You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September, 2007.
We apologize for going missing in action the past two weeks… Our excuse(s)? Meetings and travel in Europe, a move within Buenos Aires, and turmoil in business have kept us busy buried little bees…
We’re recovering our composure and will get back to our regular blogging duties as best as we can starting today dear reader.
In recent news, we moved to a new apartment that has TV. We’ve been told that the mayhem level in Argentina is going up in advance of the approaching presidential elections… that various factions have an interest in arousing the displeasure of the populous. So, the professional protesters, the ‘piquetaros’, labor groups, and other political mafia organizations are mobilizing to instill a feeling of unrest.
We didn’t see it before, but, on the evening news these days there is a fair amount of chaos around Argentina. The news is obviously sensationalized. But there’s a good amount of real footage of real trouble. And the robbery of Francis Ford Coppela’s house was the icing on the cake this week.
Anyway, our daily life here in BA moves on uneventful, in terms of outside disruptions. The weather has transformed into perfect spring. Life is good. Perhaps we should return to the bliss of no TV…
In so many ways Buenos Aires is calm and safe. In so many ways it can be just the opposite…
News just came in that Coppola’s home and office was broken into last night, his employees tied up and his laptop, containing work for his new movie, stolen along with other electronics… Ouch!
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/27/people.coppola.ap/index.html
From the Clarin in Spanish: http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/09/27/um/m-01507593.htm
Visit this blog for more about Coppola in Buenos Aires:
http://trendypalermoviejo.blogspot.com/search/label/Francis%20Ford%20Coppola%27s%20hotel
We hosted our first Argentine-style ‘asado’, for 20 or so people, on the roof of our apartment-building here in Buenos Aires on Friday.
Argentines take their asados seriously. Our spanish teacher was going to be there and our Argentine colleagues. We were a bit nervous about embarassing ourselves, and at first, most of our fears were realized…
I don’t know what it is, but, there’s something about being in a foreign country that sometimes causes you to lose all your senses… this happened to us on Friday when starting the fire for the asado… We’ve started hundreds, maybe thousands of fires in our day, back on the farm in Virginia and elsewhere. We know exactly what to do. But in the frenzy and pressure of hosting this asado our instincts and good sense just went out the window…
There we were having hastily thrown some charcoal and sticks into the parrilla grill, blowing and fanning a pathetic smoky pile as our guests started arriving… It must have seemed to the Argentines who were there that this was going to be some kind of slip-shod yahoo yanqui bbq. We could see the concern and pity on their faces…
Luckily for us, an American friend who’s married to an Argentine helped us with the shopping, tipping us off to the items that we were going to need to do this thing right… And so when the fire finally got going (with some input from just about every male guest) all the other elements started to come together as well… The drinks and music were flowing from bottles and speakers. And with the perfect warm spring night air of Buenos Aires things turned downright pleasant.
Maybe it’s genetic, but a weird dicotemy started to manifest itself during our little shin-dig… The Argentines all seemed to drift over to the parrilla where the meat was cooking and the Americans and Anglos all seemed to huddle around where the beer and wine was… Imagine that…
Anyway, cliches aside, we thought a pretty good time was had by all… And that’s the story of Gringos’ First Asado.
If you’ve been thinking about visiting Argentina… If you want to experience the vibrant culture, the friendly people, the opportunities, the beautiful and diverse landscapes… then you won’t want to miss this tour organized by my friends at Agora Travel this November 3rd-16th.
This tour is unique and exclusive (only 16 people) as it is done with a private chartered plane, so, you can travel quickly, comfortably, and hassle-free around Argentina, covering more destinations than you could with traditional airlines (especially Aerolinas Argentinas!).
The tour is also interesting in that it is oriented towards investment opportunities around the country: apartments in Buenos Aires, developments, vineyard and forestry projects, and rural estancias …
Over the years Agora Travel has established some excellent contacts in Argentina. This tour gives you access to those trustworthy and knowledgeable professionals, which is extremely important for you to be able to invest with confidence…
The investment aspects aside, the tour covers some of the most enchanting locations in Argentina: Buenos Aires… Bariloche… Mendoza… Salta (pictured above)… Misiones… the Iguazu Falls…
Basically this is a trip of a lifetime, a chance to explore the best that a beautiful country has to offer…
Click here to get all the details: http://www.agoratravel.com/investsouthamerica/wb/
FYI: We’ll be speaking to the people on this tour in Buenos Aires. We don’t know what we’ll say but, we’ll do our best to offer some interesting “off-the-blog” insights to Buenos Aires and Argentina, what we don’t want everyone to know about…
Last night we finally delved into the Buenos Aires art scene… We went to the gallery night event where many of the art galleries in Retiro and Recoleta stay open late and serve champagne on the last Friday of every month. The event is sponsored by a number of banks and local businesses and about 30 or so galleries participate. We went there with a group of expats, mostly Americans, including a couple of Argentine Americans… We had a very nice time.
We’re not exactly in the income bracket that purchases art, certainly not in the US, but here in BA we can almost pull it off. And, hell, when there’s free champagne involved you can consider us collectors!
But, in a gallery with a lot of uninteresting crapola you’ve got to play it cool. You can’t just go barrelling towards the free champagne and then run out of there, even though that’s what you want to do. The complimentary bubbly is usually strategically placed and guarded, so one must feign interest in order to win a legitimate refill.
Your editor at times found himself enquiring the price of some monstrous canvas or another so that he could suavely replenish his glass… And we know we were not alone in this…
That said, we did come across a couple very nice works… some high quality still-lifes… an interesting surrealist piece… and some intricate landscapes… We may well count our pennies and return to one of these galleries and see if we can come away with something.
All that gallery hopping gave us quite an appetite, so around 10pm (a respectable dinner-time for Portenos) we headed over to a parrilla restaurant to add the weight of some redmeat to the artsy evening. On the way there we came across a soccer-hooligan rally that was being closely monitored by riot police. Some in our group saw this as a photo-op and posed alongside the riot police standing by… surely a keeper for the photo album…
We enjoyed a great parrilla dinner and some nice conversation. It seems to us a bit of a copout to hang out with Americans when in Argentina. But the thing about Buenos Aires is that it attracts certain kinds of Americans, the more interesting types, who can make for good company… So, while we don’t spend a lot of time around expats, we tend to have a good time when we do…
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