I felt like I was heading to a major drug deal
Buenos Aires is a quirky city full of contradictions
Love notes from Siel is a newsletter about love, writing, and the nomad life from me, Siel.
Dear friend —
One of the first things you encounter when you get to Buenos Aires is the speedy, all-digital customs process. Your passport doesn’t even get stamped! Instead it’s digitally scanned while your digital photo and fingerprint are taken, then you’re through. So efficient! So technologically advanced!
The second thing you notice about Buenos Aires is that the cabs are very old school. Most still can’t accept credit cards — and those that do often charge you extra for the convenience.
Buenos Aires is a quirky city full of contradictions, perhaps now more than ever. Some things are strangely easy and convenient and hassle-free. Want to visit the famous fine arts museum? Not only is it beautiful and well-maintained with a collection that includes works by Van Gogh and Goya, it’s also completely free. No need to wait in lines or buy tickets — you just walk right in!
But there’s also a lot that’s oddly difficult, complicated, and cumbersome in Buenos Aires too. Buying things, for example, is often not that easy.
Let me explain: In many countries — ranging from Guatemala to Iceland — you can mostly use credit cards, supplemented with a little cash easily withdrawn from the ATM for, say, street food. Not so in Buenos Aires. Many shops here don’t accept cards — or will tack on fees for the privilege — so you need to have a good amount of cash on you to go about your day.
That would be fine if you could easily withdraw Argentinian pesos in cash from ATMs — except you can’t. Or I guess you can, but it’ll cost you. The official exchange rate used for ATMs is noticeably worse than the free market exchange rate — plus apparently a fee of $15 or so gets tacked on for every USD$100 you withdraw via ATM.
ATMs here also have an odd habit of just running out of cash —
This is why many tourists arrive with a stack of bills in dollars or Euros, to be exchanged bit by bit at currency exchange shops. You don’t want to exchange all the money at once, as the Argentinian peso is rapidly sinking in value.
What happens if you run out of cash? The best option is to transfer money via Western Union, which offers a good exchange rate at acceptable fees. Unfortunately, the Western Unions here — suck? I haven’t used the chain in other countries so I don’t have a basis for comparison, but of the three Western Unions nearest my apartment in Buenos Aires, two have 2.3 star ratings on Google, while the third has a solid 1 star.
This is for good reason. At the first branch I tried, three employees sat chatting and occasionally yelling at would-be customers not to come in — the machines were still “warming up.” This was in the middle of a weekday afternoon.
The bigger Western Union offices are generally better — but always seem to have a long line. I waited over an hour in one. By the time I got to the front, the place had run out of bigger bills. I got my US$200 in mostly 200-peso notes — each equivalent to less than 20 cents.
Carrying the gigantic bag of cash, I felt like I was heading to a major drug deal — except I was just going to buy nectarines at the cash-only fruteria —
The biggest bill here, by the way, is the 2000-peso note — worth less than USD$2 — so carrying stacks of cash is the norm. I hear the country plans to start printing bigger bills in June — which is to say the country is going through some major economic transitions now that the new right wing president has taken over. So far he’s devalued the currency by 54% and laid off a lot of government workers. That’s what’s made inflation here spiral out of control — though it wasn’t exactly under control before, to be fair.
Yet it’s not as if the country is in turmoil! At least it doesn’t feel that way, walking around in gorgeous rose gardens and gigantic ecological parks — all free, and popular with both locals and tourists — in perfect summer weather. The public transportation system here is way better than most of those in the U.S. — and a ride costs you only about 6 US cents, thanks to the protectionist policies of the previous government.
Or it was until this morning, when I woke up and learned there was a transit strike. Suddenly, no buses! No trains!
Am I in a socialist paradise? Communist bureaucracy? A madman’s wild economic experiment? Who knows what may happen tomorrow? The subway fare might quadruple, the national airline get sold to a private buyer, the peso fall another 20%.
Eat, drink, and be merry —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
Today’s transit stoppage in Buenos Aires is part of a larger protest. “Argentina’s largest labor unions plan a nationwide strike — including workers in transportation, construction, health care, food services, energy and banking — to protest Mr. Milei’s planned overhauls, arguing they would weaken protections for workers and the poor. More than 100,000 people are expected to demonstrate across the country.”
How do you feel about America’s tipping culture? “Perhaps no entity did more to spread the practice than the Pullman Company. George Pullman preferred hiring formerly enslaved Black men as railroad porters. He paid them as little as possible, and used tips as a subsidy…. By the nineteen-twenties, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters estimated that the policy had saved the Pullman Company a hundred and fifty million dollars.”
How do you see couples with age differences? “When people see an age gap, they tend to imagine there is something intrinsically unequal about it — that the older partner wants someone they can control and the younger partner has daddy issues or is just out for money.”
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