Jason Wells

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.”

Heather writes:

Jason finally has a new passport, and now the last bit of business is to file a police report, or else Jason could get in trouble when we try to leave Argentina. His new passport has no entrance stamp, which will be checked when we leave. We have a day trip planned to Colonia, Uruguay on Sunday, so it’d be best if we have this taken care of before then.

On Wednesday we explored a bit more of Buenos Aires on our own, and stopped in a bookstore that had been recommended to us by one of our guides here. It would turn out to be the first of two historical theatres we’d visit that day. El Ateneo on Avenida Santa Fe was originally the Teatro Gran Splendid. Now all of the seating areas, including the main floor and the balconies, house books, films, and music. The box seats are seating areas, and the stage is now a cafe. I took a photo of Jason as we stood on the third-level balcony. If you look below him you can see a TV interview going on on the second-level balcony and the cafe on the stage.

Jason standing on the third mezzanine in El Ateneo.

All of our guidebooks and our Spanish-English dictionary had been in Jason’s bag. We were able to replace one of the guidebooks here, and we selected a paperback Spanish-English dictionary. We also purchased two tango CDs.

The bookstore was a real treat to visit, but the dictionary we purchased there has been a source of disappointment and amusement. The first half-dozen words we looked up weren’t in the Spanish side of the dictionary at all, but I really began to doubt the dictionary when I started looking up words on the English side. Now we’re afraid to use the dictionary at all, imagining ourselves in a recreation of the infamous Monty Python “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” skit.

Here’s a sample of words that I’ve found in the English side of the dictionary:

aitchbone
froward
bantling
bradawl
commination
eleemosynary
hooping-cough

As it turns out, these are all real words, but fairly useless unless we were trying to translate something like the Canterbury Tales into Castellano. Meanwhile, words we actually needed like “outlet,” “plug,” and “adapter” aren’t anywhere to be found. I take that back–“plug” is in the dictionary, but the first translation is “taco.”

On Wednesday evening we went to Piazzolla Tango for dinner and a tango show. We didn’t know what to expect, didn’t even know where we were going when the car came to pick us up. We were the first to arrive, so when we were first seated we had the entire theatre to ourselves for a few minutes. The theatre is absolutely stunning, and we learned later that the Art Nouveau theatre had been closed for 40 years and recently restored. The theatre soon filled with tour groups, although Jason and I had a table for two. The show was “stage tango” and very different from what we’ve studied. We expected this, but we haven’t seen much stage tango at all before this. It was also the first time we’ve seen tango with live music. Between and sometimes during the tango dancing were songs from a male and a female singer, sometimes singing duets from opposite boxes of the theatre. Unfortunately I didn’t understand a word of it, although the crowd really enjoyed it. As expected, the dancing was highly choreographed and sometimes barely recognizable to us as tango. Before we leave Buenos Aires I’d like to see at least one more tango show. They are advertised everywhere, so I’ll need to ask around and find out more about which one to see. There are some free shows as well on Florida, and some of the dancers we’ve met perform there.

In the next entry Jason will write about the dance classes we’ve been to so far and our first milonga experience.

Heather:

I promise that I’ll write about the city tour and the other fun stuff we’ve done, but first I want to capture the last few days as we’ve tried to recover from the theft and what it’s been like as Americans watching the election from Buenos Aires.

I’m looking forward to the day that we can just be vacationers and not be dealing with bureaucratic tangles. Arriving in Buenos Aires on a Sunday complicated matters, since nothing is open on Sundays. Banks are only open from 10 to 3 on weekdays here, and at many banks I’ve seen lines that stretch outside the building and down the block. The U.S. Embassy has limited hours as well. Monday and Tuesday we went to our tango classes and on our planned excursions, determined not to let the rough landing ruin our trip. We decided that we needed to postpone our planned classes for today and try to straighten everything out.

We’ve made two visits to the U.S. Embassy so far to get a new passport for Jason. I think I had some preconception from watching TV that we’d arrive at a big gate, say the magic words, “We are U.S. citizens,” and we’d be escorted quickly inside by concerned American officials who wanted to take care of us. The whole experience was rather more like going to the DMV, except that most of the people there spoke little to no English. The security is apparently provided by a private Argentinean company, so until we made it all the way to the passport windows we had to get by on our limited Spanish. I would guess that 80% of the people going to the Embassy are there to get visas to enter the United States. We picked up the forms on Monday, and returned today to get the passport, however it turns out that today is an administrative holiday (the security guard explained in halting English) so we’ll have to try again tomorrow. We’re supposed to go to Colonia, Uruguay on Sunday, but Jason won’t be able to travel without his passport. I hope we get this all worked out.

I told Jason that the silver lining to this is that he needed a new passport photo anyway. I think his old photo looked like an angry terrorist, someone who sends letter bombs and lives alone in a shack.

After realizing that the embassy was closed today, we sat down on a park bench across the street to look at a map and discuss our next steps. After a few minutes we were approached by a uniformed officer who spoke no English. At first I wasn’t sure if we weren’t in some kind of trouble for loitering, but then I realized that he was just trying to find out if we needed directions. I’m not used to armed men in body armor trying to help me find my way.

Our other main objective was to replace the cash that had been stolen so we could pay our rent to the landlady, who will only take cash and only take it in U.S. dollars. I was not at all sure that I’d be able to navigate a local bank and get U.S. dollars. I ended up calling American Express and asking about how I could get an emergency cash withdrawal. They directed me to the local American Express travel office. Fortunately everything went completely smoothly at the travel office. I explained that I needed the money in dollars, not pesos. I was concerned that this would be a problem, since I’d gotten some conflicting information about whether it was even possible to withdraw cash in dollars. Fortunately it turned out not to be a problem, although I had to show them my U.S. passport and sign an affidavit that I’m not a resident of Argentina nor do I plan to be here for more than a year.

So far on our trip, we’ve been reminded again and again that the exchange rate of pesos to dollars is favorable to us and disadvantageous to Argentineans. One of our tour guides told us proudly that, “we used to be a rich country,” and that the exchange rate of pesos to dollars used to be 1 to 1. We’ve had the now-defunct Harrod’s on Florida pointed out to us several times, with wistful descriptions of how posh and beautiful it used to be. One of our guides remembered fondly of what it used to be like for Argentineans traveling abroad. Now they can’t afford to travel abroad, but we Americans can afford to visit them. The exchange rate today is more than 3 to 1. It is telling that our landlady absolutely refuses to take pesos from us for the rent and that I could only withdraw dollars because I could prove I’m not Argentinean.

We watched the election news last night (actually early this morning) on CNN Espanol, and today every news-stand in Buenos Aires is covered with photos of Obama. I saw one newspaper with the headline, “MARTES NEGRO.” I really wonder if they understand what connotation that phrase has, and how completely offensive that headline is. I hope not. Everyone else we’ve met has been very interested in the U.S. election and happy with the result. In a bookstore today Jason used his CA driver’s license as identification, and the cashier asked us if we’d voted and who we’d voted for. “After Bush, anyone would be better,” was the cashier’s opinion.

OK, hopefully all the heavy stuff is behind us and from now on we can just talk about the adventures we’re having. We’ve got some photos to share that I’ll post later. Tonight we go to a dinner and tango show, so it’ll be our first taste of the famous Buenos Aires nightlife.

Jason:

Just a quick shout out to Kim and Sinclair–they’re off on their own adventures today, first to London and then on to India! Happy trails.

With just three days left, our prep activity for the trip continues to be frenetic. Apartment in barrio Palermo, check. Luggage and misc. outfitting, check. Shuttle to/from airport, check. Flight itinerary, check. Friend babysitting the house while we’re gone, check. Packing still in progress. We’ve signed up for a two week package in BA–intensive tango classes and evening milongas each day, excursions to Iguazu falls, Tigre and Colonia, plus Spanish classes maybe 10 hours each week. Blows the budget, but I can live with that. This is a very special experience and I want it maximized.

And then the last two weeks, it’s unstructured. We do… whatever we want. Yeah! This is going to be awesome.

In July 2003, my ex-girlfriend Sarah and I took a week-long immersion Spanish class in Ensenada, Baja California. We had a great time and met some really cool people.

Cheryl, Katie and Alison.

We learn to make enchiladas. Joel looking fly in that phat apron.

A little poker, cigars and wine (courtesy of Barry) after the enchiladas.

La Bufadora.

After La Bufadora comes the cervesa...

... then the tequila shots.

Back at school, Alison and Katie between classes.

Big pile of people. I recognize Barry, Alison, Katie, and Joel. Don't know the other two.

Another big group shot. Kristina, Oscar, Tanya and others thrown into the fray.

Thanks to Alison for the photos.