Jason Wells

Jason writes:

November 29th. That evening we were to fly home. But as we waited for our remise (the hired car) to come pick us up and take us to the airport, a heavy rain storm erupted, sending sheets of rain down. As you can see from the photos below, the street below us began to flood! As the water rose, cars had more and more difficulty getting down the street, and even nearby blocks began to go under water. We wondered if the remise would still come; or if we would be able to leave the building with our stuff when it did? Could we even get to the airport–assuming the plane took off anyway?

So it got a little dicey. As I watched the waters get deeper and darker, I had thoughts of getting a hotel room for the night–or having a fairly unappealing conversation in Spanish with the landlady, ironing out terms to stay another night. Or–perhaps the flight would happen, but be delayed, causing us to miss the connecting flight from Dallas?

Fortunately, everything worked out on its own. As twilight became night, the flooding began to recede, and by the time the remise arrived, the street was merely wet. We made it to the airport on time, and the flight was on time too. Amazing.

Heather and Jason write:

While porteños are serious about coffee, you can’t buy an electric coffee grinder in Buenos Aires. Cafes are everywhere, offering truly excellent coffee (a combination of the Italian influence and proximity with coffee-growing regions like Brazil). We’ve been to several specialty shops that sell every kind of coffee maker available, including high-end espresso machines the size of a car engine. Yet no one sells electric coffee grinders. We don’t know why. Coffee is generally sold en grano (whole bean). The only grinders we’ve found are handcranked brass and wood affairs that look like they belong in an apothecary.

Speaking of coffee, if you realize at 7 am that you are out of coffee at home, you are out of luck. Grocery stores aren’t open that early, and neither are cafes. Most businesses open at 10. The malls stay open past midnight.

Placemats in restaurants are usually leather. In some cases the breadbasket is made of leather.

Subte (subway) stations have free WiFi. Almost every restaurant and cafe has it too. There is much better coverage than in San Diego.

Cajeros electrónicos (ATMs) dispense 100 peso notes, which almost no one will accept, at least not without a little debate. Try using one and invariably you’ll be asked for a smaller bill (this even happened in a restaurant where we used two 100-peso notes to pay for a meal that cost over 100 pesos). We tend to make change proactively whenever we have the opportunity, whether we need it right then or not.

Businesses sometimes claim that their credit card machine is broken only because they would rather have cash.

You can’t tip on a credit card. On rare occasions, your server may ask you to add the tip to the bill before they run the card. They will then stand over your shoulder while you write in a tip. They may even suggest an amount. Sometimes a tip is included on the bill, but usually, we tip in cash.

Porteños come in all shapes, sizes and colors, except, apparently, black. In a month of living here we’ve seen exactly ONE black person in the streets. One of our tour guides told us that when slavery was outlawed in Argentina, ALL the blacks moved to Brazil. This “disappearance” of the blacks is a historical mystery. Some people think they blended into the white gene pool during the massive European immigration of the 19th century. Blacks used to outnumber whites 5-to-1 here, and tango is based in part on West African dance. Argentines of European descent–that is, virtually all of them–consider themselves white, not Latino. Blacks in Argentina today are likely to be Brazilian immigrants.

Irish pubs are all over BA. Visiting one is a riot. The menu is more likely to have gnocchi than chips, and while they may have an extensive wine menu, they may not have Irish beer.

McDonalds, Burger King, and even Starbucks are all over the place, but there are no Taco Bells in Argentina. In fact, there may only be one Mexican restaurant in all of BA, in trendy Palermo Viejo. There’s essentially nothing in common between Mexican and Argentine food. Tortas and tortillas are entirely different foods, and some people here have never heard of frijoles.

If you bring your Mac with you, don’t forget the 2-prong plug. Electrical adapters are easy to find, but not for 3-prong (grounded) plugs. No one will know what you’re talking about if you ask for an adapter for a 3-prong North American plug and they may even try to helpfully show you what North American plugs actually look like. There are two incompatible plug formats common in Argentina–one is Australian, the other European–that sometimes coexist in the same room.

The Castellano word for governor is gobernador. Our English-speaking guides translate it, without a smirk or a hint of irony, as “Governator.”

Jason writes:

I got a request to post a photo of the shoes we bought while in BA. So here they are:

The new tango shoes.

I bought my pair of shoes at Darcos, a specialty store for tango shoes in Microcentro, and the best place in town for men’s tango shoes. The ones I got are an Italian design with Cuban heels. They weren’t easy to find! I wear a size 46 here (comparable to a men’s size 13 in the US) which is virtually unheard of here. Few shoes in BA are available above size 43. I tried about a dozen shoes before I got to this pair, which has been customized to fit my feet. They’re great on the milonga floor or in class; they’re very flexible and precise.

Heather writes:

Unless you dance tango, you have probably never heard of Comme Il Faut shoes.  If you dance tango, you already know that the reverence held for women’s tango shoes approaches fetish, and no design house is held in more esteem than Comme Il Faut.  While many American tango businesses import Comme Il Faut shoes for sale, there is no Comme Il Faut website, no way of buying them directly short of going to Buenos Aires.  So it should come as no surprise that one of our first stops after arriving here was the small Comme Il Faut showroom in Recoleta.

On Arenales in the Recoleta barrio, there is small sign reading “Rue des Artesanales” just outside of a courtyard.  Inside the courtyard are several doors are either side, each leading to stairways.  If you walk all the way to the end of the courtyard and go into the last door on the left, and walk up the stairs, you’ll see a closed door and a small sign that simply reads, “Comme Il Faut.”  Ring the buzzer, and (I am not making this up) a small window slides open in the door revealing two eyes peering out at you.  Stand for a heart-stopping moment wondering if the person behind the door is going to let you in.  Then the door opens and you walk into a tiny room lined with cushioned chairs and benches.

There are few shoes on display, and no catalogue to look at.  Instead you tell them your size and a general description of what you want, and sit on one of the benches as they bring you box after box of shoes to try on.  As you model shoes in front of the mirror, a friendly sales assistant (or even the owner) will dart back into a doorway and come back out with even more boxes of shoes for you to try.  Meanwhile, every other available seat in the small room is taken up by other women (they do not sell men’s shoes) who have made the same pilgrimage.  It is a particularly feminine experience, and Jason (the only man in the room) was the subject of some gentle teasing while he waited for me there.

One advantage of going all the way to Buenos Aires to buy Comme Il Faut shoes was the price.  You can easily spend $200 USD or more on tango shoes in the U.S.  Prices at the Comme Il Faut showroom ranged from $280-$400 AR (or $80-$114 USD).  Bring cash to get a better price.  I ended up buying two pairs for myself and a pair for a friend back in the U.S.

Jason writes:

From November 8th. Most of this day we spent in Tigre, a small river town about 30km north of BA. The car picked us up at the apartment just before noon. Tigre was the summer playground for the wealthy elite of Buenos Aires during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.  We had lunch at the Tigre Boat Club, the British rowing club founded there in 1888. Tigre has several rowing clubs, each of a different country, all very exclusive. It has a number of imposing architecturally first-rate buildings, mostly clubs and former mansions. But put that aside for the moment. We took a boat ride down the river after lunch, and I want to show you to what impressed me first about Tigre, rather than what the brochures tend to stress.

Boat ride on the Rio Paraná delta.

Tigre is set in the alluvial basin of the Rio Paraná. That means it gets a lot of flooding. The river rises and falls quite a bit, according to the wind direction, I’m told. This is the most defining feature of Tigre: the water level. Everything built or kept along the water line reflects the power of the water here. Most structures are built on tall stilts.

Stilts under houses and docks are the norm here.

People build retaining walls to protect their land from the river erosion, but unless they are constantly maintained–which is expensive–they’ll eventually collapse, sooner or later. It’s just a matter of time. We saw a lot of broken walls, tilted trees and land sinking into the water.

An unofficial view of Tigre. Strikingly eerie.

This is what I’d expect to see along the rural rivers and streams of the Midwest and South that feed into the Mississippi. I hadn’t expect anything like that in Tigre, given the way it’s presented. One person we spoke to compared it to Venice! Now I’ve never been there, so I can’t speak with certainty, but Venice doesn’t exactly evoke images of collapsed wooden retaining walls and rusting tin roofs. These wastelands coexist with the recreational clubs of the 19th century elite that define Tigre’s image. It’s an interesting mix. The rowing clubs were started here mainly by immigrant communities: the Italians, Swiss and Germans each have their own rowing clubs too. Each rowing club has a coat of arms that gets displayed on the rowing paddles, and to be able to row down the river with the coat of arms of a certain rowing club, you must be a member.

The old El Tigre Club, now the Museo de Arte de Tigre. As seen from the Rio Luján.

As seen from behind.

Another stately rowing club.

One historical feature of Tigre worth checking out is the home of former Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento–now preserved for the ages in a notably peculiar way.

Sarmiento's home, in a huge glass box. The waters must get pretty high now and then.

Soon thereafter, we returned from the soggy waterways of Tigre to dry land. We then took a ride through San Isidro. Unlike the one in San Diego, it’s a rich, exclusive part of town. It’s all leafy streets and well-appointed homes. We first stopped at the cathedral of San Isidro.

The cathedral of San Isidro.

Not far from the cathedral was a park hosting a feria, a weekend open-air market. In the middle of that park is Reloj Floral, the Floral Clock. It was installed in 1913 and only recently restored to working condition.

The Reloj Floral of San Isidro, with working movement; it really was 5pm.

We then explored the railway station at San Isidro, which has been developed into a high-end mall. Buenos Aires, especially the wealthy parts like this, are loaded with very recognizable designer brands and stores: Versace, Cartier, Armani, etc. After exploring there for a bit, we returned to BA proper as the afternoon became evening.

Jason writes:

From November 3rd. We now have the apartment! And we basically dropped our bags and slept like the dead, still adjusting from the jet lag–we’re 5 hours ahead of California–and the red-eye flight not to mention the post-flight drama. You cannot imagine what a relief it was to have a secure place to keep our stuff, to take a shower, to sleep.

The apartment is just what I’d wanted. It’s a really neat little pad on the 7th floor of a chic little building in barrio Palermo, close to Ricoleta.

Our apartment building. Our studio is on the 7th floor.

Inside our studio.

The apartment is a 1 1/2 bath with a small kitchen, dining area and hardwood floors. The bed’s behind the armoire. Upon arrival, one nuisance was that our Internet connection was no good, despite assurances to the contrary, but we got it working the next day. It sounds incidental, but it was actually a big deal, because it’s our primary way of communicating with the outside world and (since my Lonely Planet book disappeared with my stolen bag) looking into what to do here.

The next morning, we took a stroll around our immediate neighborhood to get our bearings and to find all the little essentials: an ATM, a coffee house, and even a great little place that has excellent pasta and sauces that you buy to take home to make–a kind of a very specialized grocery store. Down the street there’s a small but more general grocery store and a place that does your laundry for you. We found a large city park two blocks from us, Parque Las Heras. At this point it really began to feel like we’re living here. Later, we walked through posh neighborhoods to the US Embassy, about 15 blocks away. Heather already wrote about this experience.

Next order of business for us: getting into tango. Really getting into tango.