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!

La Costanera Sur

I had the TV news on this morning, listening to some Argentinian Spanish, and they had the upbeat weather report live from the Costanera Sur. Smiling happy people, spending this perfect day out in the sun. And I though, oooh, I gotta go! So off I went, on my trusty bike.

I'm still not entirely sure what the Costanera Sur is exactly. It seems to include the Reserva Ecologica, but it's a little more than that. The Reserva (more later) is a kind of nature preserve between downtown and the Rio de la Plata. It's mostly a couple of swamps, with some very nice and dirt roads running around and between them. It's nice to go there and bike around, you can actually cover a few miles on dirt roads, and there is even one end that's mostly deserted, so you can go fast and work up a sweat.

As seems to be the case in deserted areas of public parks all over the world, this area appears to be a gay cruising spot. Today it was pretty warm and I was there early, and there was no one there. But previously I have seen dudes lurking around, being very interested in who was coming by. But I just blow through (no pun intended) on my bike and they leave me alone.

To get there, I went along the Rio de la Plata as much as I could. This meant going by the port. Containerized shipping! My favorite thing, as I wrote last year!

Here's the port -- it looks like they have some new cranes!


And here is the Aduana, or Customs building. With some unusually subtly-colored containers in front. (Usually the containers are in bold, primary colors, which adds to their toy-truck appeal.)


Okay, not everyone loves containerized shipping, I know. But here's a fun kind of shipping, one you don't see every day -- It's a boat being shipped on a boat!


Ok, ok, I haven't even gotten to the Costanera Sur yet, I know. Actually the above was taken from the Reserva Ecologica, which as I said above appears to be a part of the Costanera Sur.

My spanish-english dictionary defines Costanera as a path or promenade along a river or lake, and says it's a word peculiar to the Southern Cone (Argentina and Uruguay). So I would say the most important part of the Costanera Sur, the real Costanera, is this nice wide sidewalk along the interior swamp/lagoon:It's like there are two parts to the Costanera Sur -- the Reserva, which is the "nature" part, and the Costanera, which is more like a typical park, which runs between the Reserva and Puerto Madero (which itself runs between the Costanera Sur and the MicroCentro, or downtown).

Anyway, when the newscaster broadcast live from the Costanera, she was probably somewhere along this strip or in the adjoining park areas. It's a great, very lively place to go on a nice day, probably the best people-watching in buenos aires on such a day. And I like it because it doesn't seem to be just rich people, but at the same time it feels pretty safe. There are just so many people around, and there are definitely cops around, so brazen crime seems pretty unlikely.

Of course, the Reserva Ecologica is on the Rio de la Plata -- it's the coastline of Buenos Aires. The Rio de la Plata is said to be the widest river in the world. I didn't believe it, I figured it was a delta, just the opening of the river onto the sea. But my spanish teacher Pato insists that by Buenos Aires it really is all fresh water. The water is totally brown, as are both the rivers, the Parana and the Uruguay, which join together to form the Rio de la Plata. So, maybe it is fresh water -- if it was ocean water, the dirt (which comes from the Amazon jungle!) would be diluted, as it is off Montevideo.

So, that's an incredibly long and rambling introduction to this picture of the "beach" in the Reserva Ecologica, the best beach Buenos Aires has to offer:


The small version doesn't do it justice -- you need to click on it for the big version to see just how trash-filled this particular waterfront is.

And I have one more picture. it's not a great picture, but it's a classic from the Reserva Ecologica -- the buenos aires syline:

It's not exactly a skyline worth writing home about or anything. But it's nice from this angle. It's actually very rare in BA that you feel like you're in nature. and the Reserva, if nothing else, does make you feel like you're away from the city. Just not very far away!

A Matter of Trust

While walking to the tourist mecca of the Recoleta Cemetary yesterday, I was approached by a young guy with a clipboard. The first thing he said was "hola amigo" which is a bad sign -- this is someone who's definitely targeting tourists, trying to get separate them from their money. Of course, there is nothing specifically wrong with that -- tourists are here spending money, after all, and you have to expect people to try to get a piece of the action.

The second thing the guy said was "habla espanol o ingles", which means that this guy is bilingual, a slick salesperson. OK, fine. Then he asked for one minute of my time, just one minute. I did my best to keep barreling by, but he was insistent and walked alongside, telling me that he worked for an organization that raised money for the less fortunate, children with AIDS and what-not. He quickly showed me as we continued walking the paper on his clipboard, and also some kind of ID card, which was supposed to validate his legitimacy as a fund-raiser. I considered it for a second, while continuing to walk so as not to feel trapped. Then he said something like, please, just a little, not much, twenty pesos, ten pesos, it's for the children." And with that I just kept saying, no, no, lo siento, lo siento, no, no, and charged away from him, head down.

So this experience made me feel bad for a couple reasons. First, naturally, was the question of whethere in fact I was so cheap and selfish as to not really consider giving 3 or 6 dollars to the unfortunate of Argentina. Lord knows I feel a lot of empathy for the unfortunate here, so this was a very uncomfortable feeling. But then I realized the real reason the whole encounter was troubling -- I didn't know if I could trust this guy asking me for money for a good cause. And I thought about this all day yesterday, realizing what a big, big issue this is for a society and an economy. And it's a delicate issue -- it's not something that can just be implemented, it's something that's got to develop over a long time. Perhaps it can be nurtured, but I don't know.

I was especially wary yesterday because of a story I heard a couple days prior from my spanish teacher Pato. She went on an errand with our friend Erin ("an errand with Erin" !) a few days ago to meet with a furniture builder. Erin had put a 50% downpayment on a relatively expensive custom-made chair about a year earlier, and hadn't had much luck getting the chair made. So Pato with her much better spanish came along to help. It was an ugly scene apparently. They spent about a half hour there arguing with the guy, and the guy was apparently very aggressive, almost abusive. And it became clear that Erin wasn't getting her chair any time soon, or really, any time ever. Even her receipt from a year ago was apparently "fake", whatever that means (there are a bunch of rules here about such things).

So this was an unfortunate situation where Erin thought she chould trust this person as a legitimate business person, but he clearly felt he could just violate that trust completely, essentially bullying her into letting him walk away with her five hundred pesos. And this is not a random person on the street, this is an established craftsperson, with a business and a shop and everything.

As I was talking to the dude purportedly fund-raising for a charity, all I could think of was the bullying furniture maker. The fund raiser was kind of aggressive himself, and all I could think was, here's a guy trying really hard to separate me from my money. Why should I trust him? And, in the end, I didn't, and I kept going.

So this got me thinking about the issue of trust in a society in general, and in an economy in particular. After hearing about Erin's experience, I am much more unlikely to put a deposit on anything here, right? And I'm much more unlikely to buy something that I'm not entirely sure about, knowing that I might not have any redress if something goes wrong. And so, lack of trust leads directly to less economic activity, less business, less income. And it probably leads to a lot of indirect costs as well -- people no doubt feel they have to spend a lot of time and money vetting potential transactions, and putting safeguards in place. All of these costs are just wasted, just pure inefficiency.

Development economists often refer to effective contract law as something essential for a smoothly functioning economy. Companies and individuals feel a lot better about doing business, about entering into a contract if they know that the contract can be reasonably enforced. Much of the third world has poorly functioning contract law -- the legal systems are either too corrupt or too inefficient for someone wronged in a contractual dispute to get any redress from the courts or anyone else. So what happens? Businesses and individuals don't want to do business in such countries, they don't want to invest or make big purchases. So economic activity suffers, and the economy suffer, and the people suffer.

Of course the issue of trust is much wider than contract law. Contract law is just the large-scale tip of the iceberg. Trust goes much wider, it can effect everybody, every transaction. Did your taxi give you the right change in the dark? Did the supermarket check-out person ring something up at too high a price? Is your plumber charging you a fair price for the work he just did? If there isn't trust, every single economic transaction requires extra vigilance, extra worry, extra annoyance. It's not pretty.

So where does trust come from? What makes an economy function smoothly in this way? Ha -- I think that's the subject of a dissertation or a book (or a hundred), not really the subject of an off-the-cuff blog post. But to state the obvious -- in a poor country with a lot of desperate people, I would guess that those people are more likely to try to rip you off. They just feel they have to. And, I don't know, if those poor people, or struggling people, see a lot of rich people around living it up, then they're going to feel less bad about ripping you off.

So you have the phenomenon of places like the Scandinavian countries, with relatively flat levels of economic disparity, being the places with high trust, and places like Mexico, with the second highest number of billionaires in the world and tens of millions of poor people, having a very low level of trust. It seems like a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

As I said at the beginning, trust is hard -- it's subtle, it's not just something you can decide to implement. That said, I do think that the public sector can have a really big influence. The more corruption you see in high places, in officialdom, the more the people in general are going to feel that they don't have to play by the rules. The example that everyone cites is Singapore -- this was a very, very poor country fifty years ago. But somehow it got this incredibly squeaky-clean government (an autocratic government, not a democracy, I might add). And now, its economy just hums along, with a reputation for great efficiency and reliability, and Singapore is as rich as some european countries on a per-capita basis.

So, what does this mean for Buenos Aires? I don't know. Four years ago, two years after the crisis, I was pleased with the trust level here -- it seemed like a country with a good tradition of trust, where you didn't have to be too careful about being ripped off. This seemed especially the case compared to Mexico, where I have traveled extensively. But now, I don't know. Maybe it's just that I'm a little more connected here, or maybe the trust level has eroded. It might be that the economic recovery here is not raising all boats simultaneously (what a surprise!). So the system might seemed rigged, in which case people think, hey, if I'm getting screwed, I should be screwing others, right? I hope this isn't the case.

If nothing else, after thinking about it for a day, I think my initial impression about the dude on the street was probably correct. He's probably a fraud, and that any money he got from me he was keeping. I hate it, but that's what I think.