Thomas Locke Hobbs

Hi! Thanks for visiting. I'm an American photographer living in Buenos Aires. These are photos from the blog I kept on my site from 2003 to 2009. I now have redesigned the home page to just show a portfolio of my current work. I also blog at BuenosAiresPhotographer.com where I post my baires snapshots.

Gualeguaychu - Carnaval of the Praire

Less than a day after arriving my friend German invites me on this group excursion to see the Carnaval in Gualeguaychu [wally why CHOO]. A small city 3 hours upriver from Buenos Aires, Gualeguaychu hosts Argentina's biggest Carnaval celebration. While that's a bit like saying they have the biggest 4th of July Parade in Canada, I've never done Carnaval in Brazil and our seats were great.

The official, Catholic Carnaval was over a month ago but enterprising town leaders have made the so-called Carnaval del Pais last all summer long with parades in the Corsodromo [aka Sambadromo] every Saturday night in January and February. Gualeguaychu sits on the Uruguay river, on the border, and attracts a provincial, summer crowd of young people that gives it a bit of a spring break feeling. The parade takes place in the town's old rail yard and is surrounded by grain elevators. It was a muggy, summer night and I felt I could've been in Kansas or Texas.

You can see it's a big event with 30,000+ people and great costumes.

The big controversy of the last several years has been the construction of a paper mill on the other side of the river in the Uruguayan town of Fray Bentos. This has been an ongoing spat between Argentina and Uruguay and the Gualeguaychu is filled, still, with anti-Papelera propaganda despite the eventual construction of the plant.

I was just tagging along with my friend German as there was an extra-space in the mini-bus. Here i'm sitting with Omi, one of the organizers, while wearing Gustavo's glitter hat.

And here's Gustavo. We were a very animated groupd.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Hi. I'm a 33 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. Currently I'm posting most of my pictures on BuenosAiresPhotographer.com. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures.