Still a Tough Town

Buenos Aires is doing better eonomically than it was four or five years ago. There's been good growth in the 8-10 percent range for several years. But this is still Latin America, and this is still a little bit of a tough town.

I had two reminders of this yesterday.

The first happend while I was sitting in a lovely park downtown, Plaza San Martin, located at the end of the big pedestrian shopping street Calle Florida. This is something of a showcase park near some big government buildings, and I'm sure there are cops somewhere in the park at pretty much all times during daylight hours. I was sitting on a bench reading, and there was a dude across the way a bit, maybe forty, fifty feet on a bench facing me, off to one side just a little. I didn't notice him for a while, but then I started getting the feeling that he was looking at me. I kept my nose in my book, but every time I looked up, he seemed to be staring me down in somewhat provocative fashion. Surreptitiously I tried to see what he was about. He was late teens, early twenties, thin, but he looked tough, wiry. He was wearing some kind of soccer shirt, 3/4 length pants, and athletic shoes with of course no socks. He definitely looked like he had spent more than a couple nights sleeping outside.

It seemed like he kept staring me down, but I couldn't be sure. Then he got up and walked toward me. Fortunately, there was a couple on the bench next to me who were even more obviously tourists. They had two open bottles of water on the ground by their bench, and the dude from across the way walked up to them and asked for 'un poco de agua', a little water. The american dude was pretty big, probably an ex-football player, so he wasn't intimidated, and he just refused in sign language and english. The argentinian was pretty surprised and kept trying, but the american was having none of it. Then the argentinian took off.

This wasn't much, but I definitely had the feeling that the argentinian dude was playing some kind of macho game. In particular the stare-down seemed to be some kind of attempt at intimidation. I'm not sure what he was trying to do by asking for a drink. That was an unexpected twist.

Then later yesterday, I'm walking over to my friend Piper's to go out to dinner, and I had even put on long pants and worn real shoes! (dressed up for me these days!) So I had to walk across this road Honduras, crossing the railroad tracks:


Anyway, it's about a quarter-mile on honduras that I have to walk. And as soon as I turned the corner, I saw that there were three dudes in front of me walking abreast. These were all 20-ish dudes, one of whom wasn't wearing a shirt, which I think is the argentinian national sign for 'tough guy with nothing to lose.' My spanish teacher says these guys are called "chicos rudos", tough guys, or maybe rude boys, like the 70's britishism. These three were totally strutting, and there was no way I was going to overtake these three guys. And they were strutting *slowly*, so I had to walk way slower than I ever walk. There was a cop standing alongside the road on the way, and even still, I felt like I had to be careful once we were past him.

So neither of these situations were particularly threatening or anything, but they both reminded me of the economic disparities here, and how obviously on one side of the divide I fall. And some of the people on the other side of the economic divide, well, they can be troublesome.