Adios Buenos Aires

After a month and a half in Buenos Aires (Bs.As.), it's almost time for us to move on. Our next stop is Patagonia to see the glaciers and to do some trekking, and then off to Bolivia. Needless to stay, we've decided to extend our trip, yet again, until the May(ish) time frame.

Buenos Aires has been great for us. We've met some wonderful people, had some great Spanish teachers, visited practically all the tourist areas of the city (and branched out a little today to Plaza Once but didn't find it very interesting), had our friend Betty visit for a week, been able to “play house” in our temporary apartment, and seen a "real" futbol (soccer in Spanish) game. I think the biggest challenge for us, or at least for me, is trying to pack 8-months of our lives into two measly bags.

Although Buenos Aires did feel a bit like home for us, there have also been enough differences to realize this is not home. I've come up with a list of things I will miss and not miss about Buenos Aires to help illustrate why this can (and doesn't) feel like home.

Ten things I will miss about Buenos Aires:

1) Chori-pan. Where will I ever find something as simple and delicious as Chori-pan in the states or in Bolivia, our next stop?


2) The plethora of flats in all the stores for less than $50.

3) Homemade pasta. Although we are both pretty tired of the lack of variety in the Argentinian food selection, I'm sure we will crave the homemade pasta, which is readily available at every corner in Buenos Aires.

4) Empanadas. Although Wilson did get food poisoning after eating some empanadas I made during a cooking class, I think we'll both miss it (especially the Argentinian ones)!


5) Plentiful cabs in the streets, unlike SF. We are always able to get a cab in less than 5 minutes.

6) Public transportation. I have to say the subway and bus systems have been great.

7) Our bidet. One day we will buy a Japanese toilet with an in-toilet bidet.

8) Our new friends and teachers.
9) Coffee. Must say, after Europe, Buenos Aires has some of the best coffee.

10) Delivery services. You can find everything delivered here, including coffee in a glass, pizza and pasta, and ice cream (yes, ice cream!). We even got 2 kilos delivered, by accident. I think we'll have to throw an ice cream party to get rid of it all.

Five things (yep, just 5) I am happy to leave in Buenos Aires:


1) All the mierda de perros (dog poop) in the sidewalks and streets. I guarantee you will find shit on every block. It's disgusting, and at night and when it rains, it's even worse because you won't find out it's there until after you step in it.

2) Sidewalks with unmarked areas of wet cement. You only find out it's wet after you step in it. And marked areas with wet cement never give you an alternate route to walk. You are stuck walking in the street.

3) The awful bus and car pollution in the streets. We get surprises in the evening when we blow our noses (our friend Betty did too).

4) Dripping air conditioners. Nearly every time I walk in the street, something drips on me. The first couple times, I thought it was drizzle from the sky. I quickly found out the drips were from the air conditioning systems – great way to cool off!

5) Hang drying. Our apartment didn't include a dryer so we've spent hours, ok just minutes, hang drying. Although I know this is more green, we much prefer our dryers.

Buenos Aires

First Impresssions II

Life in Buenos Aires has been good to us so far. It's a architecturally charming city with lots of good bars and cheap food. As is well known, Argentinians love there beef, with every man woman and child eating an average of just under 150 lbs of beef a year. Right now, we're actually thinking that perhaps they consume so much beef because there's not that else to eat. Literally every other restaurant in Buenos Aires is barbecue and pasta house. You can certainly get other food, but the variety isn't quite what we expected for what is considered such an international city. During their characteristically long and very late lunches, it's not uncommon to see a family surrounding a platter piled eight inches high with ribs, steak, sausages and offal and they're devouring it like they're auditioning for something out of dawn of the dead. That said, if you do like steak, it is very good and cheap here.

As we mentioned before, people all eat very late in Buenos Aires. We originally thought this was the habit of the clubbing set, but in fact, everyone eats late. On a Friday night, a restaurants seem to be at their busiest between eleven and one in the morning, and they'll be filled with old and young alike, including senior citizens with walkers and toddlers along for a family dinner. Not surprisingly, the bars and clubs pick up well after what we're acustomed to. We seem to repeat the same experience in every city, showing up at a club and one-thirty in the morning and staring across the table at each other since we're the only ones there. No one goes dancing before 2:30 here (except us). I think we seem like party poopers when we retire at 4:30 in the morning but we just explain that we're just an old married couple.

I'm not sure how much of the population here goes out so late but we have a hard time reconciling their late night partying with a normal work or school schedule. Perhaps that's why their economy has been a wreck for so long.

One annoying facet of living in Buenos Aires right now is a shortage of coins. While the government has reportedly minted more coins this year than ever before, they are still in short supply. The problem is that everyone needs coins to ride the bus and there just aren't enough to go around. This lack of coins leads to hording by everyone else who needs them as well. For instance, a store would rather lose your sale than have to give you change sometimes, or you simply need to buy more stuff. While nothing has really been proved, the bus companies are suspected of hording the coins and then selling them on the black market for a premium. A law was enacted forcing banks to exchange a certain amount of currency into coins for their depositors, bankers just ignored this law, saying that the coins would just end up in the black market (Incidentally, they write a lot of unenforceable laws here. One such law requires clothing stores to carry plus sizes for women. This one is likely ignored as much as the one about banks giving out coins).

With our own apartment, we spend a lot of time watching cable television. While I like watching TV in any part of the world, here it's actually helps improve our Spanish comprehension, making it theoretically good for us. My favorite channel is Cronica TV, which is low brow entertainment at its finest. It seems like every day a segment airs about the destruction of an office/house/store of a child rapist by angry neighbors. It's a winning formula, including several interviews with the parents of the victim, complaints by the neighbors about the laziness of the police and of course the ritual destruction of the rapist's domicile or place of employment. In today's airing, the rapist's little brick house was knocked down with a sledgehammer by the tearful father of the victim. What's always puzzling to me is the absence of law enforcement during these outbursts. But as has been explained to me, Cronica TV always gets to a crime scene before the police, and generally the police don't do anything anyway, especially in the poorer areas of the city where the immigrants from Paraguay and Bolivia reside. Cronica TV has offerings about buildings that fall down spontaneously and other types of crime as well. When it's hot, they talk to women in bikinis at the pool, focusing on her ass during the entire interview.

Anyway, that's it for now...