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.”

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:

It is no surprise: this is one of the key reasons we came to Argentina, to completely immerse ourselves in tango. This is the ultimate place for it. I think tango is the greatest dance between a man and a woman. It’s the most gripping and sophisticated of the social dances. I have seen tango danced that seems incredible, impossible. It takes years, even decades, to master.

The beginning is taking tango classes. For our time here we have an intensive schedule of classes. We’re making the most of the month and it seems all too brief already. 

We study tango in a gorgeous old decrepit building. A central spiral staircase winding around a creaky metal cage elevator with manually operated doors. The elevator is almost always hauling someone, very slowly, so we usually take the stairs to the 5th floor housing the dance studios.

Our dance studio is in this building on Avenida Callao.

View of Avenida Callao from the studio balcony.

The studios are all ancient hardwood with a mirror wall, semi-broken fans and tall open windows. The walls are glazed with layered, chipped paint from the decades and decades. Judging from the fixtures, electricity was added well after the building was constructed.

One of the tango studios.

Our primary instructor, Andrea Mansilla, is very good. She has taught us a few steps, but with her we focus on perfecting technique. Frame, balance, elegance in motion, keeping to rhythm, keeping to the line of dance, collision avoidance, etc. We’ve taken 4 classes so far, 90 minutes each. In just those few days, I’ve noticed that our timing, balance and control are considerably improved. We’ve studied tango for about two years in San Diego, on and off, but we’ve never had the time to study this intensely, and it’s paying off.

Heather with Andrea, our first tango instructor.

Speaking of classes, we’re off to our first Spanish class in a few minutes. Hasta.

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.

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.