South for the Winter

The schedule of Buenos Aires

2007-04-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

When I wrote about dining out in Buenos Aires I didn’t mention that a standard time to make a dinner reservation would be around 9:30 or 10:00 pm. I don’t know whether families go out a bit earlier, but if so not by much. If you go to eat at 8:00 the place will be empty, many restaurants don’t even open until 9. Although this seems quite late, it makes sense given that everything else here is shifted later:

I know a few people who have to be at work at 8 or 9, but many places start time is 10 AM, and I know people who don’t start until noon and work until 8.
Lunch is normally around 1 or 2
Around 5 some people have “merienda” or afternoon tea – but I think this may be dying out; if I’m at a cafe studying around tea time the cafe gets a lot more full, but pretty much everyone is over 60. On the other hand, at the afterschool program where I was volunteering they also have an afternoon snack of tea and bread or biscuits. Most cafes have merienda combos like tea or coffee, toast and jam, half a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, sugar cookies, and a slice of cake. I guess this is to get people through until dinner.
The busiest time of day at my gym is around 7-8, about an hour later than my gym in Boston. Rush hour lasts from 6 to 8 or so.
Dinner, as I mentioned, is around 10, and if you’re going out may last until around 12.
Clubs don’t get going until at least 2 in the morning, so if you eat at 10, you can move on to a bar around 12:30 and then to the club at 2. Or 3, or 4...I once went to a party at someone’s house that started at 12:30ish, there was a lot of beer there and we hung out until past four when we moved on to the “boliche” for a few more hours. (“Boliche” is the name for a bar that clears room for dancing at some point in the night, so not a full on nightclub with a huge floor. Think Phoenix Landing in Central Square.) I’ve only done that once or twice but one of my roommates is out until 6 or 7 every night it seems.
The late schedule is true for milongas as well, and although I am usually headed home by 3 at the latest some of my die hard tanguero friends will be in one milonga until it starts to dwindle at 2 or 3 and then move to another one until 5. Bear in mind this is not just weekends but every day of the week! And it’s not just tourists either, though I don’t quite understand how the locals pull it off and also earn a living. I guess maybe they don’t have to be at work until noon?

Not quite yet...

2007-04-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, I lied. I'm actually staying two more weeks - the ticket was only $25 to change and I decided that I haven't done quite as much dancing as I'd wanted, since I've been more focused on Spanish.
My new return date is May 13th, still soon! I'll see you then!

Hola!

2007-04-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

Hello faithful readers - if there are any of you that haven't given up on me after my month of inactivity. I have, however, been uploading some new photos that you can see at http://www.flickr.com/photos/58658659@N00/.

I'm coming back to the States the week after next (the 28th of April) and suspect that in the meantime I'll probably want to spend more time doing things than writing about them, but I'm hoping to write at least a couple more entries, perhaps backdated, before returning. In any case I have a lot of stuff in my head that I'm going to write at some point, even if it's after I get back! So stay posted...

Dining out in Buenos Aires

2007-03-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

It’s not entirely clear why restaurants in Buenos Aires bother to print their own menus, because they all seem to serve the same things. Sure, there are a handful of ethnic restaurants that are pretty different, but otherwise even restaurants that have a particular specialty also generally serve all the standard items.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is and have come up with the following rationale. I think here people visit each other in their homes far less than in the States (whether just to hang out and have a cup of tea, or something more specific like having a dinner party or renting a movie). So when they see each other, it’s almost always out at a café, bar, or restaurant. So the experience of going out to dinner is not really about the food, but rather about seeing people. In the US, when you are deciding where to go for dinner, the first question is pretty much “what do you feel like eating?”—this is generally true whether you’re going out for a celebration, to eat something you wouldn’t make at home, or just because you don’t feel like cooking. Here unless you specifically decide to go somewhere unique, you can pretty much expect to have the same choices (there are many of them) and everyone can order whatever it is that they like and normally get.

The standard menu basically consists of barbecued meat and Italian food, in the following categories.

Café & Facturas – if you go to a typical restaurant during off hours and don’t want a meal, you can always get coffee (various espresso based options) and pastries or “facturas.”
Tostada & Tostado– also for off hours, tostada is toast (usually round slices from baguette type bread) that comes with butter and jam or dulce de leche. Tostado is a very thin toasted ham and cheese sandwich on crustless white bread called “pan de miga”
Empanadas & Pizza – there’s a subset of restaurants that just serve empanadas and pizza and have more options, but any restaurant will have at least beef, chicken, and ham & cheese empanadas, as well as cheese pizza.
Tarta & Omelettes – most, but not all, restaurants have some sort of egg dish available, often eggs and a vegetable baked in a crust (but not really like a quiche, I guess less dairy or something).
Ensalatas – salad here does not necessarily mean with lettuce. Usually you can get ensalata mixta with lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, or make-your-own salads where you can pick 3 or 5 of: lettuce, tomatoes, onions, grated carrot, boiled egg, corn, arugula, olives, heart of palm and mushrooms.
Milanesas – breaded and fried meat, milanesa is like schnitzel. Usually available in beef, veal and chicken, sometimes in pork, fish, tofu or cheese (yup, cheese. It’s like a mozzarella stick except steak shaped). It comes plain, with fries, or “suprema” – with ham and cheese and maybe tomatoes or egg on top (I’ve never ordered suprema).
Meat – off the grill, usually at least a few cuts of beef, pork and chicken. You can also get brochette which is the same meat cooked like a kebab. Parillas have more meat options. Sometimes the price of the meat includes a “guarnicion” which might be fries or a small salad, but more often if you order one of these you just get a plate with a slab of meat on it.
Pasta – many restaurants make their own pasta, and they’re often quite good. The menu will list the different pasta options – gnocchi (ñoquis), ravioli, fettuccini, etc – and their prices, and then below list the sauce options, priced separately. These include fileto (tomato sauce), white sauce, alfredo, butter/olive oil, and then some options that vary by restaurant like maybe mushroom sauce. Pasta comes with powdered parmesan in a cellophane package.
Sandwiches – you can get smaller cuts of most of the meat and milanesa options on a sandwich, which can be just meat and bread, or with lettuce and tomato, or “suprema”
Postre – Dessert is divided into a few categories and often located in disparate parts of the menu. The sections are facturas (pastries listed near the coffee), tortas (cakes), helado (ice cream), and postres (means desert, and includes random other things like flan, fruit salad, and “panqueques” which are crepes with dulce de leche or sometimes apples).

Most restaurants bring a basket of bread at the beginning which at an average place will include slightly stale white and whole wheat rolls and bread sticks, accompanied by a spread that seems like a mix between sour cream and cream cheese. Some nicer places will bring other options like pate or eggplant spread, and butter or olive oil are usually available if you ask. Service is incredibly slow. There’s no tax and tip is 10% which makes the bill pretty easy to figure out, as long as you remember to include the “cubierto” (cover) which is usually 2 – 3 pesos and supposedly covers the use of utensils.

Random Observations

2007-03-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

Porteños love mirrors. They are everywhere. For instance, every elevator has mirrors (I guess plenty do in the US but here there is no exception) There are also small mirrors by all the doors on the subway.
Napkins here suck. At least the ones you often get at restaurants; they tend to be really papery and not absorptive at all, like wax paper or something.
School teachers wear white lab coats over their street clothes, or sometimes if they’re women they might wear white smocks with ruffled sleeves. Kids in elementary school also wear some type of white smock or lab coat, and kids in kindergarten or preschool wear gingham smocks in green, red, yellow or blue (maybe depending on age, I’m not sure).
There are not a lot of stop signs here. They look the same as everywhere, red octagons with white letters. The way I noticed there aren’t a lot of them is that after living here for a month and a half, every time I see one I’m still surprised to see that it says "PARE" instead of "STOP."

The city of Buenos Aires

2007-03-03T05:03:00.000-08:00

Buenos Aires is the capital city of Argentina, and its largest, set at the delta of the river Plate (Rio del Plata) that opens to the Atlantic Ocean. There are about 3 million people living in within the city limits, at a density of 35 thousand people per square mile. By comparison, this is about twice the population and half the density of Manhattan, and three times the density of Boston. The metropolitan area has 12 million people (comparable to Paris), which is about a third the population of the country. People who live in the metro area are called Porteños because of Buenos Aires’ importance as a sea port.

Unlike Manhattan, BsAs does not have many sky scrapers, but in most parts of town that I’ve been in buildings are between about 6 and 15 stories. The downtown area, called the microcentro, has the highest concentration of businesses and shops, but a fair number of people live there too. On the major streets there seem to always be stores on the ground floor and offices or apartments above, and even on streets that are mostly residential there will be a few stores or restaurants. The street that I live on, called Bulnes, is a mostly residential street but intersects with a major avenue, Santa Fe, a block from my apartment. Of course the intersection has lots of stores but also walking down Bulnes every third building has some sort of ground floor business; there’s a bakery, an accessories store, a waxing salon, a butcher, a pizza/empanada place, a children’s clothing store, and a vegetable market. I really don’t ever have to leave my block.

Buenos Aires is divided into 47 neighborhoods and locals often identify with the barrio where they grew up. I live in Palermo, which is the biggest neighborhood in area, and I assume in population as well, with 257,000 inhabitants (2.5 times as many people as Cambridge, though about the same land area). In addition to identifying with neighborhoods, Buenos Aires has several major avenues that cross the city that are good landmarks. These are all serious streets, usually 3 or 4 lanes wide (depending on how respectful the drivers are of the parking lane, it seems) and they are generally one-way in the busier parts of town. It’s amazing to see traffic because even though these streets are often packed with cars and buses, they all seem to go really fast (and do not ever stop for pedestrians). They also weave a lot in traffic; I’ll be in a cab getting near my street, and we’ll cross 3 lanes of traffic at a 45 degree angle to turn right onto my street. The buses do this too; they don’t stay in the right lane as they generally do in the US but will switch into whichever lane seems fastest for the block and a half before the next stop. The problem with all this traffic is that the cars do not seem to have any sort of filters on their exhausts, and you can see the pollution in the air, big clouds of black smoke at the intersections. I feel like if I ever had a desire to smoke, now would be the time to do it because I honestly don’t think it would add any more tar to my lungs than I’m already getting in this city.

The city has plenty of parks and plazas, but this time of year the parks are all pretty dry and during the daytime are too sunny, and aren’t really pleasant places to be. There’s a wildlife refuge in one part of the city that’s quite large and I think is more densely forested than the other parks here, and I’d like to go visit it at some point. But for now I think going to places like Tigre is the only way to get a sufficient amount of nature and lack of smog.

The confession: I don’t really like Buenos Aires. It’s too busy for me, there is too much to do, too many restaurants and stores to ever know if you particularly like one of them, too many parts of town that I’ll never see, and the parts that I do have too many cars and too many people. Even if I only have one or two things scheduled for a day, it takes such a long time to get from one to another that it uses most of the day. I consider myself a city person, but I guess not for cities this big. Also I just haven’t found that many parts of town that I enjoy being in. Boston has lots of beautiful streets that are just nice to walk on but here there aren’t that many, there are streets that are interesting because of the shopping or restaurants but not that many that are actually pretty and pleasant, or the few places that seem nice at first turn gross as soon as a few cars drive by leaving black smoke.

Beef: Asado & Parilla

2007-02-23T05:09:00.000-08:00

One of the things that

Argentina

is most famous for is its beef. I’m not that sure I can speak to its quality here as I don’t eat enough of it (here or in the states) to be able to tell the difference. But it is certainly good, and moreover it’s plentiful and cheap. The cuts of beef are different from in the US and the most common are bife de lomo – sirloin strips – and bife de chorizo – sirloin or rump. Most typical restaurants serve these two cuts off the grill (usually with french fries), as well as a smaller steak sandwich and sometimes kebob-type option.

For a true Argentine beef experience, however, you would not go to any old restaurant but to a parilla (puh-REE-sha; double ell in Argentina is pronounced “sh”) – a restaurant that specializes in grilled meat – or to an asado, a typical barbecue that is most often with the family on a Sunday afternoon.

At a parilla, although your only choice, pretty much, is meat, and it’s all cooked the same way on the grill, you have a lot of types and cuts of meat to choose from. One thing that is common is for the parilla (that’s also what you call the meal) to be a service for two people with a sample of cuts, a few sauces, and a choice of side dish. I went to a fairly nice parilla a few weeks ago with Eve and Cruz and their friend Ingrid, and between the four of us we shared an appetizer platter and two dinner platters. The appetizer was an assortment of entrails: kidneys, intestines, sweetbreads, blood sausage and also regular sausage or chorizo. I didn’t like eating the intestines because they were too rubbery, but the insides are soft and taste like marrow. The blood sausage here has a nice flavor (if you like that sort of thing, which most people don’t but I do!) but instead of being hard like a normal sausage and other blood sausage that I’ve had, it has a texture inside the casing that can really only be described as gloopy. I think it could be nice spread on bread, but eating it plain can be kind of gross, especially since it is studded with pieces of fat (which in a normal sausage are consistent with the texture but not in this). After the appetizer we got the side dishes that come with the main course, mashed potatoes and salad. Eve says Argentines always eat salad with parilla to make the meat easier to digest, but considering how small the portion of salad was, and how much meat we ate, the notion is pretty much ridiculous. For the main course we had one standard platter, which included the lomo and chorizo cuts as well as ribs, cut across the bone in one or two inch pieces, and some other cuts that I don’t remember. For our second platter we got an assortment of game, which included wild boar, goat, lamb, and venison. All the platters come with a few sauces including chimichurri, the most traditional sauce made with garlic, oil, oregano, parsley, pepper and paprika. We also had one that was just parsley and garlic, and a honey mustard sauce for the game. The meat was really juicy (partly because it had butter on top, yum) and had nice flavor from being grilled, so I actually didn’t use very much sauce (also because I was going dancing afterwards and didn’t want the garlic on my breath). The only thing to drink with parilla is, of course, red wine, and we had a bottle of local malbec and a cup of coffee afterwards. All together, we spent 200 pesos on dinner, which comes to less than 20 bucks a person. Not bad.

I’m a little bit confused about how the terminology works, but I think that the food at a parilla is cooked on an asado (grill), the same as you would have at a family asado (barbecue). (There’s also, I believe, a cut of beef called asado.) So the difference is less in the food and more in the setting. I would love to be able to go to a real family asado sometime, but I think for that to happen I have to find an argentine boyfriend or something.

the asado at Luz's house; click for more pictures

However, last Thursday night one of the teachers at my Spanish school had an asado at her house for all the students and teachers at the school. Everyone contributed ten pesos towards ingredients, and brought something to drink as well. Luz’ house is in a pretty industrial and somewhat unsavory area, and I was actually pretty sketched out heading over there, but because of the area they own their own house. It’s a really cool one because the rooms all open onto an outdoor courtyard which also serves as the dining room, and where we had the asado. The walls of the courtyard have vines growing up them, and there’s also a staircase leading up to a terrace on the roof of the house. There were about 20 people at the asado and they’d pushed together three or four tables. When I arrived the tables were covered with baskets of bread, bowls of lettuce and sliced tomatos, and a big tray of boiled potatos sliced and sprinkled with fresh mint. When everyone arrived, the hostess and one of the other teachers brought around tray after tray from the grill starting with choripan, followed by blood sausage, two cuts of beef, pork, and finally corn. For desert I helped Luz arrange slices of apple and slices of ice cream (that had been purchased as a log) on a tray, sprinkled with walnuts and drizzled with warm chocolate sauce made from chocolate, cream, and dulce de leche. I didn’t think I had room in my stomach after the barbecue but somehow I managed to eat a helping of dessert as well. And then a second one.

Buenos Aires is a very European-feeling city, and I think this asado was the first time since being here that I really felt like I was in South America. The warm night air, the dimly lit, vine covered courtyard, the strains of cumbia music coming from the living room, and the general hospitality of my teacher and her husband also made it one of the most pleasant evenings I’ve spent here.

Choripan

2007-02-23T05:08:00.000-08:00

Choripan is sausage (chorizo) with bread (pan). Chorizo (the sausage) is a coarse pork sausage unrelated to bife de chorizo (a cut of beef from the rump or sirloin). It’s also different from the Mexican chorizo that you can get in the US. Each sausage is about the size of an Italian sausage; about 4 or 5 inches long and an inch in diameter. It’s either pre-cooked or smoked, I’m not sure, and is the same reddish color of Mexican chorizo or pepperoni, but it’s not at all spicy (in fact, nothing eaten in Argentina is spicy. If someone tells you that something is spicy, it’s most likely to have a lot of raw garlic in it, rather than something peppery or horseradishy). Choripan, then, is bread with this type of sausage on it, usually grilled and sliced in half lengthwise. It is the Argentine answer to a hot dog in a bun (although those, called panchos, are pretty ubiquitous as well), and is what you would get if you went to a soccer game.

Punta del Este, Uruguay

2007-02-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went with my roommate to

Uruguay

, to a beach town called Punta del Este. Buenos Aires is right across the water from Uruguay and there are ferries that you can take to Montevideo, the capital, and a town called Colonia, Uruguay’s oldest town. We went to Colonia and then took a 4 hour bus ride to Punta del Este. It’s a pretty small town, with a peninsula stretching south that is about 4 or 5 city blocks wide and maybe 30 long. This picture is the view from our hotel window, you can see how close the ocean is on both sides (the panorama looks curved but that’s just the camera angle). There are beaches on either side, one side faces a bay and is calmer and the beaches emptier, the other side faces the open sea and has decent waves and a lot more people, mostly a bit older than us and some quite old with skins like leather, as if they’d spent their lives (sunscreen-free) on that beach. The town had a bunch of tourists, mostly from Brazil as far as I can tell. I’m not sure why, I think there are probably much better beaches in Brazil, but whatever.

We didn’t do much all weekend, just sat on the beach or in cafes, reading and sleeping. We had been told that it was Carnaval weekend but couldn’t really find any reference to it, which was disappointing. Also disappointing was that it rained every night we were there; it was sunny for enough of the daytime to sit on the beach for a while (longer than my capacity for sitting in the sun anyway). All in all, though, it was a really calm, relaxing weekend; in Buenos Aires there is so much to see and do and new places to try, and it was so nice to be in a small town.

Tigre & the Parana Delta

2007-02-15T13:26:00.000-08:00

First of all, my slow internet connection is making it hard to put images in this blog, so you can see some of my pictures on flickr. About half of them right now are from Tigre.

Sunday I took the train to Tigre, a town about an hour from Buenos Aires, situated on an island in the Parana delta (well, everything’s an island there because the land is divided by canals). I went with Bright and two people that we’d met in a tango class the day before; I’d been wanting to get out of the city but didn’t know where to go, and they’d already been thinking about going here and invited us along.

I went into it kind of blind; I just knew that there would be more water and fewer cars and that was enough of a reason to go. It turns out it’s the thing to do on the weekends; porteños (Buenos Aires natives) flee the city by the tens of thousands on the weekends to have asados (barbecues) with their families and breathe the fresher air of the countryside. There are two train routes to Tigre and also two bus lines; the one we took left every 20 minutes and was packed (standing room only, and not much of that); I estimated there must have been over a thousand people on the 11:20 train alone.

Upon arrival in the city, (which seemed pleasant and manageable and I’d like to go and actually see it someday) people board one of several boat-buses that navigate the canals—or if they are there to visit family, may be picked up in their family’s motorboat. We took one of the boat buses for an hour upstream, past endless green lawns, and a few sandy beaches, covered with sun bathers, children playing in the water, and families having barbecues. The houses along the river are all on stilts in case of flooding, but these are not rickety wooden structures; if you took off the stilts they’d blend right into my neighborhood in Berkeley. The water itself is the color of milk chocolate, because of iron in the soil all around, and is actually quite clean. It’s used for recreation as well as transportation, and we passed many people in rowboats, kayaks, sea-doos and motorboats (sometimes with water-skiers in tow).

Since we didn’t have a barbecue to go to, we got off the boat at an inn that had restaurant with tables on the lawn looking at the river. Most restaurants here are pretty laid back and don’t mind if you stay for a while, so we just sat for a few hours and had a couple of beers before taking the boat back to Tigre.

Coffee

2007-02-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

Coffee here is much stronger and comes in much smaller doses, as is more common in Europe I guess. (Ok, well in this picture I'd ordered a "Lagrima" which turned out to be 3 parts milk to one part coffee, but normally you get something darker!) You also almost always get it in sit down cafes, rather than order-at-the-counter places. It can be quite a production, because not only do they bring you the coffee in a glass on a saucer and a separate saucer with sugar packets, there is often a small cookie or piece of chocolate on the side, and depending on the restaurant and kind of coffee you get, it usually comes with a small glass of water. In this picture there's also some other desert thing that I got, called rogel, which is layers of pastry and dulce de leche, with lemon icing. Muy rico!
It's pretty hard to get coffee to-go; sometimes if you do it means it comes in a disposable styrofoam cup, but the lid doesn't have a place to sip from; they expect you to drink it at your destination rather than while walking. I found my first "cafe frio" on a menu today and was really excited because I really crave iced coffee when it's hot out (especially if I have to go somewhere in the morning after being out the night before). But it turned out to just be room-temperature coffee in a mug. It was a little disappointing.

This isn't really related to coffee, but this picture is from the same day as the above. The cafe was sort of overrun by pigeons, which I hadn't noticed when I sat down, but they were everywhere and quite aggressive. While I was trying to do my Spanish homework they kept hopping onto the chair across from me, and then right on my table! When the people at the table behind me left, the pigeons instantly descended on the remaining food, which was some sort of chocolate ice cream or mousse pie with whipped cream; when the waiter scattered the pigeons away they had goo all over their feet, which they then tracked all over the ground and left on the backs of chairs in the cafe. Gross!

Villa Malcolm

2007-01-31T20:32:00.000-08:00

What a great night! Tonight I had my first real Buenos Aires tango experience. Well, I've had some classes that have been good but hadn't been out dancing too much. Last week I went to one milonga (that's what a social dance party is called in tango) but it was a gay milonga where I wasn't exactly a hot commodity. Tonight I went to Villa Malcolm which was technically a practica (practice session) but functioned basically like a milonga with the benefit that it started and ended early--9:30 to 1am--compared to the milongas that go until 3 or later.

The evening started off well because, to my surprise, I knew people there. First soon after I arrived were Jennifer, Korey, and Mila, who all taught at Tango de los Muertos. Later a Swedish guy showed up who I'd met earlier today at a class, and then later in the evening 2 more people that I know from tango in NY and Boston came (Shorey and Michael). It felt really nice to see familiar faces. Also, Korey and Mila did a show that was really awesome; they always do something new that I've never seen anyone do before.

It was a pretty young crowd and today there was actually a surplus of leaders, so I pretty much danced straight through, and with lots of good dancers. Actually, more of the better people I danced with were not Argentine but other tango tourists. Also among the Argentines I danced with, I think a bunch of them knew each other and I must have made a good impression on one of them to make the others ask me. I got some nice compliments and at the end of the night various people asked if I wanted to go to one of the other milongas that were just getting going. I declined since I have spanish class bright and early tomorrow (well, 10 AM but still) but it's good to know that in the future I'll probably be making friends in transport from one milonga to the next.

Costs & Exchange Rate

2007-01-31T04:07:00.000-08:00

Before I left, I was telling everyone about how great the exchange rate was for Americans: 3 pesos to a dollar, but with each peso having the buying power of a dollar. Turns out, that was only sort of true: there are a lot of things that cost the same in pesos as they would in dollars, and for the most part I'm used to to thinking of pesos as being worth dollars, but there are also a lot of things that cost way more, and a handful of things that cost significantly less. When I buy different things I switch between whether I think about it in pesos or dollars. Does that make sense? Here are some examples of prices:

Bottle of water/soda from a kiosk: 1.5-2 pesos; similar to what it would cost in USD
Bus or subway fare: .70-.80 pesos; cheaper than USD
Cup of coffee: 4.5 pesos; expensive in USD but normal if converted
T-shirt from boutique-type store: 25 pesos; a bit high in USD? or maybe this is pretty much normal? but cheap if converted
Empanadas: 1.3 - 2.5 pesos each; fairly cheap in dollars
Leg wax: 14 pesos; way cheap in dollars - it would be at least 40 I think - and SUPER cheap when you realize it's just $5!
Towel in a department store: 30 pesos; expensive
Tango class: 8-14 pesos, similar to USD
Ice cream at Tosci's equivalent: 4.5 pesos for a very small (but satisfying) cone
My room in well-located 4 bedroom apartment: 920 pesos

And finally, quite strangely, box of Twinings tea: 17 pesos! Not only expensive in pesos, but that's $6 american! I think it's the only thing I've encountered so far that is actually more expensive than in the US, though I understand that imported things generally are. For me, it's just confusing in terms of what to use as the determining factor for whether something is "too expensive" -- but it's weird to think about in terms of people who actually earn pesos, and pay 6 times as much for a cup of coffee as for the bus.

Apartment

2007-01-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

After a week in Buenos Aires, I moved into my apartment yesterday afternoon. The apartment search was very educational; I had to go to new parts of the city and got to see the insides of several local apartments. Kitchens here are tiny! Most of the ones I've seen are the size of my bathroom in Cambridge; the stove tops generally have 4 burners, but are 1/2 - 2/3 the size of ones I'm used to in the US. The sinks are more like the size of a bathroom sink (though deeper) and there might be 2 feet of counter top. One kitchen I saw was literally a closet off the hallway: there was a sliding door which, when opened, revealed two burners, a mini sink, and about a foot of counter (plus this one wasn't as deep as the other counters, which are generally the same as at home). That kitchen didn't have an oven besides a toaster oven. Actually, that apartment was strange because there wasn't really any common space, there were two bedrooms (which were both fairly large) and a bathroom and a little table at the end of the hallway that had the closet kitchen. Even some of the larger apartments I saw had tiny kitchens, like one three-bedroom with a large living/dining room. The bathrooms, on the other hand, are mostly significantly bigger than mine in Cambridge, so having a tiny kitchen can't be solely a function of needing to conserve space. Right? But I can't think of any good reason that you'd want your bathroom bigger than your kitchen.

The apartment that I moved into is fairly big, with 4 bedrooms. Nico, the guy who rents it out, doesn't live here but around the corner; apparently he grew up in this neighborhood and the apartment is his family's. He rents it on a month-to-month basis, mostly to foreigners. The rooms are furnished, each with a single bed, desk, and dresser (mine's a built in closet/dresser; see the pictures...). Before I came, there were two people living here; Rachael from Canada and David from Chile. My friend Bright, who I know from doing tango in Boston, is also in Buenos Aires for a few months and was also looking for an apartment, so he moved into the other room that was available here. It's cool because if I go out dancing late at night I won't have to come home all alone. Previously we had talked about getting an apartment together but I felt like that might have made it harder to meet new people in the city; this seems like a good compromise.

I had a choice of bedrooms, one looks a lot nicer because it has a window onto the street with plants in a window box and a tree right outside, but that meant it would be fairly noisy, and also the bed wasn't too comfortable and the dresser wasn't really big enough and didn't have anywhere to hang stuff. Instead I took the room with a window to the inside courtyard; the downside is that the air coming in the window isn't as fresh, and there's not enough natural light (I basically have my overhead lights on all day) but it's much more quiet, and a ceiling fan makes up for the lack of a breeze from outside. I guess the plus side of the lack of light is that once I'm done with Spanish classes which start at 10 AM, I'll start staying out a lot later at the dances, and won't have to worry about the sun waking me up early in the morning.

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2007-01-22T17:33:00.000-08:00

Day 4 in Buenos Aires. There seem to be so many interesting things to write about, but so far I haven’t had enough experience with any of them to write more than a few lines…so here are some of the interesting things that I may want to write more about later:

Ice cream. What I’ve had so far has been really good. All the places seem to split their menus up into categories of base flavors: chocolate, cream, dulce de leche, and fruit seem to be the basic ones, each with various combinations of nuts, brownies, chocolate chips, etc.
Empanadas. Eve and Cruz have developed a rating system, A - F, for empanadas from various bakeries. They get one of each variety, such as beef, chicken, tuna, ham and cheese, corn, etc, and rate the fillings as well as the crust. Actually, of the empanadas I’ve had so far, I think that I’ve had better ones in Boston (like Cafe Brazil chicken and corn empanadas, delicioso!).
Apartment Search. I’ve only visited two apartments so far, both this evening, and they both kinda sucked. It was cool looking on craigslist from Boston and seeing that apartments seemed so cheap, ($250 - 300/month) but it turns out that’s for stuff that is below my standards…like a room with no window in a house I’d be sharing with a 50 year old man.
Spanish classes. I just started yesterday. I’m in a class with a Scottish couple and a British guy; both of the guys are named Paul and are in the music business.
Ok, there are so many more food things: pasta, alfajores (dulce de leche sandwiched between two cookies), grapefruit flavored drinks, tartas…
Cost of living. Many things are really cheap, and nothing so far is expensive when converted to dollars, but it seems totally random which things are comparatively expensive.
Tango. Clearly I’ll have much to say on this, but so far I haven’t actually been dancing except one class.