Category Archive

Last night we went with some Porteno friends to the Opera Pampa show at La Rural. As usual we had no idea what it was we were going to see, and our assumption that it was an ‘opera’ in the traditional sense was completely faulty…

Instead it was a live action theater production telling the story of Argentine history through song, dance, battle reenactments, and impressive horseback-riding…

La Rural, situated next to the US Embassy in Palermo, is a nicely restored complex that was once a sort of livestock convention arena… It has some stands that surround a rectangular riding rink and stage. From the stands we watched the dancers and horseman act out various stages in the taming of the pampas and the establishment of Argentina.

We had a pretty good general idea of how Argentina was founded and this show confirmed our view of how similar it was to the founding of the US… colonization of a bountiful new world, the purging of the natives, the fight for independence from the colonizing nation, the battle between the federalists and anti-federalists, the settling and taming of the wild west, and the hardwork and prosperity that followed… Of course, the colonizing nation was a different one which made the legal and government structure different, but the similarities are many…

Now back to the show, as we said the horseback-riding was quite good. The horses that they rode were Criollos a very well dispositioned Argentine breed, a decendent of the horses that the Conquistadors brought. In the show they did demonstrations of Argentine equestrian events. They also did tricks, like having the horses all lie-down in unison, and galluping into formations…

All in all it was an enjoyable show that we would recommend to visitors.

We’re going to try and round-up some pictures from someone… unfortunately our new digital camera slipped off an ottoman the other day and is no longer functioning. It was a disappointing loss, before we’d gotten even a fraction of our money’s worth out of the thing… uggghh.

There’s little hope of it being fixed and I don’t know if we can bring ourselves to buy another one in such short order. But for you dear reader we trouble and toil, perhaps we’ll get a cheap little gizmo, so at least you’ll have some pictures to look at to distract from our boring writings…

In the Buenos Aires Herald we find this tidbit… about a drunk British cameraman who stole a taxi outside Cordoba city and drove himself to his hotel to take a nap…

Evidently, the journalist, who was supposed to be covering some kind of Argentine rally for a major English TV station (BBC?) went looking for a cab to take him back to his hotel. Unable to find a taxi with an actual taxi driver, this gonzo journalist, took matters into his own hands… Finding a taxi with the keys in it he stole away with it back to his hotel…

The article didn’t say what happened to this intrepid newsman other than that he was arrested. Quite a Hunter Thompson moment… and that’ll be quite a hang-over in Cordoba prison, ouch…

It’s rainy again today… After weeks of sunshine, it’s starting to feel like London around here, London in the summertime at least…

I haven’t spoken about one of the big advantages of living overseas where you don’t understand the language well… no TV!

Yes, we could turn the thing on and watch BBC or CNN, but we can get all that on the internet. Would it help our spanish to watch Argentine TV, maybe, but I don’t think I could stand it…

I realize the advantage of not watching TV when I’m on the internet… at certain mainstream websites I see little tidbits of the things that come on American TV… news about ‘Dancing with the Stars’, the latest in ‘American Idol’ gossip… and I thank goodness I don’t have that crap foisted on me like you do with TV, where it seems more invasive than the internet.

Sometimes you find yourself on a channel because of inertia, or you’re not paying attention, and before you know it you’ve consumed precious minutes of your life-span on some worthless rubbish…

In the US I bought a large flat-screen TV just because I thought we should have one. And we could watch a movie every now and again on it… Of course I ended up turning it on way too often and wasting countless hours that I’ll never get back.

I sold the flat-screen about a month after buying it… I’m just not responsible enough to own one…

But then in the US I would feel like I was ‘missing out’ on something… Even though I knew darn well that I wasn’t.

Here we are TV free.

While I wouldn’t recommend moving overseas to get away from the boob tube… It’s a little fringe benefit of doing so…

My hard-working wife rarely treats herself to a trip to the salon, but she returned from one the other day looking and feeling like a million bucks… She had her hair washed, cut, and styled. She had her nails and toes done.

She couldn’t have been more pleased… and the price… $40 for everything. And that’s at an upscale place in a touristy area…

You know what they say… ‘happy wife, happy life’… Here everyone’s happy including the wallet…

‘Twas the day after St. Patrick’s Day, and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even my spouse
Clothes from last night flung around the room without care
And a splitting headache, the legacy of St. Patrick, was there
—

Okay, that’s enough of that…

In the Retiro neighborhood where we live there are a number of Irish pubs on Reconquista street. They had closed off the streets and a conspicuous number of English-speakers began to gather…

We met up with a friend and found a less busy, but not empty pub (called John John) in which to partake in the revelry… The music shifted back and forth between traditional Irish, 80’s pop, and thumping techno. After a while we decided to look for something more authentic which we found… I forget the name of this other pub, but they had a great Argentine band playing live Irish folk music. They were very good… and the Kilkenny and Guiness flowed…

Before too long the streets were getting packed with teeny boppers, drunken Anglos, and assorted party-goers. We decided to make a graceful rather than less graceful exit. We were back home by around 1am… but our tolerance is low these days and we suffered the next morning.

But the weather was so nice we were lured outside by the early afternoon… We had a wonderful walk around the city and went to see a house that was on my interesting property ’watch list’…

We had lunch at a surprisingly good French restaurant called Croque Madame (a gourmet lunch for two with coffee and dessert was $25), which is actually part of a museum, but we didn’t bother to see what the museum was…

We strolled through some of the Palermo parks and on a nice day like today we strolled slowly…

 Then when we reached Recoleta, at the Sunday open-air market, they were having a music festival with a couple bands playing. Hippy Argentines were lounging in the grass, throwing frisbees, doing hippy things…

It was very pleasant. And I’m almost always impressed with Argentine musicians. They have some great talents here…

It got off to a rough start, but it ended up being one of those special Sundays…

A Day in Buenos Aires

Nicely done video tour of various sights in Buenos Aires…

Our American acquaintance told us about how an Argentine friend once asked him, “Why do all the Americans want to buy the old houses? Don’t they know you have to spend a fortune to fix those places up?”

His answer was probably the right one… Americans want what they can’t have. Nice historic houses are rare in the US, and when you can find one, they’re expensive… So when we see classical mansions for reasonable prices we can barely contain ourselves.

Today we looked at four Petit Hotels, on the behalf of some clients… They were all impressive. But it’s hard to tell where the value is… These things were not cheap. By American or European standards they are, but this isn’t the US or London. Would it be wise for our clients to make such a significant investment right now in BA? We think so, but at the same time Argentina has a long history of booms and busts… Is another bust coming in the near future? We don’t know… I guess you just have to love a place and the investment aspect should be secondary, then if the market goes south you’ll still appreciate what you have (in theory anyway…).

 In Argentina they don’t have the same sensitivities of political correctness that we do in the US… For instance, what’s the only dark skinned person on this tissue box doing? And the lazy looking character in the sombrero… Click to get a better look… 

After our first post about bringing our parrot down here with us, people have asked about him, what kind of bird he is etc…

Here’s a picture of him lounging on the couch. It’s taken some adjustment, but he seems to like it here. We’re actually looking for a ‘girlfriend’ for him. So, if you know of any available female caiques in the greater-Buenos Aires area please let us know…

At different points in my life there have been different reasons for getting up in the morning. In college it might have been, “Oh my g*d, my greek class starts in 3 minutes!” or, “I need a cigarette…” When I worked in Florida the motivator was mainly to avoid embarrassing myself in front of  people like Michael Masterson and others. But here in Buenos Aires I’d have to say that the motivator is… The Coffee. It almost doesn’t seem to matter where you get it, the coffee here is just excellent. These aren’t big American-style cups of coffee we’re talking about, but small, efficient, savory shots of expresso… At some point I’ll cut back on my coffee consumption, but, that time is not now….

He he he… We’ve seen a number of these creative stencils. They’re actually rather tasteful graffiti, small sized, with an actual message instead of a bunch of nonsense. This is one of the better ones…

We got into Buenos Aires on Tuesday, other than a snafu bringing our parrot through customs (he did make it), everything went smoothly… [BTW: We 'smuggled' him onto the cabin of the plane because he was supposed to go down with the luggage but we were worried something would happen to him down there, so, we put his cage in a discreet gym bag and carried him on instead of checking him. Luckily we didn't go through security again right before getting on the plane. It went fine except once when we were giving him water he made some noise struggling to get out, but we neutralized that with some coughing and zipped up the bag...] Like us, he was happy when the flight was over…

The weather has been great, it’s summer, sunny in the mid 70s with a cool breeze. We’ve been going out to eat a lot at the outdoor restaurants to enjoy the weather and the low prices…

It’s been a little tricky setting up the home-office. We’ve had some close calls with the electrical adaptors, one of which started smoking and was briefly on fire, another one made my laptop screen flicker wildly… Also, it’s been a helluva time setting up the wireless in the apartment.

Argentine retail of electronics is pretty far behind the US. They don’t have any “big-box” stores that we’ve seen, (which is why we had to buy the adaptors at sketchy mom-and-pop shops…) It’s slim pickins and expensive, and they only keep one or two of each item in stock, then you have to make sure that what’s in the box matches what the box says… and of course you have to communicate in Spanish which is tricky in itself for some of us… So, I finally struck pay-dirt after buying the second wireless router…

But configuring the router was a different story. Of course, it didn’t go as the ‘EZ 1-2-3′ setup claimed… but after finally getting in touch with the US technical support, in India, via my Skype internet phone we got things figured out. Now Shirley and I don’t have to work from our bedroom tangled in a web of cords…

As you can see things are coming together. I’m studying my Spanish, getting ready for classes, so I’ll have some idea of what’s happening around here… And maybe someday we’ll even get a business going!