially as New York was experiencing a brutal cold snap when I left, yet I was enjoying leisurely breakfasts al fresco on the sidewalks of Cole Valley (near Upper Haight) in warm Spring sunshine in San Francisco!

Although I was on vacation, I also went to half of a Library of Congress event on users and uses of bibliographic data held at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, since I had plans to meet friends and former co-workers from RLG — located across the street in Mountain View — for a drink that evening anyway.

The Googleplex is massive — they took over Silicon Graphics’ old HQ, plus a lot of other adjacent properties — and is still growing. But apart from the refrigerators of free Odwalla drinks and computer programming tips pasted above the urinals, it was much like any other corporate office environment. In the end we persuaded quite a few folks from the meeting to join us for a beverage in the bucolic setting of Michael’s at Shoreline.

After a few days’ in the Bay Area, my ex-girlfriend Jessica & I drove up to north Lake Tahoe to join some friends for a long snowboarding weekend. We were blessed with light traffic on the way up and beautiful, warm spring skiing conditions that lasted for the entire 4 days I was there. We rode at Alpine Meadows for the first two days, Northstar on the third day and Sugarbowl on the way home — and every day was great. I even managed to get a bit of a tan!

The cabin was a lot of fun too; great crowd of people, big communal dinners, copious beer and margheritas, a ping-pong table and assorted games around the log fire.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, one of the five Partner organizations that make up the Center for Jewish History where I work, has been in the news all over the World today, because they finally released the Otto Frank papers for public viewing. It’s kind of a big deal — it even made the front page of today’s New York Times: In Old Files, Fading Hopes of Anne Frank’s Family.

These papers were accidentally discovered in YIVO archives’ off-site storage facility in New Jersey in 2005, but it took until yesterday to clear the copyright and ownership issues sufficiently for the papers to be released.

By bizarre coincidence, there’s an article in today’s New York Times about a couple that took a sleep study together on the same night I did my study: “Fighting Snoring, and Its Dangers, Together.”

They weren’t in the same sleep study centre I was, though.