My name is Aaron and I am a Connecticut web designer spending 35 days in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina. I arrived here speaking only scraps of Spanish that I remember from High School.
Follow along as I fumble my way around BA, the Paris of South America.
¡Chau chau!
Needing to get my daily caloric intake back to pre-BA levels, I made a trip to the Disco store around the block. I’ve been in three different grocery stores here in BA, and they all play random American music. Today I walk in and Days of the New is playing. You just don’t hear Touch Peel and Stand while shopping in the US. I loved that album when it came out in 97.
Then there’s the packaging: a bikini clad woman suspended above a cup of yerba mate herbs.
Western Digital Passport portable hard drives apparently can handle a 4 foot drop to a hardwood floor and still work.
Tumblr blogs like this aren’t really meant to support comments. They’re meant more for simplicity. I think of Tumblr as somewhere between Twitter and a more feature-rich blogging platform like WordPress.
I want to go one more notch away from Twitter, so I’ve installed Disqus (prounounced like “discuss” I assume) commenting. Each post will have a link to the Disqus comment thread.
When you comment, leave the radio button on “Unclaimed” and fill in the other fields. Easy peasy!
It’s laundry time.
Now I’m used to the 28-minute cycle, coin-operated washing machines. I’ve also used my mom’s which was really easy. Can you make heads or tails out of any of these icons & symbols? I felt like I was trying to decipher ancient heiroglyphics. I put some clothes in, chose a setting, pushed some buttons in, turned it on and hoped for the best.
…and joined a gym. I feel like crap after eating all this Argentinian food and doing zero physical activity. It’s less than two blocks away and costs 140 pesos for one month. (Oddly, it costs 150 pesos for two weeks. No misinterpretation, it really is cheaper for more time.)
You know when you buy a new electronic device, you have to fold out this big huge instruction panel and it has about 8 languages on it? Or, at least in most instruction manuals you’ll have a Spanish section and an English section? Not so with my new Morotola phone. The one time I could really use multilanguage documentation I’m again swimming in an ocean of español.
With Buck’s help, picked up a cheap Motorola phone for 155 pesos at a Claro store around the block. Prepago (prepay/pay as you go). Not sure I can text internationally though.
FUBAR.
I’m fairly picky about my diet. Schedule-wise and food-wise. There’s a lot more types of food that I avoid than food that I do eat. For example, I don’t eat anything white (white pasta, white rice, etc), no fast food, no fried food. I avoid sodium, some oils, condiments, pizza, and several other things.
Now I realize that in the US casually eating out isn’t that healthy either, but in BA it seems magnified. Most places around town serve heavy pasta, empanadas, pizza made mostly of cheese (porteños for some reason aren’t into putting many toppings on their pies), pastries, etc. Greasy, oily, fried stuff is everywhere. And when you’re new in town it’s hard to find where to eat healthy. All the cafés serve you white bread and butter when you sit down.
So I started going to the supermarket. It’s not much better there. Finding anything whole wheat is a chore, especially when you can’t read much of anything. I bought some jamón (ham) which was super salty, but the bread I chose seemed to be whole grain. You win some, you lose some.
I average around 2800 calories/day. Since I’ve been here, I’ve likely averaged around 1500/day. You’re thinking but you just said everything around town was oily cheesy pizza, empanadas and pasta? True. But for various reasons, I’ve been eating around two unbalanced “meals” per day as opposed to the five balanced meals that I’m accustomed to. I feel like I have lost around 5-6 pounds. I have cinched my belt up one notch. I was 200 lbs on the dot when I left. I’ll be curious when I get back to the US. Combining this terrible eating with zero gym time and I feel pretty awful.
After an unsuccessful bid at getting in at a popular Recoleta restaurant called Cumaná, Jessica had a brilliant idea: takeout. We ordered from Cumaná, then we split the team; Karen and Danny went off to buy wine, Jess and I established a base camp outside the door to Cumaná.
Jess noticed a bar across the street had happy hour. So we ran up, each had a shot of tequila and a Corona. I was famished so I shoveled pretzles into my mouth, and we headed back across the street. By that time Buck had arrived. The five of us headed to Karen’s apartment to eat on the rooftop patio.
Now the five of us together established a collective of internet nerds. Karen and I were recalling that we had a typing contest one day when we were working at ESPN.com. Danny suggested we all play on typeracer.com. We spent the next hour and a half speedtyping.
It got quite competitive. Danny, unhappy with his first few rounds, was compelled to trim his nails in and effort to squeeze a few more WPM from his fingers. On average, Buck was the fastest. I struggled due to the tequila but we all were slowed to some extent from the wine. I had the overall slowest time of 50-something WPM - but also the overall fastest of 124. I was really happy about that, but my average sucked.
Being a loyal Packers fan, I felt the need to find a pub that was showing Monday Night Football. Buck suggested we head to the Alamo, about 10 blocks north. We headed there around 9pm.
It wasn’t crowded at all when we arrived, but by 10:30-11 it was busy. I met some foreign exchange students, some Linux nerds here on business, other American vacationers, and a German named Mario. Overall the place was a mixture of Americans and Porteños (I’d say 60/40, favoring the locals).
I don’t think either of us were planning on a long night, but we didn’t make it home till around 4am.
