Visitors and Home in BA

Visits from friends and family gave a chance to share this city during our summer.

Days of Wine and Graffiti

Mendoza is the wine center of Argentina, located at the foot of the Andes mountains, with a sunny, crisp climate not unlike Northern California. Valparaiso is the colorful French settlement in Chile that boasts a dense array of street art and old funiculars, ascenosores (elevators) that get people up the hills to their brightly painted houses.

Mendoza is the cleanest city in Argentina and there are aqueducts that line its city streets. Mindy, my sister, used to work in wine and is passionate about paint, so we took the double decker bus to wine country and then to the Chilean port city swathed in color.






From Mendoza, we caught a shuttle to neighboring town of Maipu. We rented bikes from Bikes and Wine and set off to see some wineries. The first one was the Rutini museum, with historic methods of juice extraction and a poor excuse for a tasting. But it's Rutini, one of the best labels, so we tried something and jumped back on the bikes. It was noon and we had a lot of wineries to get to.

You might think biking and imbibing don't really mix and, you'd be absolutely correct. Thing is, this is Argentina where, 1) people don't drink much and 2) capitalism isn't around. Nothing functions to make money, it's all about having a nice day and taking your time. Our bike trip? We drank very little wine, road very far on gravel with large trucks speeding by, and most of the wineries happened to be closed. Because it was Saturday and why have a winery open to the public that day?

Next day we went to the park to get some sun. We hung out at a big swimming pool there and ate at a strange, country club restaurant with a cold cut buffet full of German dishes. The park was nice but Mendoza was really boring. We were excited to cross the Andes.

Driving in South America is what you think it would be like. That's why the curtains are kept closed on buses, and why a lot of trips are done at night. That way the passengers can't see how scary the roads are. We didn't see enough of the landscape, but we did stop at the border, high in the mountains, to wait in line and show our passports where it was freezing in the middle of summer.

We got to Valparaiso and it was everything we'd hoped.




Winding, cobblestone streets, brightly-painted houses piled up on hilltops, murals and mosaics around every corner.








The port was an impressive example of history and function combined.
Chile was very different from Argentina. The warm, talkative people of the port city where I live were in contrast with the polite, Chileans who keep to themselves.
6 hours from Mendoza was a very different world. It was haunting and plaintive and it was beautiful.

International Affairs

I started a grad program yesterday, in international affairs with a focus on relations between the EU and the Mercosur. Tonight was the first econ class and we talked about growth, mostly Argentina's history which has been the story of a progressively richer nation hitting many economic walls. Today it is a country that could have been, that still hopes to become fully franchised, always looking to the US, Italy and Spain to join the ranks of the countries it identifies with in the First World. While 50% of Argentines subsist in poverty.

I take the bus from the marginal neighborhood where I live on the south side of the city, the old section of Buenos Aires proper, to the elegant part of town. Recoleta is where the wealthy shop and dine, it resembles areas of Paris, and Fendi and Louis Vitton are around the corner from the Universidad de Bologna.

The program is made up of 50 students, most in their late 20s from upper-middle class families in BA and neighboring La Plata. I had coffee with a well-dressed girl from Venezuela today and chatted up a guy from Puerto Rico. Rio, Mexico City, Quito, Rome and Milan are also represented. So far it's a nice program and I'm the only English speaker, deciphering Spanish and Italian lectures and trying to ask questions without stumbling. It's both exhilarating and extremely humbling.

One thing that always strikes me, living here, is that even the people at the top of regular society live well within their means. They are frugal, they live with their parents until they can buy something of their own, they eat at home, they wear clothes that show signs of actual use. They ride the bus. I saw the same when I lived in France and Italy.

Waiting in line for the bus on my way home, in my own skirt and blouse circa 1998 and Payless shoes from 2005, I revisited the lecture and how Argentina escaped the Great Depression by being in their own private economic bubble. Their economic progress has been bleak compared to that of the US but I thought how we Americans could learn from the Argentine response to crises.


I've spent the past four months working at the British newspaper here, doing some writing about economics and social issues and being really glad I don't have to be in this economy forever. On Wednesdays I visit the office of the paper, bought out by the national financial newspaper - their equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. Ambito Financiero can't pay my salary in full because they can't get access to funds. Their advertisers pay by check and the bank holds their funds for reasons I can't quite wrap my head around. So I join a thick book of invoices that have to be paid out bit by bit since the accounting department only gets a few thousand pesos in cash a week, and works through payments as it is able.

The accounting department of the national financial newspaper.



I'm reading my way through events at home and peeping chapters of Studs Terkel's Hard Times but obviously I am disconnected. Still, here in Argentina where I live off pesos I gather as I can from jobs long completed, I'm in the rhythm and thinking of you people back home, living through a gloomy piece of history. This cool article from today's NYTimes looked for the upside of dealing with market dribbles.

Let me know what is happening with you? It's hard to picture NYC slowing down or LA without petty cash. Besides, in economic downturn, isn't that when Hollywood, bars and city nightlife make the most loot?