A "Virtual Kidnapping"

Right before I took off to Brazil, my spanish teacher Pato told me about a "virtual kidnapping" her family experienced the night before. It's a weird story, worth telling.

Kidnapping is definitely an issue in Latin America. Colombia is famous for it, and Mexico has had more of it in recent years. And since the Crisis -- the economic collapse of 2001/2 -- there has been a bit of it here in Argentina as well. Just today the TV news was reporting on a kidnapping of a daughter of a business owner. I'm not sure but it seems that although the victim is still held hostage, they have identified the kidnapper, a 24-year old male. Or maybe they somehow just figured out that he was 24 years old?

Anyway, about two weeks ago, Pato's father received a telephone call from someone claiming to have Pato's sister held hostage. The person wanted 30,000 pesos, I think (about $10,000 US dollars) -- something like that. Pato's father handled the situation relatively poorly. He said he did not have the money, so somehow the person on the phone got the father to give out the phone number and address of Pato, the sister of the person supposedly held hostage. The perpetrator then called Pato's number, and Pato's boyfriend Mark, a brit with so-so spanish, picked up the phone. He naturally could hardly understand the person, so not much progress was made, and I didn't really get the story of how that call ended. Pato was at school, and when she came home the police were there talking to Mark and I guess waiting for her.

As it turned out, the other sister was also safely in a class somewhere, and so no kidnapping had actually taken place. It was a fraud kidnapping, "un secuestro virtual" as Pato put it. But still, now the person has Pato's address and phone number. Not that that's much of a threat, it's easy to get someone's address and phone number. But still, it would certainly make me uneasy to be a target of this sort of thing.

It seems to be generally agreed that the two big concerns among people here in Buenos Aires and probably in Argentina as a whole are inflation and security. Prices are going up up up, and so making ends meet is harder and harder. But the rise of crime, especially violent crime, really seems to be the big problem to me, the problem that will have greater repercussions if it doesn't stop. People will become more and more wary, more and more distrustful. I think people are already more wary than they were two or three years ago. And then also if crime really spirals out of control, there will be support for rougher and rougher policing tactics, more authoritarian behavior on the part of the authorities. And, god forbid, the military might come to be seen as the best hope for maintaining "order".

This is the sad history of much of Latin America -- fluctuations between more representative governments and nasty military dictatorships. Let's hope the cycle doesn't repeat itself here.

Buenos Aires -- Ciudad Internacional

I have some much more serious stuff to write about tonight, but before I get to that, I thought I'd mention a great situation tonight at the gym. I was in spinning class with about 16 or 17 people in it. And it couldn't have been a more international crowd if it was in London or New York or Hong Kong. There were two people from the US, a Norwegian, two people from Venezuela, one from Mexico City, one from Switzerland, and a Guatemalan.

The teacher made a point of asking everyone where they were from, and it became more and more amusing as each person mentioned another country. Most of the latecomers were Argentines, too, so for a while the class was 2/3 foreign. It was funny and sweet, but it was also great -- a real sign that Buenos Aires is a world city, not just an Argentine city. Like New York, London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and a handful of others. Good company.

MY problem with cars here in Buenos Aires

As I've mentioned in other posts, the drivers here suck. They have a terrible, terrible macho road culture that puts everyone at unreasonable risk for no good reason. They talk about it every day on the TV news, they call it a crisis even. La inseguridad vial, road insecurity, they call it. Every day on the news they show all the accidents, they show the blood on the road, the bloody car interiors, the bodies on the ground covered by blankets. And still they drive like, oh, not madmen -- like assholes. No consideration for anyone else, pretty much my definition of an asshole. But culture changes slowly, very slowly, so I suspect the road carnage will continue for quite some time.

I don't like dwelling on the negative, but, hey, a few days ago I came as close as I've ever come to getting hit by a car. And it was absolutely 100% the car's fault. And this was the second time this happened, in almost the same way.

I went for a ride out to the suburbs on Monday, which was a national holiday. (For some reason commemorating or recognizing the military coup in the 70's, '76 I think.) I left around 2, and the roads were very quiet. I took Juan B. Justo, a great big road with not so many lights that leads out of town, and it was no problem -- nice and empty, like most sundays. Coming back, though, the road was quite crowded, and cars were driving aggressively as usual. It think people were coming back from vacation, because it had been a 5-day weekend.

Near-accident was simple -- I'm riding along at a good clip on my tank of a mountain bike, 13-14 mph, and a car turns in front of me to make a right. Going fast, clearly trying to "beat" me through the intersection. But, swear to god, there was about a meter, meter and a half maybe, between my front tire and the corner of the car that cut me off. Which, at 14mph, is not very much at all. I am a very aware, kind of paranoid, rider, and so I managed to break really hard, and I just barely missed the back side of the car -- less than a foot.

I was actually shaken up by this, and got off the big street and took the less direct (and frequently cobblestoned) side streets home.

All I could do was shake my fist at the car as it sped away. I could see that it was an older woman driving, with what looked like a family in the car. So macho driving is not limited to the males of the species here.

My earlier near-accident was indeed an example of macho driving, the worst kind of macho driving. In that case, I was at the interesection of Libertador, a giant through avenue, and the General Paz, the ring freeway which forms the boundary of the Capital Federal. Most of the cars were turning onto the freeway, so the only way I could get through the intersection was to jump the light and gun through the intersection before the cars took off. Standard urban biking, not dangerous, not particularly aggressive -- just getting the hell out of the way, essentially.

But, you know, get a young argentine male (futbol fan, no doubt) behind the wheel, and he doesn't like a guy on a bike (a dork wearing a helmet, no less) getting out in front of him. So even though i got a good head start through this big intersection, this guy accelerated hard and pulled past me and cut right in front of me. Again, I had to break really hard to avoid slamming into the passenger door. And I am a seriously, seriously skilled urban cyclist. I can't imagine how amateurs deal with driver behavior like this. (Although amateurs probably wouldn't jump the light and gun it across the intersection.)

Both of these drivers put my safety (and life) at an unreasonable risk. Especially the later guy, he couldn't possibly have saved even a full second by "beating" me through the intersection. The woman, maybe she had some other crazy driver on her tail. But she could still have braked a little and let me through the intersection.

So what's to take away from all this, besides "fuck you people!"? As I said before, it's a kind of culture, the road culture here, and it changes slowly. I guess sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago US road culture was full of carnage, and probably devoid of consideration for other drivers and pedestrians and cyclists. So our road culture evolved. And here in Argentina, oh, I guess this particular aspect of culture hasn't evolved so much. So if I'm going to keep cycling here, I just have to accept it and be careful.

As a nice quantitative example of the "inseguridad vial" here, check out this nice graph showing traffic fatalities per million cars on the road:

problems with cars

One of the reasons I keep coming back to Buenos Aires is that it's a city where you can easily live without a car. Much like New York, much like many of the great cities worldwide that developed before the auto became so common. Seoul, no; Barcelona, si.

The posh districts of the Capital Federal, where foreigners such as myself are likely to live, are relatively close together and are generally close to the subway system. But it turns out that the subway system is quite limited. So most of the public transport is via these crazy buses that run in very perplexing routes and get very full. And these buses really barrel around -- just two days ago, there were two bus-on-bus collisions in the morning rush hour, one of them very serious -- sixty injured, two or four killed.

And so Buenos Aires is more of a car town than I thought. I'm in a pretty central area, and of the four apartments in this building occupied by locals, three of them have a car. Traffic here is just terrible -- maybe not quite as crowded as New York, but the drivers here have much worse habits. (I was going to say "skills", but that would be too generous.) There is a kind of aggressiveness on the roads, a devil-may-care attitude about safety, that just drives me insane. I can't tell if it's a symptom of latin machismo, or italian carefree-ness, or some combination, but whatever it is, it's my least favorite thing about this town.

This week there has been a great deal of attention on the news to the road conditions, because of the aforementioned bus accidents, but more importantly because of another accident where an 80-year-old driver barreled into a crowded sidewalk on Avenida Rivadavia, one of the biggest streets here, killing one and seriously injuring four or five others. Worse, the dude kind of kept going -- he crashed into the sidewalk, then veered back onto the street and kept driving, dragging someone under his car. Nice, huh? And of course the local news had no qualms about showing the trail of blood on the street. Maybe that's macho as well, I don't know.

So there's been lots of discussion about whether eighty year olds should be driving, and how to make sure that those who shouldn't be driving aren't. Which leads me to the subject line of this post.

Here's one of the worst problem with cars, or rather with a society physically organized around car-based transportation -- Driving a one- or two-ton vehicle around at high speed is not something that should be done by anyone at any time, but because it's such an integral part of functioning in our societies, not being able to drive is a serious handicap. If you can't drive, because you're old, or you're sick, or you're intoxicated, you're a second-class citizen. And people don't want to be second-class citizens, and so they drive even though they shouldn't be. So you get eighty-year-olds and drunks killing people on the roads.

It's easy to blame the drunks, but it's harder to blame the eighty-year-old. No one wants to admit to diminished capacities. And ninety-nine percent of the time, driving is easy, very manageable. It's just that one percent or that one-tenth of one percent of the time when you need good reflexes, peripheral vision, and depth perception.

On a personal note, my father is now 75, and he lives in rural Washington state. He's in excellent shape physically, but he's 75 and he just doesn't drive as well as he once did. Not at all. My older sister and I joke morbidly that the only way he's going to die before 90 is behind the wheel. But driving has been such a part of his life, and it's so essential where he lives, he'd have to really, really deteriorate before he could submit to be chauffeured around by his wife.

This is a long-term problem, not a short-term one. Sure, you can test people more, you can have roadblocks for drunks. But still, people are going to want to drive. And also, just on a fairness measure, you don't want to create second-class citizens out of those who can't drive. There just needs to be other ways of getting around. And more importantly, things need to be organized differently, more densely, to enable effective public transportation. Like I said, long-term problem -- none of us are going to live long enough to see it resolved.

Slum Tourism -- A Tough Issue

It's been years and years since I read any real philosophy, and even in my undergraduate days, I could barely slog through it. I think I'm too impatient -- it's such unbelievably slow going sometimes. If you'd ever cracked "A Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanual Kant, I'm preaching to the choir. But I have a restless mind and so I'm attracted to philosophy. I've been reading a free e-book I found online, "100 Great Philosophers" or something like that. Philosophy very, very "lite". And perhaps the most valuable insight I got out of this book came in the introduction, which addressed what it is that philosophers do. And largely, what they do, is address questions for which there are no answers, or at least no agreed-upon answers. Questions that resist answers.

And this is right up my alley. Issues to ponder, to turn over and over in your head, trying to get to the bottom of them. In many cases you get closer, but usually, there just aren't answers.

And one of the thing that discourages me the most about our culture these days is that people feel they have to have an answer to everything. A firm opinion, not an open-ended, well maybe this, maybe that opinion. And of course, most of the people who have the firmest opinions are the ones talking almost exclusively out of their assholes. Idiots, in other words.

So the reason I haven't updated my blog in two weeks, except for a brief rant a couple days ago on futbol violence, is that I've been chewing over an interesting issue that was brought up by an article in the travel section of the new york times. The article got under my skin a little, and then the 200+ comments, most of which I read, really got under my skin.

The article is on organized slum tours, where some enterprising local or expat takes a group of tourists to see a slum of one of the larger third world cities. The article mentions it being done in Rio, Mumbai, and Mexico City, and I know that it's also done here in Buenos Aires.

The impossible-to-answer question is this -- is slum tourism bad, or good? Really, that's it.

Like any conventional journalism exercise, the article presents two sides of the story, each side presented by one or more Qualified Experts. Someone who is a professor of Tourism and the Environment (which sounds like a sweet gig) thinks it is Bad. Someone else, who is the director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism thinks it is Good. Actually the later qualifies what he says quite a bit, but says it can be good.

Both of these experts make good arguments. The professor asks quite reasonably whether you'd want people walking by your door every day, snapping a few pictures, and moving on. What he doesn't ask, but obviously implies, is whether you, as a poor person living in a hand-built shack in a slum, would like to have rich people parading by gawking at you for a few minutes, and then moving on back to their fancy hotels and their fancy lives. He also notes that for many people the exposure to the slum just serves to remind them of how good they have it, by displaying at close range how bad many other people have it.

And sure enough, this hits me a little where it hurts. I have traveled lots and lots in mexico and now argentina and many other relatively poor countries. And I have always said that this is good, that it "puts things in perspective". And the perspective I would get, surely, is that I'm super-duper-lucky to have been born where and when I was, and not in the slum outside Mexico City or wherever.

From this perspective, slum tourism, and to some extent my own travels, are ethically suspect -- they represent the fortunate coming to gawk at the unfortunate, just to be reminded of their good fortune. Or put another way, the powerful using the weak to help them appreciate their power. Sounds pretty ethically suspect to me. And it sounds very plausible, and no doubt in many cases accurate.

The other chap, the director of the center for responsible tourism, says that slum tourism can promote awareness of poverty, which can be a first step in addressing and maybe some day alleviating it. He has a nice quote: “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”

The article doesn't have him getting into specifics, but I can think through this side of the argument. It's an extension of the idea that tourism, or at least certain kinds of tourism, helps foster cross-cultural understanding, hopefully leading to greater cooperation and less hostility among countries and cultures.

And I do believe that international travel can have this kind of positive effect. It is eye-opening for a lot of people to travel overseas, to interact with people of a different culture, to see the common humanity that we all share. I don't know, but I suspect that people who have traveled and gotten to know people in different cultures, are going to be more understanding and respectful of the interests of others. And probably less likely to start a war with them, less likely to hideously exploit them economically.

Think of the really Bad americans you know, or know of. The ones who just want to exert american power and influence around the world as much as possible. The ones who can really do some damage, and who have been doing damage. Are these people who have traveled a lot overseas, in particular to less-developed countries? People who have gotten to know, or at least been significantly exposed to, people from much more disadvantaged backgrounds? Probably not. (I do remember hearing that before his presidential campaign began, the only time our Current Occupant had left the US was for a brief vacation in Cancun. I'm not sure if that's true.)

So to me, the principal benefit of slum tourism is this -- by exposing the powerful to the less-advantaged, making clear that even the most poor are in most important ways just like the, maybe the powerful will be less likely to totally fuck over the weak.

I guess the new york times can't put it that way, but I think that is really what it boils down to.

There are practical questions about this positive effect, of course. First of all, there's self-selection. Perhaps only the people who were already sympathetic to the plight of the down-trodden are likely to participate in such tourism. And self-exclusion, too -- the really bad people, the ones who may do the most damage, are the ones least likely to participate in this sort of thing.

But there's a giant middle in there, and as in many cases, the giant middle has a huge effect, even if it's indirect. If we could have gotten the giant middle in the US to think about the Iraquis in 2003, rather than TV images of burning towers, then we would not have spent a trillion dollars turning that country into such a mess and making the whole world hate americans again.

And so if we could get the giant middle to think about the disadvantaged of the world a little more, rather than just themselves, perhaps our influence and activities in the world could be directed towards making the lives of these people better. And perhaps slum tourism, or some variant of it, could be a way of reaching that giant middle.

But back to the tourism professor, I totally agree, you absolutely don't want rich foreigners traipsing around slums gawking at the poor people as if they were animals in a zoo. That is just ugly. The second guy made the point that this kind of tourism needs to be done "respectfully", in small groups, with the consent of the community, and unobtrusively.

But honestly, I think this is a very big challenge. Most of these slums are really, really poor. Like these people frequently have an annual income of under a thousand dollars, under five hundred dollars even. Anytime you have that kind of disparity in wealth, I don't know how you can avoid the feeling amongst the poor that the visitors are flaunting their wealth.

One program mentioned in the article, in Mazatlan, Mexico, kind of combines slum tourism with very light charity work. Visitors can go and spend some accompanied, guided time in the poor community, but they have to participate in charitable activities, like passing out food. This sounds like a good arrangement -- the visitors are actually producing some tangible benefit for the community.

So, where do I stand on this? Good or Bad, Dan? I don't know, but I think it could be good, or could be bad. The devil is in the details, right? I do think there is great, great potential for this being pretty ugly -- rich people with thousand dollar cameras taking pictures of the poor in their hovels with open sewers running alongside. Very ugly. But I do think under the right circumstances this can be a positive thing for the poor community. And I also think that if the economically advantaged are more routinely exposed to the economically disadvantaged, in the long run the advantaged may be less likely to abuse their powers. But that was a very qualified maybe -- people can be very, very ugly, for sure.

So after thinking about this for two weeks, my opinion on this is still very very divided and qualified. In contrast to about 3/4 of the comments posted, most of which were posted the same day.

As I mentioned earlier, I find it very disturbing how americans these days feel they have to have a strong, rigid opinion on everything. And sure enough, most people posting comments came down very strong on one side or the other of the ethical spectrum. (I'm reminded of the kind-of-lame frankenstein on Saturday Night Live a few years back. Everything was either BAAAADDDD, or GOOOOODDDDD.) But some of the responses were clearly very measured and thought-through. If you look at the article, I highly recommend looking at the comments page -- it's actually much, much more interesting than the article.

I'll close with the comment that I liked the most. I found it rather powerful and kind of disturbing:

I lived in Mumbai in 2003, close to the world trade center in a large and beautiful residential tower. It was only a couple of streets away from the nearest slum and the people that lived there were essentially the 'support staff' of the wealthy who lived in the towers. They were cleaners, cooks, garbage collectors, elevator operators and street sweepers, keeping the district and its wealthy residents in tip top shape. I was always fascinated with the slums of Mumbai and would walk my shirts down to the local ironing men, on the edge of the slum to have them pressed. One day, my curiosity got the better of me and instead of handing over the clothes and turning back, I headed in, winding my way through the tiny lanes. I hadn't been walking for 2 minutes when a young man stopped me - and in halting english asked me what I was doing there. I said I was just walking and looking. He looked at me, then at the ground and replied, madam, you not see this. In an instant I was looking at the ground. I apologized, turned on my heel and left. My curiosity got the better of me, I wanted to see inside those homes, look through the doorways, see what 'they' did in there. I didn't think about their dignity, that these shacks were someone's home. I would never walk through a neigborhood in the US to see how the people lived, to look through their doors, to see what 'they' did in there. That young man taught me something about myself that day, I thank him for it, and I will never forget him.

more futbol madness

A couple years ago I read a book called "How Soccer Explains the World." It was naturally written by a soccer fan, and I found it disappointing -- I didn't think it explained much, actually. But now, after watching the local news in Buenos Aires for three months every day, I'm thinking the more interesting book would be called "How Soccer Explains Most of the Bad Things in the World."
(Image from La Nacion, used sin permiso!)

I tend to think of futbol, and pretty much all sports, as a kind of ritualized battle. One side v. the other, somebody wins. A battle, nothing less. and the sports fans, supporting one side or the other, become vicariously involved in the battle. And in places like Buenos Aires, and all over the world really, a culture evolves around this vicarious participation in battle that elevates it in importance. And to be sure, this taps into some deep genetic impulses that everyone, but especially males (obviously) carry around. Sure, it's a survival thing -- the young men are the strongest and fastest of the group, so over the millions of years that we evolved, they had to fight to protect the group. So being a futbol fan gives the young males a chance to participate in some level in a battle, which some genes somewhere say is a good thing.

The problem is, battle is not a good thing. Not at all. Battle is violence. Battles frequently get out of control. Especially in a heavily populated, urban society. The battles get out of control, and kids get killed at soccer games, people get stabbed. One kid got killed at a game on saturday, then on sunday there was something of a riot at a Boca Juniors game. A hundred and eighty people were arrested, and one older guy was stabbed. Cars were burned and overturned, i'm sure there were dozens and dozens of injuries.

And it's not just a matter of game-day violence. The bigger problem is that this battle-related violence may tend to legitimize violence and a generally confrontational attitude. Gotta be tough, right? You can't help but notice the attitude, the dudes wearing the futbol shirts. Not all of them -- lots of dudes wear futbol shirts, but you can easily spot the ones looking for trouble.

Argentina, like italy, brazil, england, and lord knows dozens and dozens of other countries has a futbol culture that glorifies belonging to a group of supporters of a team. It becomes way, way too much of these people's identities. And when it's that much of your identity, you start to justify anything done in the name of "supporting" your team.

Seems to me to be very much like a street gang. Your gang becomes your support network, and before long you become willing to do anything to support your gang.

And of course it's generally the people (okay, men - let's be clear, this is a male problem) who don't have that much else going on in their lives who become the most trouble. They're frustrated by their place in society, their lack of opportunities. And being a member of the "Barra Brava" -- the brave/crazy fans -- gives them an outlet for asserting themselves.

So, hell, what is there to do about this? Nothing, it seems. This is cultural, and it's hard to change culture. Although it does change over time -- the soccer fans in england are much, much less thuggish than they were twenty years ago. So what happened? Actually, I hate to say it but it seems that england just became a lot richer. In the seventies, eighties, things were looking kind of bleak in england. And now, it's much more posh. The soccer teams were bought by big companies and really rich people, the stadiums fixed up, the prices raised, and over a decade or so, soccer became 'family entertainment'.

And note how in the US we have a very limited amount of sports-related craziness. OK, once in a while the post-victory celebrations get out of control, but that seems to be about it. And of course the US is pretty rich. But what about the italian example? Italy is now a pretty rich country, but I think they still have trouble with their futbol fans. Although I'm not really sure.

OK, I admit, this is a rant. But it's something I think about a lot. Dan's original quote of the day -- "Violence -- it's a problem." I just hate the futbol culture, because it seems like a violence incubator. We really, really need fewer battles, not more.

You can't buy Pepto Bismol in Buenos Aires, but...

This week I had my first experience with mexican-vacation-style upset tummy here in Buenos Aires. It wasn't too bad, I wasn't sick-sick, but my tummy hurt for three days or so and I didn't want to leave the apartment for a day or so. And I found out that you can't buy Pepto Bismol in buenos aires, or anything remotely resembling it. (Pink Bismuth? I've seen it called that in generic form in the states. Bismuth, hmmm...)

Which is fine, not everything has to travel internationally. But really, this would be a good thing to travel. I see it everywhere in mexico and central america, at least everywhere where foreigners might go, probably for good reason!

But one thing that shouldn't travel is this -- daily updates on the doings of Britney Spears on the local news. And I mean daily, like, every single day. We get the big news of other stateside 'stars', like j-lo's twins and, I don't know, Victoria Beckham or whoever. But swear to god, every single morning, around 11:45, the "entertainment news" comes on my favorite news channel here, and i get the Britney update.

The world is a strange place.

FWIW, here are some other things you can't get in Buenos Aires which would be nice: pseudoephedrine (for sinus headaches), hydrocortisone (for mosquito bites, which are ridiculously frequent), a decent chocolate chip cookie (please, just some chips ahoy!), swiss cheese, turkey (never did I think I'd miss turkey sandwiches, boring as they are), and, maybe worst of all, screens for the windows.

Everyone has these little devices that they plug into an electric outlet, which take a little "tablet" of some toxic chemical. It seems the device melts the tablet, causing the toxic chemical to permeate the air and kill or annoy or tranquilize the mosquitos. And nobody, nobody has screens on their windows. (My spanish teacher says "en el campo", out in the country, they have them.)

I hate to admit it, because I'm generally anti-air-conditioning, but I took to keeping the windows closed and running the AC when I needed to, just to keep the damn mosquitos out. Now it's March, the equivalent of Sept. in the northern hemisphere, and there aren't many mosquitos left, thank god. Fresh air in the apt. again.

Oh one last thing that travels in surprising detail -- coverage of the US primaries. I wouldn't think the primaries would get that much attention, but they spend tons of time on the local news channels seriously analyzing what's going on in the US political process. This is probably a good thing -- lord knows it's going to affect them, a lot more than whether britney breaks up with her current loser boyfriend or whatever.

Friday Afternoon with the Cats

Within a year or two of moving to New York City from bucolic Portland, Oregon, I found a book called Marcovaldo, or Seasons in the City by Italo Calvino, an Italian writer. Its a short collection of beautiful stories about Marcovaldo, a simple laborer in an unnamed Italian city. Marcovaldo is a simple creature, who goes about his business as best he can, but he's also a bit of a dreamer and so he gets into some adventures.

I loved this book when I first moved to the city, because Marcovaldo was very soulful and had a craving for a natural sort of life, and he sought it out in the nooks and crannies of the harsh city. For instance, in one of the stories (I believe - it's been a long time!) he finds a mushroom growing in the city and he gets very excited and tries to protect it as it grows. My favorite story, the one that has stuck with me over these many years and the subject of this long introduction, is called "The Garden of the Stubborn Cats". In this story, Marcovaldo befriends a cat near his work, and he starts following the cat around, seeing the city from the cat's point of view. This eventually leads Marcovaldo to the titular garden, the last free space in the city for cats to gather. There's not much too it, narrative-wise, but it's a lovely story. It's actually available online (maybe some grad student's translation?) here. And if you like it, I highly recommend the book, which I just saw is available new on Amazon for a whopping $2.60!

Which brings me to the real topic of this post -- my trip today to the Jardin Botanico in Buenos Aires. This park, perhaps the nicest in the city, is about a half-mile from my apartment, and it is the home to many abandoned cats. I had some time to kill today, so I did what I've done many times, and went over and hung out with the cats. I love to do this. I find it incredibly charming when there are cats lounging around a public place. Mind you, I like dogs just fine, but I wouldn't want a hundred stray dogs in a big park. A hundred stray cats, though -- it's kind of sweet.

I found two nice cats who wanted to be my friend today. There were actually many cats out today, but I got enough action out of these two, so I didn't go looking further. Here is the first cat:


As you maybe can see, this cat was very clean and healthy-looking. Perhaps it had not been in the park too long. Most of the cats are no doubt abandoned by owners, and some of them can get pretty scruffy. This cat was very pretty and seemingly healthy. Unfortunately, this cat seemed to be more interesting in doing the self-petting routine in my presence than in actually having me pet him. It's a strange habit of cats, something to do with spreading their scent, I guess. Anyway, this cat took off, so I focused my attentions on the other.

The second cat was also handsome in his own way. He had beautiful black fur, and seemed relatively clean. He was very, very skinny, though -- definitely not well-fed. And there was one other thing that you might notice if mr. black cat came up to you for a little pet -- he was totally missing one eye:
This was not a damaged eye, this was a missing eye. Like, a sunken, kind-of-puss-encrusted eye socket with no eye in it. So of course my heart goes out to the disadvantaged kitty, and I tried to be as nice to him as I could. These park cats tend to be a little wary though, so you often don't get to spend too much time with one before it slinks away. This one actually went away and came back a few times, which is how I managed to get the picture. Poor kitty -- I'm going to have to start bringing some food down there and feeding them. I hope I can find this one again.

I'm clearly not the only one who likes going to the park and hanging out with the cats. It's kind of heart-warming, actually, there seems to be quite a number of people who come to the park regularly to be with the cats, and sometimes to feed them.

And speaking of feeding the kitties, I saw a lady today who the cats really seemed to know. As I said, they're usually a little wary, even when there's food around, but not with this lady:
This was great, and I wasn't the only one who thought this was hilarious. A nice moment in our own little Garden of Abandoned Cats.

Inundacion!

The word for 'flood' in spanish is "inundacion", which I love. It sounds so much more dramatic than "flood".

So today we had inundaciones around the city. It was raining buckets this morning, for several hours. Way, way more rain than we get in New York except maybe once a decade. This is a pretty regular occurrence here, the semi-tropical downpour that floods the streets.

There was a big lake in the street outside my window, though only two or three inches deep. But a few blocks away, it looked like this:

I saw an image like this on the TV news at around noon, and got all excited. Oooh, baby, here I am, so close to trouble! (Right -- in my comfy apt on the 3rd floor, with the cable TV on, etc.) Then shortly after the electricity went out. Trouble indeed! But no, the rain stopped shortly thereafter, and I just laid in bed and read a book for an hour or so. I did have to take a cold shower before heading out, though -- oh, how I suffer!

I had spanish class downtown, and I wasn't sure if the subte (subway) was running, but amazingly it was. Delays, of course, delays in jam-packed cars full of hot damp people. (No AC in the trains here, not for 30 cents a ride.) But amazingly, it was running, right under the street where this picture was taken a couple hours earlier.

I swear, it amazes me that places like Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and for that matter New York, manage to run as smoothly as they do, with all the things that can go wrong. God bless those hard-working civil servants and whoever else keeps the cities running.

This evening the local TV news (which I watch for spanish practice!) was full of hand-wringing about the flooding in Buenos Aires and how the government has not planned well enough and has not done the public works that it should etc. etc. etc. But honestly, I was shocked that the city cleaned up as fast as it did. The first thing I said to my spanish teacher was, hey, you guys have some good alcantarillas (sewers) here. She wasn't buying it.

Neihgborhoiod Rallies in Support of Cartoneros

As I noted in an earlier post, I think the presence of the Cartoneros here in Buenos Aires is pretty much the most interesting thing about being in Buenos Aires right now. Throughout the whole city there is a small army of freelance recyclers combing through all the garbage looking for anything of value. Anything they find they carefully pack up and pull around in these very primitive two-wheeled carts:

They are called Cartoneros because most of what they gather is cardboard, or carton. Though they'll take anything of value. You see things like toilet bowls, old beat-up mattresses, and discarded computers in their carts -- anything, really.

They used to have a train that ran specifically for the Cartoneros, called the Tren Blanco, or white train. This ran from downtown out to the outskirts, where most of the cartoneros live. (They couldn't possibly afford to pay rent in the city. They make about a hundred bucks a month. And they work hard, all day, for a hundred bucks a month.) They canceled the Tren Blanco about a month ago, though I don't know why.

So now lots of the Cartoneros are screwed. The only option they have for moving their findings
is on a truck. And lord knows there are trucks working with the Cartoneros -- I see them loading up late at night when I'm out on my bicycle.

But unfortunately there appears to be more Cartoneros than trucks. So there are Cartoneros who are essentially trapped in the city, living on the streets, in lots, in parks, waiting for the weekend, or whenever they can get a truck to pick them and their findings up.

There was a big group of Cartoneros living in the fancy neighborhood of Belgrano the last few weeks. This isn't so far from where I live -- maybe two miles. It's pretty upper-middle-class, maybe like the upper west side of manhattan. (Recoleta would be the upper east side, I guess.)

Last week I was watching the local news, and they showed a "desalojo de Cartoneros" -- the police forcibly evicting the Cartoneros. There were a number of people passively resisting, and the police picked them up by the arms and legs and dragged them through the streets into police vans. And there were tons of people screaming and shouting and just general mayem all about. It looked pretty ugly on TV, and I guess it was.

This kind of bugged me, of course. These poor Cartoneros, lord knows they work hard, for probably the lowest possible pay. These people -- men, women, and lots, lots of children -- don't dawdle, they hustle around all day, very industriously. And then they have to manually pull these carts through the street, sometimes loaded crazy high with stuff. So all I could think was, oh, the fancy Portenos (residents of Buenos Aires) couldn't stand to have the unfortunate unwashed around, so they got the police to do their bidding. The bitter taste of vastly uneven distribution of wealth.

But my faith in the Portenos was renewed a few days later when I saw on the news again that there was a demonstration of residents of Belgrano protesting the police action to remove the Cartoneros. There were lots of man-on-the-street interviews with people at the demonstration, and almost all of them said some variation of the same thing -- these poor people, they are just trying to make a living, there's no other work out there, you have to respect them for trying to feed their families, etc., etc. It was nice, a nice reminder that despite its current economic situation, Buenos Aires still has a strong liberal, communitarian ethos.

Lots of good people here, even in the fancy neighborhoods.

Futbol fan police escort

I just saw the strangest thing about an hour ago. I coming out of the big park in palermo, and I hear police sirens coming from a long way away. As I was coming to the edge of the park, the sirens were just starting to pass by. There were a few motorcycle cops up front clearing the way, and then the main group, spread out over about a quarter mile came up. And this group seemed to be nothing but futbol fans on their way to today's game for River Plate, one of the two big local futbol teams.

There were four or five old dilapidated buses, with guys hanging out the windows and leaning out the doorwells, all yelling and hooting and what-not. My first thought was, oh, that might be fun, but then I saw that the buses were absolutely jammed inside, like worse than the worse rush-hour subway. I'm kind of guessing that the old buses didn't have any seats either, it looked like everyone was standing up, cattle-car style.

There were also about 15 or 20 cars filled with these guys, too, and some motorcycles. And these were for the most part grown men, I think, guys in their 20's it looks like, though surely there were plenty of teens and guys in their 30's and maybe even 40's.

And there were flags and banners and stuff, of course, draped across the sides of the buses, and held out the windows of the buses and cars. Because, lord knows, these guys want to make sure that we know who they support.

What's interesting here, of course, is that a bunch of knuckle-heads on their way to their team's game have to have a police escort. And it was a substantial police escort -- There must have been 10 motorcycle cops, and about 4 or 5 police cars, and they were stopping cross-traffic and everything. Clearing the way so these fans don't come to a stop. Lord knows what would happen then, I suppose.

I haven't researched this phenomenon or paid it much attention, but it seems to be a big part of life here, and elsewhere. Young men who support some sports team (pretty much always soccer, it appears) in such fervent fashion that they become dangerous. Here they refer to the rowdy fans as "the barra brava", which means the fierce, brave, or angry fans. Fierce seems to be the appropriate word here. There was a big scandal here a year or so ago, an internecine battle where the River barra brava fought amongst themselves to the point of plotting great violence against each others, maybe even murder. (I'm not that sure of the details, and don't really want to put in the effort to find out -- this stuff makes me sick.) Really, I just don't get it.

One thing that's interesting and not at all surprising, is that this is entirely a male phenomenon. I remember reading this about the UK, how twenty, thirty years ago when they were having real soccer thug problems, the fans were all male. Then after much cracking down and much cleaning up of stadiums and much general prosperity, soccer game attendance has become a family matter, and the thugs just aren't a problem anymore.

I thought of this when I came home and saw on the local news some beauty contest, swear to god, miss argentine wheat, or the wheat queen or something else suitable to the national wheat festival. It was the usual, fantastically beautiful twenty year-olds parading around in bathing suits. And I thought, girls, don't let your guys turn into soccer thugs. But they do, and I think this is a big problem in this society, and in a lot of societies.

What problem, you ask? It's this -- too much segregation of the sexes. The girls here seem to do girly things together, and the boys do boy things together. It's very group-y, this culture, it seems, much like spain. Everyone goes out in groups. But here the groups seem very sex-segregated. Mind you, there are plenty of counter-examples, but in general it seems that the girls here are happy being girly amongst themselves, and the boys are left to be boyish among themselves. And what does this produce?

Boys acting like sociopaths, that's what. Futbol fans that require a police escort.

More on Cartoneros

I'm putting up another post on Cartoneros just because I got a better picture of one today, one with his cart somewhat loaded up. Cartoneros are the city's freelance recyclers. I wrote a long-ish post about them last week.


This guy is only 16 or 17, so his cart is on the small side, and not too loaded up. Bigger, older guys haul around four, five, six times this much stuff, all on these two wheel carts that require careful balancing.

Last night I went for a midnight bike ride downtown and back, and I saw lots of Cartoneros out.

I read recently that they canceled the tren blanco, the free cartonero train that they used to use to haul their findings out to the suburbs where they hand them in to the recycling companies or the brokers or whoever. Now, it seems that everything has to move by truck. So last night I saw six, seven, eight big ol' trucks being loaded up with these giant sacks full of recyclables. No forklifts here, these guys and women lift these sacks, some of which probably weight a couple hundred pounds. Serious work.

I also saw two of the trucks loaded to the brim with recyclables and also with cartoneros -- fifteen or twenty people perched on top of and between all the bags and piles of cardboard and whatever. People were still scrambling up into the second truck, and they were laughing and yucking it up quite a bit. It actually did look pretty funny, because the load is anything but stable so they were kind of falling around in the back as they jumped up and got settled.

I'm glad they were able to see the humor and enjoy themselves a bit after a hard day and night of work.

This begger got some money from me

I was riding the subte (subway) here today, and it was hot and crowded. It was 90, 92 humid degrees or so today, and there's no such thing as air conditioning in the subte. So, it was a kind of uncomfortable ride.

I hear a begger giving her speech down the car, but I can't see her. This is unusual, because you don't really get beggers on the subte here. You get tons of people selling things, all kinds of things. They have a funny technique, where they go up and down the car, and place the book, toy, hair clip, or whatever in everybody's lap or hand it to everybody, and then they go back and either pick up the item or if they're lucky the cash that someone is willing to part with. These men and women, boys and girls, definitely hustle, they are working, make no mistake about it.

So it was unusual to hear someone just asking for money. I couldn't hear/understand much of what she said, but she definitely said something about an operation in a hospital.

My New York wariness kicks in somewhat, but I don't want to be too cold here, so I take a look down the car to get a look at her between the people standing if I can. And right away, when I see her, I know I'm taking out the wallet. Because ... her whole face is burned off. Seriously, melted. After a while she made her way back down to our end, and I got a much better look as I handed her ten pesos (3 bucks or so). Her face was all melted, her ears were gone, they were just holes, and her whole scalp was gone, except for a patch in the very back where she had eight-inch long hair growing in a ponytail.

As she came closer, I saw that it wasn't just her face. Her arms were totally scarred, and, I hate to say it, she didn't have either hand. Both hands, gone. Stumps at the wrist, or slightly above. You couldn't hand her money, you had to put it in a little purse she had around her neck.

God, it breaks my heart just writing about it. Lord knows it set off a torrent of thinking about fate and merit and fairness and charity etc. etc. etc. etc., which you will be thankful to hear I won't bore you with here.

But what impressed me most about this woman, when she came by and I got a look at her face, we made some eye contact and she was very not self-conscious, it seemed she had made her peace with her condition. Later I thought, fuck, this woman is so much tougher than me.

One last detail, perhaps the most interesting. When I looked at this woman, with face seriously deformed, and no hands, I realized she was wearing eye makeup. It was kind of inspiring, she actually moved through the car with confidence. Like I said, fuck, this woman is tougher than me.

I hope I see her on the subte again -- I will give her more than a ten next time.

Oh, this is too good

Okay, I think this is the most ridiculous, most hilariously unique thing I've seen so far here in Buenos Aires.

I'm flippin' channels on the cable TV, going through the five sports channels because I know there was a tennis tournament today, and I see that two of the five channels are broadcasting the same Boca Juniors game. Boca Juniors are one of the two big local futbol (soccer) teams, the other being River Plate. Nice names, huh?

On both channels, they're showing the score and the time remaining in a box up top, and they're panning around the stadium, showing fans, going nuts as they always are. And on both channels the announcers are doing the play-by-play in spanish, with the usual ups and downs of the game -- the announcers always getting more excited as the ball gets down by the goal.

OK, here's the good part -- both channels just keep moving the camera around the crowd, they don't show the game at all. Even when the announcers are going nuts, the camera is just panning around the stadium. On both channels.

So, clearly, neither of these channels had the right to broadcast the game. But somehow, they have the right to broadcast shots of the stadium and play-by-play. But the really amazing thing is, they put this on TV, and people must watch it. And enough people watch it that they play it on two channels!

So they love their futbol.

And also, I guess, maybe this shows that the fan experience, the group nuttiness going on in the stands, must be a big part of the appeal of the game. I'm sure this is true with football fans in the states and soccer fans all over the world, but where else do they play the game on TV without showing the game?

UPDATE -- one week later

Right now there are two stations playing today's game involving River Plate, the other big futbol team in town. And, sure enough, they are not showing the game, just the fans in the stadium. Two channels, again. This is the weirdest thing ever, if you ask me.

UPDATE -- on hour later

OK, River game is over, now the Boca game is on. And once again, they are not showing the game, only the fans in the stadium. This game is only one one channel, for what it's worth. So clearly this is something pretty normal, at least here.

LAST UPDATE

Pato, my spanish teacher, confirmed that this happens because the cable companies have "premium" sports channels that broadcast the actual games. No surprise there, I guess. But still I think it's hilarious that there's enough interest to sustain two stations showing nothing but the stands for the whole game.

By FAR, the Single Most Interesting Thing in Buenos Aires

To me, by far the single most interesting thing in Buenos Aires these last years has been the presence of the Cartoneros. These are free-lance, or quasi-freelance recyclers, who comb through the city's trash looking for recyclables, in particular carton, or cardboard.

Before explaining any more, let me establish a little context, at least for me.

Years ago I read and loved a book by Paul Auster called In the Country of Last Things. This is perhaps his least-known and least-appreciated book. It's an imperfect book, a beginning writer's book, but it was very powerful for me. It described an unnamed city, clearly based on New York, in which civilized society for some unstated reason had collapsed. The narrative was about a woman who came to the city from overseas to look for her missing brother, but the narrative didn't matter really. What mattered was the description of a failed urban society. Nothing worked, there were no authorities, no transportation, no way to get accurate information about anything, etc. There were people who ran themselves to death as a type of suicide, training for the big day for months. But I remember most from the book was the importance of your shopping cart. Pretty much everyone had a shopping cart, in which you kept your live's belongings, and people combed through the detritus of the failed city looking for anything of any value. And there existed a trading class, who traded you things you didn't need for things you did need. I don't think there was any money, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, the Cartoneros remind me of that book, a sign of a post-apocalyptic breakdown of order. Except instead of shopping carts, the roam the city with these two-wheeled carts that seem like they were made for horses or donkeys -- a cart perched on two wheels, with two long poles that go forward that would be attached to a horse's tackle, but which instead the cartoneros grab with their hands.

Let me interrupt and mention that it's hard to get pictures of the cartoneros. Actually, it would be quite easy if I was a bit more rude, but you don't want to run around taking pictures of the poor people. Some might take offense, but more importantly, it just feels ugly. So, anyway, here is the best picture I have to show:

And these carts here are tiny, usually the carts these guys pull around are 2, 3, even 5 times the size of these little guys. And they pile 'em high.

The first time I noticed the cartoneros was two years ago, when I rode by bike downtown after midnight. I saw all these young guys going through the trash, flattening and piling up cardboard boxes. I noticed two things right away. First, these were mostly strong young guys, with probably a few women, and they were busting their butts. They weren't like old bums going through the trash, they were working. And second, they were organized. The people going through the trash back home for returnable bottles aren't organized, no way. But these people were working together, trying to increase efficiency. In a way it was impressive.

But they're still going through the trash, and in this way they can't help but remind me of the failed society in book In the Country of Last Things. Like there's nothing new to make, nothing productive to do, we just hope to live off of the refuse. Although, in the book it was the refuse of the previous, successful society. Here, it's the poor living off the refuse of the rich, of the functioning society of which they are not a part.

I just read a few short articles in spanish on the Cartoneros, and one of them said that in metropolitan Buenos Aires there are some 100,000 cartoneros, 60% of them working the center city, or Capital Federal. And whereas a few years ago, there were mostly young men doing it, these days you see lots of women, children, and whole families working together. This will break your heart sometimes, to see an unwashed little eight year old girl in prosperous downtown Buenos Aires breaking down and stacking up cardboard boxes all by herself. (Talk about dying to take a picture, this girl that I saw was on Florida Street, the pedestrian shopping thoroughfare, which is jammed at all hours with business people and people toting bags from all the stores. But I just couldn't be that much a voyeur, I just couldn't.)

One of the most interesting things about the Cartoneros is that a few years back they were sort of institutionalized, the government assisted them by arranging a train for them that ran into the main train station downtown at around 11 or 12 at night, then left around 5 or 6. This was called the Tren Blanca, the white train, and was specifically for cartoneros to haul their findings back out to the suburbs, where whoever buys their stuff picks it up from them. This train has recently been cancelled, which has led to some repercussions which I'll discuss in a minute.

But first, speaking of hauling, one of the most amazing things is how much stuff these guys, and women, and children, collect and haul around. They've got this giant white reinforced bags, which are more or less cylindrical and about 4-5 feet in diameter. And these they fill, mostly with stacked cardboard. Then they pile these bags in their carts and haul them around. And it's not just cardboard, it's bottles and metal, and really just anything that might be of value. Through out a heavy old toilet bowl, and probably some cartonero will put it on his card and somehow get it to the suburbs and hope to sell it for a dollar or two.

Last year I saw an amazing thing walking home from downtown late one night. On Avenida Cordoba, there was a flat bed truck parked, and there were a bunch of Cartoneros around, and there were bunches of these white bags filled to the brim lining the side of the street. Clearly this was a meeting place for these people, a place where they transfer their goods to the truck to take them out of the city. I watched discreetly for a bit, and I saw how it took four or five big strong guys to lift these giant bags up onto the flatbed truck. These things were heavy. And they must have had a dozen or so that they were piling up there.

And just two nights ago I saw a similar thing, but the truck was already loaded up, and the Cartoneros were in back with the stuff, headed home. There must have been 12 or 15 people all crammed on top of all these bags and boxes and what-not in the back of a big truck. (The truck the other day had sides, which no doubt made it safer to ride in. But it didn't have a back, so it wasn't that safe!)

Oh, I've got one other photo of Cartoneros, this one of two guys working outside my window breaking down and stacking boxes. You can see the big white bag, though they've just barely started to fill it. These bags get big -- 4-5 feet in diameter, 4-5 feet high.

I don't know where these guys' cart is. Something a little unusual here.

Oh, and an amazing thing, is that sometimes you see big Cartonero carts actually being pulled by horses. Here in the big city, almost as urban as New York, horse-drawn carts going around picking up valuable trash.

Like I said, seems like a sign of some kind of fundamental breakdown. But then, people always do what they have to to survive, and people have done much, much worse, and are no doubt today doing much much worse in many places. It's just the juxtaposition of fancy buenos aires with sixty thousand garbage pickers that makes it so eerie.

Last word for now on the Cartoneros. The good thing about them is that for the most part I don't worry about getting robbed by them. These people are working. They know it would be much easier and more lucrative to rob people, but they're just not doing that. So I give these guys tons of credit for busting their butt and doing more than an honest day's labor for incredibly little money. Last year I read an estimate that said Cartoneros make about a hundred bucks a month. That would be 25 bucks a week. Five bucks a day. Not pretty, not pretty at all.

I will write more on this soon. Right now it's past three and I think this post is getting a little disorganized. More later.

Turns Out I'm Not All That Into Cafe Culture

In describing the lifestyle here in Buenos Aires to people back in the states, I would frequently say that they have a "cafe culture" here. And this is pretty much true, at least among the upper and middle classes. There are lots of cafes and restaurants with sidewalk seating, and people seem to spend lots of time hanging out at these places.

And to everyone in stressed-out New York, this just sounds fantastic. Less work, more hanging out in cafes! Sounds great -- in theory.

But on this trip, maybe since I've got more time on my hands since I'm not working at all, I'm starting to see just how much sitting around people do. And it's a lot. So this is my realization -- Argentinians are really, really good at sitting around. I've shared this realization with my argentinian friends, three or four of them, and they all laugh and say, yup, we are truly experts at sitting around.

There are definitely nice aspects to this. No one is in a hurry, no one gets impatient. This is really nice, make no mistake.

But, funny, the cafe lifestyle, all that sitting around, it kind of drives me crazy. I'm very patient, I don't get worked up when the line is delayed at a store or anything, but I can't just sit at a table for hour after hour gabbing. I need to be a little more active.

People don't just sit around in cafes and restaurants -- they sit around all over the place. Walk down any street during the day long enough and you will see a group of people, usually men or teen-age boys, sitting on the sidewalk or the curb. They've got some sodas, some chips maybe, but they look like they've been there a half hour, and look like they'll be there another half hour. Maybe they're taking a break from some kind of job? Or else just teenagers with nothing to do? But I see this all the time.

And my neighbors, they are truly experts at sitting around. I know because we both have these nice sizable terraces, stacked on top of each other. And when I'm outside or have the door open, I can hear every word they say down there. And, man, do they sit around a lot. Granted, they have a baby, so they can't be out all that much. But they have friends over in the afternoon and evenings, and on Sundays they frequently have the whole extended family over, cramming six or eight or more people onto this terrace, and then spending five, six, eight hours out there sitting around yapping. I was just amazed.

But then I find out that Sunday is family day. Much as they do in Spain, here almost everyone spends all day Sunday with their family. Like, at the family house, or at somebody's house. All day. This is really, really nice -- god bless 'em. I totally believe in the extended family, I think the loss of the extended family in the US is what has made us all so incredibly neurotic. (I could pontificate on this, but I won't -- if you're interested in my thoughts, ask me.) But, nonetheless, I guess I am an American, so spending all day every sunday inside with my extended family sounds like torture.

And back to cafes -- yes, people take their sweet, sweet time at cafes. This is lovely. In theory I should love this. Take the time, smell the roses. Bond with your friends and family. I know, I know this is the most important thing in life. But, I don't know, I am just not that into sitting around. It might not be who I am. I want to do stuff, at least during the day. Evenings I like to hang out with people, but during the day, I feel a need to be active.

Who knew?

I guess the big question then is this -- if I stayed here, or somewhere else with a similar culture, would I adapt?

PS -- the funniest thing about the neighbors downstairs is that one of them -- I think the father, roughly 35 years old -- is smoking weed pretty regularly down there on the terrace. Once he was even smoking weed on family day, with all these people down there. Sometimes I have to shut the sliding door out to my terrace, because it comes right in my apartment.

CuidaCoches, and now, CuidaCasas

For ten minutes now, the news station I'm watching has been talking about "Cuidacasas", which roughly translates as 'house-watchers'. At first I thought it would be a story on house-sitters, which sounded weird, but instead, CuidaCasas are just the new manifestation of CuidaCoches, who are guys who hang out on the streets here in certain places and "watch"your parked car.

I remember this from Brazil -- everywhere we went, our hosts had to slip some cash to some teen-age boy who was hanging around. And here it works basically the same, though it's not as prevalent. This phenomenon seems like a good demonstration of how Argentina is precariously slipping into third world status.

I remember thinking in Brazil that these guys were just opportunistic entrepreneurs, offering a legitimate service to people who wanted to park in areas that were not safe. But listening to the news here, they clearly think the practice is extortion. Just a minute ago, they had a graphic on screen that says "If you don't pay, they'll rob you." That pretty much tells the story.

The news segment showed lots of pictures of these CuidaCoche and CuidaCasa people, all teen-age boys or slightly older, and they sure enough look like kids who would rob you given the chance. A lot of the people interviewed expressed a fair amount of empathy for the poor kids, noting how they had no money and no chance for a job or anything. This was nice, there's still a "social consciousness" here. But at the same time, no one likes being shaken down, and some people really, really don't like it.

I'm a little worried for Argentina. I'm afraid that it's going to slip further and further into third-world type insecurity, that a huge gulf is going to open up between the fancy rich people and the teeming masses of poor people. And unfortunately, Argentina has a long tradition of authoritarianism competing with its more liberal traditions. And I'm afraid if the economic recovery continues to not reach the poor, crime will rise to the point where the rich people say "basta" and return to an authoritarian, police-state type of country. Not pretty. But then again, my perspective is certainly being warped by my TV news watching. (Which I'm doing for the spanish practice -- it's just way, way easier to figure out what they're talking about on the news programs than on anything else.)

I think I have seen some CuidaCoches in my neighborhood. There's a dark, slighly sketchy open area area by the train tracks near my house where people park at night to go to the fancy bars and restaurants in the area, and at night there is usually one or two people there kind of directing cars to parking places and clearly taking money. I thought that somehow they were sanctioned, because there are always cops near this area. (Funny, how there are always cops near the fancy shops and bars.) But now I think maybe they're just free-lance
CuidaCoches and the cops just can't be bothered. I'll have to check it out a little more carefully one of these days.

Update: I was out two nights ago with my super-cool Porteno friend Marial, and she drove her car, and both times she parked it she had to pay a cuidacoche. She says you basically have no choice but to pay what they ask -- the only other option is to move the car. Which does sound quite a bit like extortion. We laughed wondering how each guy got his block -- did he have to beat up the previous cuidacoche for that block?

The second time Marial parked, we were a group of five getting out of the car, including a 6ft 5 in tall Finnish dude who could not possibly look less Argentinian. The cuidacoche on that block asked for five pesos, ($1.50 or so), which marial says is outrageous. She figures it was since we looked foreign and rich.

An unexpected bargain

I had a happy experience today taking my tennis racquet to get re-strung.

Knowing that tennis balls are about the most expensive thing I've seen here vis-a-vis US pricing -- 7-9 bucks a can v. 2-3 bucks a can in the states -- I bought some strings online before I came here. Really good strings, 12 or 14 bucks, I don't remember.

So all I have to do is find the tennis shop and get the damn thing strung. When I first got here, I was a little scared to do this, just because of the spanish involved. As I guessed, they don't use the plain old word for "strings" (cuerdas) -- rather the "Southern Cone" (argentina and uruguay) have a dedicated word for strings on a racquet, encordado.

Anyway, I'm going to the shop thinking, hmmm, how much are they going to charge me or this. Stupid gringo, has his own strings. I get my wariness guard up. And just bringing in my own strings may annoy them, since shops of course earn a lot on the string mark-up. So I walking along thinking, how much is this going to cost? And more importantly, where do I try the "protest line" -- as in "no way, that's too much." I figured ten bucks for the labor, 30 pesos, would be on the high side of acceptable.

I have to also mention that part of my initial hesitancy on going to the tennis shop not knowing how to say "can you re-string this racquet with these strings?" is that tennis tends to be an upper-class sport here, and some of the upper class people here can be very snooty.

But, as it turns out, they were super-nice. They could tell I was a gringo, so they didn't stress me out too much with too much discussion or questions. He saw I had my own strings and had no problem with that at all. And, get this, labor for stringing the racquet? Ten pesos, or 3.20 or so. Three bucks! Ready tomorrow!

So I leave feeling happy, but a little sheepish for having been wary. Maybe I need me a little chill pill?

BA's version of Lizzy Grubman

Anyone in New York back in the summer of 2001 probably remembers Lizzy Grubman. She was the nasty publicist who crashed her big nasty SUV -- possibly intentionally -- into a crowd of people waiting to get into a nightclub in the Hamptons after being told to move. There was all kinds of media attention, because she was a spoiled-brat rich kid who nearly killed some people in a hissy fit about being asked to move. Oh, and of course she was drunk at the time. It was a great class-warfare kind of story for a while, with allegations of lenient treatment by the authorities and what-not, and she ended up serving 60 days in jail.

Well, for two or three weeks here in BA we've had a similar story dominating the local "society" news. This time it's a male named Gaby Alvarez, but just like Lizzy Grubman, he's an upper-class, party-boy in his 30's, not really all that well-known by the general public, but apparently well-known to the fancy people. Again it happened near the upper-class beach retreat, this one Punta del Este in Uruguay. But in this case is was an open-road accident in which two people died. And the guy was coked-up and drunk, and this (I think, given my spanish limitations) was clearly determined by the authorities. And, maybe because it took place in Uruguay and not in Argentina, the rich kid is still in jail.

Word on the TV news right now -- right now -- is that Gaby is depressed, and afraid for his life in an Uruguay prison. The news is switching between exterior shots of the prision, pictures of the wreckage on the highway, and pictures of rich fancy people, presumably his friends and family. There's also a little bit of a Paris Hilton media circus to it -- I don't think Lizzy Grubman got this much publicity.

Somehow Rich Kids getting into trouble makes great news everywhere. Strange world.

BA Road Culture Part 2 -- Rampaging Buses

I can't believe I left this out when discussing Macho Road Culture last night.

To me, by far the most startling thing about road culture here in Buenos Aires is how aggressively the buses (colectivos) drive.

I was think about this yesterday as I was riding the bike all afternoon. What is it that makes these buses seem more threatening than buses in NYC? And I think the answer is this -- hard acceleration. Bus drivers here really stomp on the gas, they take off from every one of their frequent stops as fast as they can. I don't remember my basic physics all that well, but I'm pretty sure that you're using a great deal more force to accelerate than to just maintain a particular speed. And when you're accelerating a 10-ton bus, that takes a whole lot of force.

I think in NYC the buses are driven quite a bit more gently. Granted, the buses here are no doubt faster than the buses in Manhattan. Everything is a trade-off I suppose -- in this case efficient transportation v. threatening huge hulks of steel hurtling around all over the place. Of course you could say that about automobile transportation as well as bus transportation. But the thing of note here is that the threat level from these buses -- on just a basic, physical awareness level -- is frequently a lot higher than we foreigners are used to back home.

No surprise, I guess. Just part of the 'roughness' of the place that's part of it's appeal for us.

Macho Road Culture -- or just Inept Road Culture?

For three years in a row here in Buenos Aires I have bought a bike and ridden it around quite a bit. This is what I do, I'm a cyclist, this is what I love to do. It's the best way to get to know a new place -- you're going slow enough to really take things in, and fast enough to cover some serious territory. It's great.

Except when dealing with Macho Road Culture.

In general, BsAs is not the most macho place, by Latin American standards. A lot of people here are very educated and cultured and busy -- they don't have much time for machismo. Of course, among the less-educated, less-cultured, and less-busy there appears to be quite a bit more machismo, but, honestly, I don't deal with them that much.

But it appears that even among the snooty upper class, and even among the women, when they get behind the wheel of a car or on top of a motorcycle, machismo rules. Brakes are for wimps, except when absolutely required. Leaving a comfortable distance between your car and the car in front -- that just shows weakness. No room for weakness when you've got a wheezing, whining 60-horsepower vehicle to command.

Two examples, of this aversion to braking in particular. When turning a corner here, cars and buses tend to cut unbelievably close to the curb, which turns the corner into more of a curve and less of a right angle, thereby reducing or eliminating the need to brake. They do this regardless of how many people are standing on the corner waiting to cross the street. When you first get here, you are likely to be terrified by a car missing you by inches as your looking the other way.

Another terrifying practice, which probably leads to more accidents (though maybe fewer fatalities) is cruising into an unmarked (or marked against you) intersection without applying the brakes. This is very common, and I've seen many near-accidents. BsAs has a lot of unmarked intersections among its side streets. And this isn't necessarily the worst thing -- some rebel traffic engineers in europe think this is actually safer, because it forces everyone to slow down and check out the intersection before proceeding.

Good in theory -- or maybe in Denmark and Holland -- but these traffic engineers probably haven't seen the intersections here. Typical practice here is to pull about 10 feet into the intersection -- about the width of the parked-car lane, and then slam on the brakes if there is a car entering the intersection before you. Or else hope that the other car slams on its brakes. My spanish teacher lived on one such corner, a busy one, and she would hear an accident every week or two she says.

Another variation of this, one that dogs me as a cyclist, is people on little side streets pulling out into the bigger street, again about the width of the parked car lane, and only then applying the brakes if anyone is coming. This happened to me two or three times just today. Typically what happens to me is that I don't want to swerve into traffic to go around the car, so I have to brake and go behind the car, taking a small detour into the side street.

The last example of ridiculous driving here that I'll mention is one of the first experiences that virtually every tourist has here in Buenos Aires: insane tail-gating by taxi drivers. Almost everyone who flies here takes a taxi to the airport. They're relatively cheap, and you just spent the night in a plane after all. You get in your taxi, and for thirty minutes, your driver keeps your little tin-can of a taxi, with broken rear seat belts, about a foot away from a series of cars in front of him, all the while doing about a hundred kilometers an hour. No lie. Okay, maybe the one foot distance is an exaggeration. But way, way too close. In the US we learn the "two second rule" -- you should have two seconds between you and the car in front. Look at a spot on the road that the car in front of you passes -- you should be able to count 1-mississippi, 2-mississippi before your car reaches that spot. Here, it's more like "1" -- without the mississippi. Not Safe. Not At All.

And I've been watching the TV news a lot, and good god do they have a lot of auto accidents here. What a surprise, huh? I should look for some statistics, but that would sort of spoil the "top-of-my-head" approach to this blog. So for now, let's just say they have a Lot. With lots of people Dead.

So, anyway, at first I just thought this is all about Macho Culture. Breaking is for pussies, being a cautious driver is the same as being an afraid driver, which means you're definitely a pussy, a weakling. And I do think that's a component. But part of me just thinks that it's more just sheeer ineptness than any kind of machismo. Good god, somebody teach these people how to drive!

Meanwhile, I'm not sure how much biking I'll be doing. It was a rough day out there today.

What's still cheap in Buenos Aires

As mentioned in the last post, prices are on the rise and this place just isn't nearly as cheap as it was a few years ago. But there's one class of things that's still a tremendous bargain for visitors from the US (and probably Europe, but I can't be sure) -- personal services.

This week I will take 5 one-hour private spanish classes at 30 pesos ($10) each, a one hour private tennis lesson, which includes court fees for 70 pesos ($23), and a 90-120 minute private photography lesson for 60 pesos ($20). And all of these are with highly qualified providers. My friend Piper and her friends take lots of private tango lessons. Of all the private lessons, these are probably the most expensive, only because tourist demand is so great. But they're still somewhere between 30 and 50 dollars US I believe.

Another thing we visitors indulge in here is massage and other personal treatments. I've been going to this one masseuse three years running now, and she is fantastic. She has been studying to be an osteopath, with a focus on cranial-sacral therapy (which I guess is the approach osteopaths in Europe take, whereas American osteopaths lean more towards chiropractic manipulation). She now apparently charges 70 pesos for an hour, and she is really, really qualified. Cheaper but still very good massages can be had for 45 pesos ($15) or so.

Last year I went to a physical therapist for my shoulder. I got a whole hour out of the guy, though admittedly about half of that was being iced and getting some kind of weird magnetic stimulation (not the standard electro-stim you get in the states). But even then half the time he stayed in the room and nicely spoke basic spanish with me. This treatment -- free spanish practice included -- cost me all of 30 pesos, though I understand he raised his fees to 45 pesos now.

I haven't had a haircut here in a while, but a couple years ago a super-stylish salon charged me 30 pesos, and that was way upscale. I believe I saw a price list in a regular salon listing 11 pesos, or under four dollars, for a hair cut. I'm sure things like manicures and facials and what-not are equally reasonably priced.

So, visitors, give up your dreams of buying cheap crap here in Argentina. Chances are you have enough crap back home. Instead, get yourself pampered, or figure out some skill you'd like to develop via lessons while you're here. That's the bargain, and the money goes right into the pockets of people who need it.

It's Semi-Official -- Inflation at 25% last year

A very common complaint in Buenos Aires is how prices are going up. And coming back after just eight months, I could see that almost everything seemed more expensive. Taxi rides in particular -- wow, they seem to have gone up close to 100%. What used to be a 10-peso ride now costs 20. Food too seems quite a bit more expensive. As I said, it's something everyone complains about, something covered on the local news all the time.

But the official government rate of inflation for 2007 was 8.25%, which isn't so bad. And absolutely nobody believed it, it seemed. When the figure first came out, there were lots of stories on the local news, interviewing people on the street and business people and whoever, and everybody disputed that figure, citing all kinds of examples of rising prices.

And sure enough, yesterday the results of an independent study done by what appears to be a respected group determined that in 9 months of last year inflation was 18% or so, extrapolating to 25 or 26% for the full year. This is much more in line with people's experiences.

This is a sad development. Inflation tends to 'spiral' -- inflation leads to more inflation. I studied economics a fair amount, and I'm still a bit fuzzy on the mechanics -- I think everyone is. In general they say 'inflation expectations' get incorporated into price-setting, contract negotiations, labor negotiations, and so everything just keeps getting more and more expensive. But what causes it to spiral out of control, I don't know.

But I do know that this is something that's happened in Argentina, a bunch of times. I will try to go back and find some statistics, but make no mistake, it's a habit here. And it's definitely a risk right now. (Turns out that increased economic activity tends to lead to inflation. "Too much money chasing too few goods, is how the economists put it. This is what they're talking about when they say the Fed or whoever is afraid the economy is "overheating." And argentina is having lots of economic activity right now. It hardly looks like it's overheating, but, to continue the metaphor, at what point your economy overheats depends on what it's made of. If it's made of straw, it may overheat easily. If it's made of ceramic or steel, it can take lots of heat.

I don't think that the argentinian economy is made of straw, but unfortunately, it may be made of wood. Inflation watch ahead.

More on Trust, Wealth, and Cities

I've been avoiding updating this BA blog because I knew I had to write more about the topic I brought up last week, Trust in a society at large. This is a Big Issue, and like all big issues, it's hard to write about because there are no easy answers. So this post will be long, rambling, and probably boring. My apologies. But I like to dabble in such issues, because they're really, really important. When we ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in, I think one of the things that should come up near the top is just this -- a world in which we can trust everyone. When you can trust people, you just don't have to worry about as much. A world without trust is a tense world, a world where you have to second-guess and third-guess everything.

And I'm not sure, but it seems to me a world without trust probably devolves into a world where power and violence become more and more important. And that does not sound like a nice world to me.

So, to start, I want to get back to what I need to last week's post. I do need to correct something, or at least elaborate. In particular, I said, or at least strongly implied, that it's more likely in a rich society that you're able to trust people than in a poor society. My thought there was that in a poor society, people are just more desperate, and so are less likely to be constrained by ethical concerns.

That's probably true to some extent, but it absolutely must be said that in a lot of poor societies, people are very, very ethical, and there are tons of people in rich societies like the US who are not very ethical at all, who will rip you off at the first opportunity. So clearly wealth is not some kind of direct determinant of ethical behavior.

One thing I mentioned last week that makes a big difference at least in larger-scale transactions is good contract law. If there's no good contract law, you can't call on the legal system to help resolve a private dispute. And if you can't get your private disputes resolved in a reasonable manner, then you're going to be much more wary about your your financial dealings. This tends to inhibit business and economic vitality in general. I think it probably also has a trickle down effect to people's personal behavior. If people see businesses and rich people and people in official positions screwing everyone over, then the screwing of others is going to seem more permissible generally. On the other hand, if screwing others over gets you in trouble, then it seems like a worse idea. And the legal system is the public mechanism for the prevention of screwing-over. So, a bad legal system, corrupt and/or inefficient, can make screwing-over more popular, leading to an over-all decrease in Trust.

There are no doubt many exceptions, but it's probably safe to say that rich countries are more likely to have effective contract law than poor countries. So that's one thing rich countries have going for them.

I'm not sure about the legal system in Argentina. A proxy that is sometimes used is the corruption index published by Transparency International. In a way this is an estimate of Trust in business dealings, and it attempts to include contract law and official and political corruption, among other things. And guess what? Argentina comes pretty far down the list, 105 out of 179. It is way behind Mexico, Brazil, Peru, India, and China (all tied at 72 -- the list is admittedly very approximate).

As an aside, the US comes in at number 20, behind most of the other rich-rich countries. I think this is largely because of the power of lobbyists to affect policy and the power of money to affect elections. I think this list is interesting enough to mention the top 10 "most transparent" countries:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. New Zealand
4. Singapore
5. Sweden
6. Iceland
7. Netherlands
7. Switzerland
9. Canada
9. Norway

These are all pretty rich countries, but another thing that jumps out on this list is that all of these are relatively small countries. Canada is the biggest country on this list with 33 million people, and most of them are much smaller. This leads to another factor that has to affect Trust -- population, and more specifically anonymity.

I think most people would agree that it probably becomes harder to maintain public Trust when anonymity increases. No big surprise here -- in a small town, everyone knows you, and so you're much less likely to screw people over. It's going to get back to you. In a big city, you'll never see these people again, and on a strictly practical level you're a lot less likely to suffer repercussions if you behave unethically.

But of course, in Singapore and Copenhagen and Toronto and New York and Buenos Aires for that matter people do behave ethically most of the time, even with complete strangers they will never see again. I think I'd go as far as to say that maintaining Trust in big cities, having people behave ethically despite the anonymity of the megalopolises, is one of the great achievements of humankind. People behave in a trustworthy fashion not because it benefits them on a practical level, but because they just feel that this is the way they should behave. This is what holds society together, right?

So, OK, what about Buenos Aires? I think Trust probably is a little harder to come by in BA than in NY and in a lot of countries. Especially on an impersonal level -- like you're more likely to get screwed on a business deal, you're more likely to have a corrupt official try to get a bribe from you, you're more likely to have some 'inspector' of your business try to shake you down. But on an inter-personal level, I don't know. I think people here are mostly great -- highly civilized, highly trust-worthy. There is a big lower class that I don't know much about, and those people I can't be sure of at all. But in the educated classes, on a personal level things seem good.

And of course crime is probably a bit higher here than it is in the US, at least petty street crime. (Sorry I don't have the energy to look it up right now!) I hear of lots of people who've been robbed here, and I hardly know anyone in the states who's been mugged lately. Of course this crime level is party, maybe largely a matter of the current economic hardships of the country. But also the culture of machismo has got to make crime more attractive. After all, Machismo is all about Force and Power, and robbing someone is nothing if not an exercise of Force, of physical power (although that power may mostly reside in a gun or knife).

Think about it -- where is Machismo lowest? Probably East Asia, right? Where do they have super-low crime rates? East Asia. Hmmm, I'll have to think about this.

But don't worry, I'll try to get back to more interesting topics and posting pictures.

The kind-of-icky smell of clean

I have an old guideline for traveling -- the two things you absolutely must do when visiting a new country is ride the public bus and visit a local grocery store. I figure, this is where you see how the people in a place really live.

Naturally, when I first came to Buenos Aires several years ago, I went to the local grocery store here (a "chino", an independently-owned small grocery, generally owned by asians). It's not too big, and there really doesn't seem to be all that much food for sale. Lots of wine, soda, beer. And LOTS of cleaning products. So many cleaning products you can hardly believe it. I don't even know what half of them are -- I don't spend too much time browsing. But it's really disproportional, and you see it in every grocery store, big and small.

I was reminded of this a couple days ago when the cleaning lady at my tourist rental apartment put on clean sheets. I got into bed, ready for that nice clean-sheet feeling, and, gross, it smelled like i stuck my head in a giant bag of really cheap detergent. And this is just the smell left on sheets that had been through the laundry.

And I thought, ewww, this is the smell of chemical-clean, not clean-clothes-clean. And all those cleaning products, I'll bet most of them leave that old-fashioned chemical-clean smell behind.

I have noticed also that they advertise air freshener an awful lot during daytime TV. That seems a little old-fashioned, like something from the sixties or seventies. But what do I know, maybe they still advertise that stuff on daytime TV in the states.

I can't generalize that much here. Maybe people feel that this is a dirty city, and need to compensate. Maybe they're just a generation behind in cleaning technology, still using the chemical-warfare approach that my mother used in the sixties and seventies. Maybe it's nothing, just something I noticed.

But I do know that the smell of my pillowcases and sheets from this laundry is just icky. It's the weirdest thing.

Important Weird-Laundry-Smell Update! (OK, pretty much the opposite of important, really) Two days ago I was riding a hot subway train wearing a t-shirt that had been laundered at least a week before. I grab the bottom of the shirt at flutter it forward and back to create a little breeze up the front of the torso (something us hot-and-sweaty-mens do to try to evaporate the pooling sweat). And this breeze came with a pretty significant smell of the nasty laundry detergent, significant enough that I'm sure others smelled it, significant enough that it lingered in the air for about ten seconds. This is a nasty, hot, crowded subway car, which no doubt had many significant smells of its own. But my nasty laundry smell won out, at least for a few seconds. And this after a week of sitting in the closet. Nasty!