either/or

Realizing that many of my posts may be construed as not covering the positive aspects of our stay here, and having been here for four months now, here are a few things, mostly meaningless, that have affected me.

1. You can buy anything one at a time at a kiosko. I have a mouse with a dead battery. I go outside to the kiosko, and I buy one AA battery. Super convenient. It’s everything Costco isn’t.

2. Cheek kisses. 

3. Politicians can talk for 40 minutes, with 75 microphones, cellphones, and tape recorders jammed in their face, and TV stations run the whole thing. Sure politics is dysfunctional here, but it’s a different sort of problem. Argentina is not a ’sound byte’ culture in some respects, or at least Argentine TV news doesn’t tend to pressure political dialogue in the same way that US news coverage tends to.

4. Cafe culture. Beef.

5. That asados just happen all the time, you get invited, then random people show up. Like the guy who painted our house invited me out to hang out with his band while they played one night, mostly covers, at this house that is essentially uninhabited except for when they practice. So while they were playing, their eighty year old neighbor comes in and takes the microphone and starts singing a tango ballad from the 50’s.

6. Friendliness from strangers when you are clearly a foreigner. First, one day when I was here in January just visiting, I needed to get some clothes washed. I didn’t speak any spanish at that point and looked up what to say in my phrasebook, walked next door to the Lavadero and basically butchered my sentence. There was this customer there, an older woman, who spoke english and helped translate for me. The next day I was about 10 blocks away at a restaurant and the same woman was there. So she comes up and starts helping me order.

Second, and not from a stranger, but still, we posted on an online forum here that we needed help mounting our TV on the wall. A friend of a friend basically saw the post, helped translate and find a local store that had the part we needed, and found someone who could do the work. 

7. Bus drivers who open doors for you when you’re not at a stop. And open doors when the bus is still going 20 kph, and let you kindof half navy-seal it out the door, then keep going. OK, i have mixed feelings about this one, but on days when I feel like i’m in the rhythm of the city and enjoying the bus, I like it. 

8. That Porteños think its funny that Americans eat while walking. Now that I think about it, I used to always eat while walking in Seattle, but there are all kinds of barriers here to prevent this combination of activities. Like coffee is practically not purchasable ‘to go’. If you buy a pancho or choripan from a street vendor, generally people just stand around right there and eat it.

9. That the neighborhood parilla comes over to our office, rings the bell, and to tell us when ‘hay disco’. El disco is this big disk cooked on the parillada with either beef or chicken - somewhat like a half roast beef/half stew. 

10. The fact that people are willing to protest at the drop of a hat. I’ll take that over the numbness and emasculation of the US public any day.