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...