After a last day of domestic chores in Santiago, I made my way to the airport bright and early to catch my Air Canada flight to the east coast. A bit odd to be flying Air Canada at the southern end of the Americas, and also a bit odd to fly from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast in just under two hours!
Nevertheless, I arrived in Buenos Aires on a beautifully sunny day and the city looked great. It is much greener and brighter than Santiago and has many beautiful tree lined streets along sometime cobblestone roads lined with beautiful old French colonial style buildings. I settled into my trendy neighborhood of Palermo for the weekend and plotted out my first few days here. It seems as though more people speak, or at least understand English here, which is a bit of a relief.
Unfortunately, the beautiful weather I flew in to only lasted that first day and it has been cold, dark, and wet ever since. I’m looking forward to the sun coming back out, but for now it is definitely feeling like winter around here. My first day was spent trying to find money and a few locations around town related to tours I was interested in signing up for.
Buenos Aires is a much bigger city than Santiago and it can be quite disorienting. I repeatedly found myself walking in the wrong direction and getting lost when trying to explore and hop between subway stations. Fortunately, I’ve managed to find a good little app for navigating Buenos Aires that should help me from now on.
Not everything around here is perfect, of course. There does seem to be an endless plague of ugly non-creative scrawly graffiti. On everything. And the subways are no exception. The subway itself is pretty depressing and not so far below the streets in dark, dirty, noisy, stuffy tunnels (you can hear truck running over the manhole covers). The temperature difference between being down below and being up on the chilly street is quite extreme!
Money is another strange matter. I learned today that there are actually two different exchange rates: one for suckers like me who are forced to use ATMs because they didn’t bring in a suitcase full of U.S. dollars, and another black market exchange rate for those willing to put U.S. dollars into the hands of locals (who are prohibited from trading in them). The black market rate is almost double the official rate, so you essentially get everything for half price here if you play your cards right. And let me tell you, this place ain’t cheap – but not ridiculously expensive either.
Today I managed to hop onto an all day bike tour of the city. It was fun, but I’m not sure I enjoyed it as much as I did in Santiago. Perhaps it was the chemistry of the group, which was comprised of all Americans, including a tour guide from Utah, two New Yorkers of Korean descent, and one totally obnoxious tyrant from Texas. He was very odd and had a knack for offending everyone around him. Originally from Los Angeles, he working in the oil industry in Texas and sounded like he made way too much money – flying down here on weekends and owning a home near my hotel that he rented out for US$1000 a week. He seemed mad at the world and was most keen to prove to the tour guide that he knew more about Argentina than he did. Not sure why else he would have bothered to come along to an introduction to the city tour that he has been visiting and living in on and off for years.
The tour took us into a number of historic neighborhoods, mostly along the eastern parts of the city next to the ocean. Among the more interesting stops was a huge memorial from the Bolivians made from melted down coins collected from school children and given as a gift decades ago that was partially salvaged for scrap metal during the Argentine financial collapse in the early noughties. It stands today with a massive gash in the side of it where a wing was harvested off of it. We also stopped by the Argentinean equivalent of The White House – that’s more or a red/pink color painted initially with bulls blood (or so we were told), and Eva Peron’s grave in a very expensive graveyard that charges descendants annual rent to stay there. Most disturbing, we also stopped by an archeological dig of a torture chamber that was used by Argentina’s dictators in the 1970’s that was only discovered when they destroyed a recreation center to put a highway in during more recent times.
On the whole it was enjoyable as long as you didn’t engage the crazy Texan too much. Sometimes I felt the conversation got a little too American oriented and not enough Argentinian oriented like it should have been, obviously.
