Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is an exhausting place.
You don't go out for dinner until 10 or 11pm. Happy hour in bars usually runs from around 11pm to 1am. After that, you go clubbing.
I couldn't adjust at first. The first night I got there, I had some beers with the guys running the hostel, and started talking to a woman from Chicago. She was amazingly cool - she worked as a sommelier in a very upscale Chicago area restaurant, but had also trained as an EMP - "Emergency Medical Professional", and numerous other things. Passionate, and intelligent, she was a real "rolling stone that gather's no moss". Well anyway, she had a long story to tell, but the upshot was she had decided to sell up everything and head to Argentina, just to try something different. She'd already been in Buenos Aires for 4 weeks. Amazing as she was, I cannot remember her name now! Backpacking is unfortunately like this - you meet interesting people, but don't really get to know them well enough.
She said Buenos Aires is a lot like Chicago, and I think she's right. Cabs are cheap and plentiful (well, everything in Argentina is cheap). It's a grid layout - and there are numerous bars and steak places throughout the place. The north is the "nice part of town", whereas the south is the dodgy area that you don't really go into. To the east is the water, to the west is inland. There's also a cheap and efficient underground system that connects everything. There are huge streets - there's one "street" in Buenos Aires that has 8 lanes going each way. It takes you 30 seconds at a brisk walk just to cross it.
Differences? Well, Chicago has huge skyscrapers, and distinctive world famous architecture... In this respect, Buenos Aires is more like Paris, with more of a "cafe" culture.
About the taxis: I was warned about taking taxis before I left because apparently a number of robberies had happened from people taking rides in cars painted up to look like taxis, which weren't actually taxis. But nobody there seemed to pay this concern any mind, and after a while I did not either.
Well, by around 11pm I was tired, and thought perhaps I had a bit of a cold (my throat was really itchy)... So I went to bed... right when most people would start heading out for dinner.
Next night I made a better effort. First, I teamed up with the EMP-girl and headed to a classical concert. It cost 10 pesos - that's roughly 2 pounds. Everything in Argentina is amazingly cheap since they devalued the Peso. The acoustics were great and it was a refreshing change for me since Rio.
Then, at 11pm, it was time to head for dinner - steak of course - and back to the hostel for some drinks. Finally, at around 3:30am, it's time to actually go out to a club, where things are now in full swing. That's right: 3:30am, and things are in full swing. Unfortunately, it was at this point that everyone decided to take 2 Tequila shots, and one girl got so sick she spent the rest of the night throwing up in the women's toilets. Never mind - it was still a great night out, and we left the club at 7am.
Here's a shot of Buenos Aires taken at 7am:
Next day I walked around the city. Some people were making a huge racket, supervised by police, banging against the metal bars of a building:
The man's sign says "Antes tenia un Plazo Fijo. Ahora tengo un PROBLEMA!". I asked the guys back at the hostel about this... pretty much a translation for this might be
"Before I had a fixed term (deposit). Now I have a PROBLEM".
This was referring to the net result of the currency crisis in Argentina from 2001. Essentially, around the end of 2001 Argentina froze people's bank accounts, restricting how much money people could withdraw each day. A while after that, they floated (and effectively devalued) the Peso, which had been fixed 1:1 to the US dollar.
But things had grown a bit ridiculous before all of this anyway: Normally, a currency peg is backed by hard reserves - that is, there would be as many US dollars sitting in the currency board's bank account as there were Argentinian Pesos in existence. But due to political pressures and interventions, this was no longer the case, and the word had got out that Pesos were not going to be worth as much. Everybody was trying to convert their Pesos into dollars at the 1:1 rate, but everybody also knew there weren't going to be enough US dollars to go around. If the withdrawal limit had not been imposed, the banks would have run out of money as people withdrew all of their Pesos to buy US dollars.
I could try and explain it better than the above - except that after a dedicated hour searching on the web, there appears to be as many opinions on what happened in Argentina and who is to blame for what happened as there are economists.
The argentineans I talked to really didn't care to understand things to this level, and I suspect might reasonably have grown irritated with me as I quizzed them on their plight. As far as they were concerned, the government robbed them of a third of their savings, while a few croneys who knew what was going to happen got rich. Whatever happened, I agree that it wasn't the fault of the ordinary Argentinian people who paid the price. So I agree they were robbed - but I'm not sure by who yet. It's quite possible that either my previous or future employers made a lot of money off this situation.
I'd like to understand it better though. I need to find a good economist somewhere who really understands this.
In general, Argentina is an economic riddle. It has abundant natural resources, and previously had a very well educated population. Yet somehow, it's people are generally poor now. How did this happen? Again, there are lots of opinions, and no real answers.
Looking at Argentina, I was reminded that in the 80's, living in Australia, we were all scared that Australia might become like Argentina, when world commodity prices fell drastically. Australia was and still is a commodity-export economy with a large foreign debt. I still don't quite understand why this could not happen in Australia, or what fundamentally separates Australia from Argentina.