Equipo Williams

We’ve just spent a week in Buenos Aires and have now sailed across the mouth of the Rio de la Platta to Colonia, Uruguay.  The plan is to spend a few days here and explore before taking a bus down the coast to Montevideo where we hope for a speedy reunion with our car.  We’ll see.

BA was lovely and fascinating.  The city has a very European feel, like an Italian city with a bit more space.  There are statues everywhere, the buildings have beautiful facades, there is a certain amount of decrepitude as fortunes have conspired to make once-prosperous families and places less prosperous. 

Arrival at Ezeiza and the Uber in to town were uneventful.  It did look like there were pillboxes lining the highway from the city to the airport, but I haven’t been able to figure out if that was right or not.  We arrived at our Airbnb which was sparse but very charming and after a quick introduction by our host we headed off to find pizza.  Dinner time is late in Argentina; we were usually first for dinner so we never had to wait for tables but frequently passed long lines when we left. 

We were able to pay for dinner with our debit card as we hadn’t gotten any pesos at the airport, but deciding we needed walking-around money we started the next morning looking for an ATM.  Argentina is the midst of a severe economic crisis: I think the year-over-year inflation rate hit 140% while we were here, which, if my math is right, means that the weekly inflation rate is a little under 2%.  Cash is reasonably hard to come by: ATMs severely limit how much you can take out in a day and how many transactions you can make in a day, and many places offer significant discounts (10-20% not uncommon) for customers who pay in cash.  Oh, and the exchange rates.  There are many.  There is the official exchange rate of about 350 pesos to the dollar, but as far as I can tell nobody uses that (maybe just the central bank).  When we paid with credit cards we got the blue dollar rate, which is closer to 850 pesos to the dollar, meaning that we routinely had full meals (three entrees, drinks, bottle of wine) for about $18 US.  An article I was reading last night reported the exchange rate this way:

The official dollar exchange rate went from 365.50 pesos to 368.50 pesos, depreciating 0.81 percent during Wednesday…

The “blue” or informal dollar, whose ups and downs impact price increases according to economists, rose on Wednesday by 4.8 percent, to 970 pesos per greenback.
The “CCL dollar,” for purchasing securities in pesos and selling them in dollars abroad, closed at 873.80 pesos.
The “MEP dollar”, for purchasing assets in pesos which are then sold in dollars in the local Stock Exchange, closed at 882.35 pesos.

https://batimes.com.ar/news/economy/argentina-adopts-daily-micro-devaluations-four-days-from-run-off.phtml

Yeah, so that’s what Argentina is dealing with.  I could go on and on about the economy but google is your friend here.  Oh, and the election: neither candidate had a good plan, and the eventual “winner” (much of his coalition seems to have been people who couldn’t bear to vote for the other guy) has plans that are considered unrealistic and will probably drive inflation higher in the short term.  I’ve seen articles that expect 180% by the end of the year. 

Anyway: we were able to get about 35,000 pesos from ATMs.  The largest bill in common circulation is only AR$1000, you end up carrying thick wads of money around.  I’ve heard of AR$2000 bills but haven’t seen one.  And the ATMs are kind of a pain; later we ended up sending ourselves money via Western Union, which is a more reliable and slightly better exchange rate.  The only downside is that you must go to an office and get thick stacks of bills. 

Our week consisted of going out in the mornings to the bakery for pastries, breakfast at home, and then schoolwork for the kids until lunch.  Afternoons were given over to exploration: visiting the tourist sites, exploring neighborhoods, eating far too much. 

We stayed near the neighborhood of San Telmo, so the first day was walking through the Sunday street market there and then eating vast slabs of cake for lunch at a café.  The market ran down the street of La Defensa and had various arts and crafts (lots of leather and matte gourds, plus literally anything that you can put Lionel Messi’s face on).  The neighborhood is old BA, and there are some beautiful buildings along the way.

We returned to San Telmo the next day for a tour of the El Zanjon de Granados museum.  It was an old house built by a wealthy family in the 1830s that became a tenement house from the 1860s to the 1970s.  They used the building to tell the story of the neighborhood.  Also, cool underground brick tunnels.  “For the love of god, Montresor!”

Recoleta cemetery is wonderfully weird.  First, like all of BA, it consists of beautiful old structures next to decaying and crumbling ones. Many of the mausoleums have stairs going down several levels.  As a tourist attraction they highlight the various grandiose and well-maintained graves: generals, presidents, a Nobel prize winner, various industrialists, and Eva Peron.  They were impressive, but I found the crumbling mausoleums more interesting than the pristine ones.  Dust to dust, memento mori, and all that.  In the crumbling ones there were frequently holes and broken doors so you could see inside.  I kept trying to convince Sydney to sneak in to some of them, being a skinny guy and all, and go down the stairs to the lower levels, but he was appalled at that idea: “I’m not breaking into a grave for you!”  Some grateful son I have. 

Mid-week we ended up at an eco-park in the Palermo neighborhood.  We hadn’t actually meant to go there but it was a fortuitous mistake.  It was an old zoo that was in the process of modernizing: there were pictures of old cage-like and barren enclosures next to the newer environments.  There were a few giraffes and an elephant, but local wildlife (something related to a capybara and several nutria) were just wandering around freely. 

Palermo is a neighborhood with a lot of parks, so after the zoo we went to a café, had ice-cream, and wandered around one of the larger ones.  The most obvious sign of Buenos Aires’ one-time wealth are the statues that dot the city.  Money and lots of European immigrants apparently equals lots of classical statues.  Every president, general, and ethnic group has a monument in marble. 

The place we had intended to go to when we ended up at the ecopark was a reserve on the banks of the Rio de la Platta.  We made it there the next day and walked through the various riverine ecosystems.  The Rio de la Platta is a brackish estuary, but I have no idea how the hydrology works beyond a quick skim of the Wikipedia article.  BA is far from the ocean, so the water is fairly fresh, and I think the surface and shallower regions in general stay fairly fresh.  It’s kind of hard to believe, because in Buenos Aires you cannot see the other side of the river: it’s about 60 kilometers to Uruguay. 

Our final full day was spent culturing the kids and ourselves.  In the morning we went to the Museum of Latin American Art, again in Palermo, before heading home to clean ourselves up for the opera.  The art museum had a pretty modern collection, but I was surprised there wasn’t more art aimed at the military dictatorships of the 70s and 80s.  I guess the campaigns against government opponents were brutal and sadly effective.  There was more art from before and after the Dirty War period.  The kids got to giggle at lots of nudity; they are, after all, nine and twelve. 

The opera was one of the highlights: the Teatro de Colon is an architectural masterpiece, and the acoustics are world-renowned.  They offer tours of the building, but Jessie and I thought that attending a performance would be more interesting.  The kids are probably not quite ready to sit through Madam Butterfly (and we couldn’t get tickets), but there was an afternoon performance of selected pieces that was about right for the attention spans. 

And that was BA.  It’s a beautiful town; it’s a pity that Argentina has had such a rough time over the last 80 years. 

Now we’re on to Colonia de Sacramento across the river, then Montevideo and our best attempt at Thanksgiving on the road and then the paperwork to get the car. We plan on being back in Argentina around mid-December once we have the car.