Category Archive

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…

We attended our good friends’ wedding this weekend in Asheville, North Carolina. It was well worth the trip. The wedding was held on the grounds of the Biltmore estate in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains… It’s the largest private home in the US, at 150,000 sq feet, and is still owned by the Vanderbilt family.

George Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius, had the house built in the 1880’s, it was completed in 1895. The place was stunning. We’ve visited many chateaux around Europe and this baby is as spectacular as any of them…

George Vanderbilt’s father built the family fortune up to $200 million by the early-mid 1800’s.  That’s the equivalent of around $87 billion in today’s dollars, double the individual wealth of today’s richest men. (There was no income tax in those days!) At the time the Biltmore was being constructed Vanderbilt’s employees where buying up the surrounding land. It took over 600 real estate transactions to cobble together the 100,000+ acre estate.

The Vanderbilts of today have done an excellent job preserving the place. Not only that, but we’d venture to guess that they might even be making a tidy profit off of it. No doubt the maintenance and operational costs are staggering. But the estate hosts around 1 million visitors a year. The place was packed when we were there and it’s not even peak season. The entry fee to the house, the basic tour, is $50. Then, there are upgrades galore available… the audio tour, the guided tour, the secret places tour, the rooftop tour, etc. The winery on the property is the most visited winery in America. The giftshops were humming with activity as were the restaurants. If the average visitor generates $50 in revenue, which is probably on the very low-end, that’s $50 million right there… the real numbers I’d venture are much higher.

The Biltmore was fairly pricey, but it delivered value… all the visitors we talked to were very impressed with the place. Speaking of delivering value, that’s one thing that, in business, Americans are pretty darn good at… We were impressed by the level of customer service we received at the Enterprise car rental in Charlotte, NC… With typical southern hospitality the office door was opened for us and we were greeted by a friendly, efficient, and clean cut young guy. Inside, the place was bustling with activity of these young go-getters enthusiastically executing the business of car rentals. The little economy car we rented was less than $30 per day… good value…

Likewise at the Best Buy in Asheville we shopped for some electronics… we were impressed by how cheap things were… $19 for a cell phone, $149 for a 7 mega-pixel digital camera, $499 for a laptop… All these things cost double or triple in Argentina… Argentina, however, delivers good value on other things like food, clothing, transportation, real estate etc. which is partly why we like living here.

Anyway, let’s get back to the wedding that we attended in the west Carolina mountains… The rehersal dinner was held at a ranch outside Asheville. Southern BBQ was on the menu and it was fantastic… We hadn’t had a good southern meal in a long time. The setting was a picture perfect lakeside pond and a converted barn… likewise, the wedding reception and ceremony were held at a converted historic barn on Biltmore estate. Everything was very natural and relaxed, but also elegant.

Our friends who were getting married invented their own service and wrote and selected all the vows and readings. It was non-religious, but not non-spiritual or non-emotional… It was original and special. We’re very happy for our friends. It was a long way to go for a weekend wedding, but we wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And we feel very fortunate to have gone…

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…

We’re back in the ol’ USA, visiting family and friends, handling personal business… doing maintenance on our ‘American lives’.

How does it strike us being back after an extended stint at our new home in Latin America? Well, life is easy… we speak the language and there are no surprises. It’s for the most part relaxing and familiar, but of course, we haven’t been gone long…

We’re not from Florida, it’s another one of our adopted homes, we’re hardly ‘from’ anywhere, or so we think…

In BA when people ask us where we’re from we have different answers every time… We name different locations in the US, where we’ve lived, whatever strikes our fancy at the time.

But, we can’t shake our ‘Americanness’ and that’s something we’ve reflected on during our time in Argentina. Having spent the majority of our lives in the US, it has shaped who we are, more so than we realize…

Sure, we’ve lived in other countries too. We hold other passports. Our fore-family came from other countries, of course, some more recently than others…

But we fell out of a birth-canal somewhere off of the Chesapeake Bay. Our nationality and an entire set of life parameters were selected for us… just like everyone else.

That’s one thing we don’t like about the US or Argentina, or anywhere else for that matter, is nationalism. It’s so emotional… Of course, that’s what people like about it. It gets the blood flowing and makes you proud. But it can make you sad too.

Until next time…

Yesterday we made the expatriate pilgrimage to renew our visas… a one hour fast-ferry ride across the Rio Plata to the pretty historic coastal village of Colonia, Uruguay.

Unfortunately it was a bit overcast, but we still have some nice pictures to show you (almost all of which were taken by our better, more talented, half)…

Of no concern to anyone except your editor… our little blog, started about two and a half months ago, has gotten over 25,000 visits… 

It’s been a humbling learning process, starting from scratch like this.

Before coming down to Argentina, we helped build and manage a daily email newsletter with a list of over 400,000 subscribers… so, getting less than a hundred ‘visits’ per day to this blog seemed like such small potatoes we almost wanted to stop bothering with it.

But things have picked-up and we enjoy writing to you about what’s happening down here…

If there’s anything you’d like to hear about from way south of the border… places, pictures, thoughts, whatever… just leave a comment on this thread and we’ll see what we can do.

Also, if you don’t want to miss out on anything then click on the subscribe link in the upper left column and get updates delivered via email…

 Thanks for reading!

WB

After two and half straight months in Buenos Aires with no respite from city life, we finally made our escape to a remote area of Salta province in the foot-hills of the Andes mountains of northwestern Argentina.

The land there is a lot like the southwest of the US… Arizona or New Mexico…

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

From Buenos Aires it’s a two hour flight to Salta city. However, Argentine airports and airlines are dependably unreliable, so, you can almost count on your flight being delayed. Our flight was a good 4 hours late… (One fringe benefit of this is that if you want to change a flight, to a new date, they will do it for free, which doesn’t make up for the chronic delays, but, it’s nice…)

The downtown of Salta city is charming…

The shopping is good… things are cheap. But there’s not a whole lot to do. As a tourist you probably wouldn’t want to stay there for more than a day or two, as there’s a ton to see around the province…

The land outside Salta city is a lot like California, with pretty rolling green hills…

However, after about an hour of driving into the mountains, the lushness gives way to a sparse high-altitude desert (8,000+ feet)…

To get where we were going would require four and a half hours of rough, bumpy, zig-zagging, dusty, dirt-road driving…

Some places are downright dangerous, a tight road on a cliff-side with no guard-rail and large truck coming the other way…

But after enduring the brutal car ride we had a wonderful time enjoying the sanctuary of the remote ranch retreat..

We did a lot of horseback riding, the main mode of transportation in the area, with a local gaucho as our guide…

We were hungry after a long horse-ride, so, we’d stop for a lunch served-up gaucho-style…

We visited a couple local towns. This is a no-man’s land outside Cafayate..

Cafayate is sort of like Santa Fe, New Mexico would’ve been about 50 years ago, with wineries… a very pretty area.

We had hardly any internet access out in the Argentine wilds and enjoyed being disconnected… But we’re back now and catching-up, slowly…

We’re still recovering from the return trip… Our flight was in the morning, so, we had to leave the ranch early, early as in 2am… we drove for 5 hours back through the rough roads to make our flight (we took a wrong turn which added a good 30 minutes to the trip).

This time your editor was not the driver, and for that he suffered dearly… Yes, we got car-sick and found ourselves wretching on the side of the road on more than one occasion.

And once we reached the airport we discovered that our flight was re-routed from another airport, and we had to take an hour long bus ride to get there… ouch… When we finally got home it felt as if the internal gyroscope of our frontal lobe had been turned to scrambled eggs.

But it was well worth it. The lower the lows, the higher the highs, dear reader…

More details to come about our trip and it’s aftermath…

You can indeed live here without speaking spanish, you can do it through the contacts listed in the Argentina Owner’s Manual and at International Living… That’s pretty much what we’ve done. There are services that can take care of any hassles, like setting up a phone line, internet, and utilities. Then there’s an entire English-speaking network of Argentine professionals, lawyers, consultants, real estate agents etc. The upper-class mostly speak English, it’s sort of a status thing…

While I think it’s ridiculous not to learn Spanish… It’s not like it’s Japanese… It takes time to learn, but you can get by just fine in the meantime. Plus, there’s a large and growing expat community here… While I don’t recommend it you could pretty much live in an English-speaking world in the middle of Latin America if you wanted to…

A Day in Buenos Aires

Nicely done video tour of various sights in Buenos Aires…

The city wasn’t named Buenos Aires for nothing… The weather is great. It’s summer, but not super hot. Most of the time we’ve been here it’s been clear, sunny, in the low to mid-70s. People tend to think that it’s going to be steamy jungle weather down here, but that’s not at all the case. It’s very mild. The year round average is 69F…

We’ve read that violent crime is now surging in many American cities after over a decade of declines. Most of this is gun violence between gang-bangers and other disaffected youth… In the US we know what to look out for in terms of crime, where not to go, and what to do…

Here in BA we’re not so sure. We were cautious when we first got here, but as we’ve become more familiar with the city, we may be getting over-confident and setting ourselves up for trouble. We’ve been walking around here at night more so than we would do in Baltimore….

We don’t really know what to look out for here. We first kept an eye on the poor-people collecting the card-board, but now we realize that these are hard working guys doing what they can to make an honest buck. They’re polite and don’t seem to be at all a threat. We’ve given them some money, even though they don’t ask for it…

What I think you have to watch out for, like in most places, are the angry young men. The ones that don’t want to work for a living… the lay-abouts looking for an opportunity to make a fast buck with a little crime. My wife and I walked past a group of young grungy looking guys the other day… and they tried to make contact with a little “hola amigo…”. We flashed a look that hopefully came across as, “I’m going to ignore you now, but if you want to push it I’m going deal out some punishment no matter what happens…” We’re pacificsts at heart, but every once in a while our Irish blood pumps hot… Anyway, nothing at all came of it…

While we are enjoying the city to the fullest we do need to keep our guard up. We read in the paper of robberies and an occasional murder, (you don’t know what’s not reported) but for a city of this size (12 million) it seems pretty darn safe in comparison to many places. (Much safer in comparison to Brazil. We’ll address Brazil in a future post…) That’s all for now, but we’ll keep you updated, dear reader, on the safety situation over time.

Our conference hosts flew us from Bonn in central Germany to the port city of Hamburg in the north to have a look at another part of their business. After arriving we were scheduled for a tour and dinner. As we were headed out the door we took the lining out of our jacket because it didn’t fit well over our suit jacket, this proved to be a bad decision as we had forgotten about the walking tour we were supposed to go on…

So we had a tour of the port wearing the equivalent of a wind-breaker… And on the bus ride there we sweated a little bit with our suit and tie on the warm bus, so little we usually wouldn’t notice. But we did notice when this perspiration practically froze after about 15 minutes out in the icy wind swept docks of Hamburg. The tour went on for almost an hour and a nice little drizzle developed about half-way through.

Everyone was cold. But your editor who lived in Florida for 5 years before moving to Argentina was particularly ill-prepared for the Nordic winds coming down on the Elba river from the North Sea. The port was interesting, a kind of Amersterdam on steroids… (the newer part is similar to Puerto Madera, except not as nice) But by the time we reached the restaurant we were frozen solid… So, now we have a nice little head-cold to take with us back to BA. We can’t wait to feel the warmth of the Argentine summer! But of course we have a nice long flight ahead of us before we do…

Well, the gods smiled on us and we received our bag yesterday morning… The only thing is out of our two suits only one is wearable. The other had been chewed up by Floridian “silver-fish”, little bugs that ravenously eat fabric… Anyway, a suit with holes in it is not going to work here in Germany, especially at meetings with suited Romanians, Poles, South Africans, French, Australians, Brits, and Russians. So to avoid international embarrassment I’ll go American business-casual…

Surprisingly though the Germans are very laid-back about getting started in the morning, here it is almost 10am and we haven’t started yet, people are kind of strolling in… and another stereotype broken… the sun came out for a few minutes this morning! 

When you take up residence in a foreign land it’s only natural to have moments of confusion about who you are and what you’re doing… But when you have one of these moments in front of German Immigration officers after being pulled aside while attempting to enter the country… well, that spells trouble…

“Speake de Deutche?” he asked, more forcefully this time…

“No, I don’t speak German. And I’m not doing anything wrong… just trying to go to a publishing conference in Bonn.”

“Where’s your ticket from here to Bonn?”

“I don’t have a ticket yet. They only gave me the tickets for Buenos Aires to Sao Paolo, and Sao Paolo to Frankfurt. They said I’d get the tickets for the next leg when I arrived in Frankfurt.”

“So, you don’t have a ticket?”

“No, they haven’t given it to me yet.”

“What about your bagage, where’s your bagage ticket?”

“I don’t have that either, it was on my boarding stub and I must have accidently left it at my seat…”

“You’ll have to come with us.”

After a 14 hour series of flights, your weary correspondent was whisked passed immigration, following the big ‘agent’ in the black leather jacket and followed by two other burly German plain-clothes polizei.

When we reached the investigation nook and a large stainless steal table, he said, “Empty out everything from your pockets. You haven’t been handling any drugs have you?”

“Drugs!? No, I haven’t… I don’t… anything…”

I held out my hands and was swabbed by a plastic testing device. They had taken out my laptop and were running tests on it as well as looking through my bag for the third time.

The disturbing thing was the way they were looking at the drug test kit and talking about the unfolding results… They seemed to be arguing with each other about what the results meant… “Oh, god”, I thought, “do they know how to use that thing?! Did I touch something in our apartment building, in the cab, in the airport??”

Then the agent in the black jacket put the drug testor in his pocket and stepped close…

“Look you’re coming from South America, so, we have to take precautions… You can go now.”

Maybe it was my appearance, the beard and need for a hair-cut… Our fumbling with answers about ‘living’ in Argentina, but only having been there for two weeks… Our story always sounds suspicious (even to friends and family). The roster of Central and South American countries on our passport certainly didn’t help…

Whatever it was I sure as hell hope I don’t have to go through that every time I enter Europe from South America!

After the interrogation we had to run to make our train for Cologne. We shivered on the platform as the train pulled up. All of our warm clothes were in our checked luggage. And when we arrived at the Cologne station we came to find that our checked luggage did not get there with us… We wondered the train station in our short-sleeved polo shirt until we found one of the few coats for sale (it was an ugly thing with a pathetic fake fur collar and the brand name ‘Russian Solid Jeans’, but dammit it’s warm!). On a Sunday afternoon all the clothes stores were closed. So, here we are with a week long conference ahead of us and only the clothes on our back…

Will our bag show up? We’ll see… More to come from the land of the Huns…

My wife’s not used to living in the city full-time. Everytime someone talks about anywhere out in the country her ears perk up and her mind wonders back to the Catskill mountains where she’s from… So for her I’m posting a couple pictures from our last trip out to Salta, Argentina, the foothills of the Andes in the northwestern corner of the country. It’s a beautiful part of the world… Click on each one for full effect…

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!