Buenos Aires is Sidewalk Cafes. Forget everything else. The greatest happiness of your life is as follows; you see your favourite café from afar and spot an empty table in the shade. Your eyes squint to full zoom –yes, vacant. Your pace quickens. Like the devious and impulsive Mr. Bean, you look around warily to see if someone else also has an eye on your table - and $150 Nikes on their feet. You begin to really hustle - even though you didn’t actually see anyone else closing in, you can sense their presence and know they can run faster than you. Argentines can be so aggressive. You break into a full out run – it is imperative that you arrive before any and all competitors. Your finger touches the arm of the vacant chair. Home free, ha ha! na na! You look around with a wad of gloat smacked on your face and then spectacularly settle into the well-deserved winner’s seat. Puffed up and satisfied, even a little breathless, you don’t even notice that the chair is quite without back support and a tad uncomfortable, that there’s not much room for your legs under the table and that the table is rickety and wobbly. You completely disregard (for now) the delivery truck idling a few feet away, filling the area with fumes. The waitress comes out fashionably late. Young, slender, good looking, dangling earrings, friendly, speaks not a word of English. ‘Café con leche y tres media lunas, por favor’ – standard BA lingo for desayuno – breakfast of coffee with milk and three small croissants. From the winner’s circle you can now relax and gaze expertly over the rim of your cup as you lovingly polish the apple of your eye. You are ready. The real fun is about to begin.
A café junkie. Thousands of cafes line the leafy sidewalks and corners in BA and every one of them is busy – from morning until late at night. By city ordinance, the buildings on every street corner have to be cut at an angle to enlarge the sidewalk area and allow more light to filter through. The entire planet walks and drives past your wobbly table during a single café con leche and every passer-by is a ‘person of interest’ to your investigation. Let’s start with shoes. Because BA in summer it is so hot and humid, it is always worthwhile to see how well people’s feet are coping. Oddly enough everyone seems to be wearing shoes. Flip flops, sandals, high top sandals, wedgies, high heels, flat shoes, dress shoes, runners – you name it, they wear them. Well there’s nothing different about that, is there? The majority of people in the neighbourhood look European – they could be from France, Italy or Spain, Germany, on and on. For the most part though, they do not look Mexican, American or Canadian which you might think is surprising because how would we know the difference? Well it is almost impossible to not spot North American tourists; even though they try and blend in they look different. Portenos, as people from Buenos Aires are known, are slender – young or old it doesn’t matter, they are thin. It is a ridiculous physical condition and how dare they flaunt the fact that they eat less and exercise more than anyone else? Of course, Argentina is a world leader in implants and plastic surgery, so some of those slender gals with wrinkle free skin and more dangerous curves than a slippery slope are targets for nonchalant scrutiny from every sidewalk café in town. Generally, Argentines are not particularly tall, but some are. They do not seem to have a ‘defining set’ of features that would enable you to say, ‘this man or that lady is Argentine’. Not by hair color, facial features or bone structure. BA is an energetic young city and it appears that there are far more people in the neighbourhood wearing sexy jogging attire and $150 Nikes than people wearing housedresses and sensible shoes. Further to that, possibly because of the heat or possibly because of a reason that has never occurred to people who were born where the weather is cold 300 days a year, most women, young and old, wear dresses and skirts when they are not jogging or sun bathing, but not slacks or jeans. Some wear little bitty teeny skirts at that. Possibly related to that topic but maybe not, for some reason there are lots of women pushing baby strollers, lots of mothers walking with children, lots of families out for dinner on Sundays. Like their parents, Argentine babies do not have any defining characteristics except they love their soothers as much as their parents love sidewalk cafés. Like everywhere else except maybe Asia and India, some babies have blond curly hair, others are bald, some are blue eyed, etc. All of them stare up into your face suspiciously as they roll past. The baby strollers themselves are as varied and colourful as fruit at the market, all of them look expensive and a few appear to be sturdy enough for the Dakar. Some people may have even sold the baby in order to afford the stroller, which they then use for moving groceries. And that’s another thing. We find almost everything to be quite expensive including groceries – even with Canadian currency. A good steak dinner at a fancy parrillia (grill) restaurant starts at, let’s say 160 pesos. Divided by four equals CA$40. Last time we were here (November 2007) the exchange was a division of three – but the meal cost 90 pesos, about CA$30. Even with a strong Canadian dollar inflation has hit Argentina hard and porteno life is expensive. In fact Richard says he is running through cash faster than his legs will carry him to the bank. Maybe he needs new Nikes (and a sexy little jogging shirt).
Meanwhile, back behind the rim of the cup, the sidewalk café is busy and other patrons don’t seem to care who got to the vacant chair first. They are reading their newspapers, working on laptops, chatting with friends. A little dog is sometimes sprawled out and asleep at parton's feet. Not one person at the outdoor café realizes or cares that what they are doing at this exact moment is impossible everywhere in Canada. In an entire country. It is just not fair. The white coffee tastes yummy, better than hot chocolate even, but as it disappears, fear begins to dig its surly fingers into the complacency of the muse. The beautiful moment is rushing past like an out of control pendulum and the only way to prolong it is to order another cafe con leche. Yes indeed, you need more time. A dog nanny walks past with seven or eight dogs of varying sizes and colors strung together on sturdy leather leashes. They all seem to be having fun, these dogs. Instead of being locked up in a pen or inside an apartment, they go out and meet their friends’ and play in the park while their parents are at work. It’s a great system – a sane system because everyone has at least one dog. Meanwhile, the black and yellow taxis flit past, one after another after another like bumble bees pollinating flowers. A delivery truck double parks across the street and the driver leaves the motor running while he makes his delivery. It's not his gasoline. Everyone is carrying something as they wander by – a bag, a purse, a book, a backpack. Business suits, high heels, slinky skirts, shorts, long hair, short hair, well dressed, poorly dressed - they are all on the sidewalk, fenced in by the perimeter of the view, focused on their business at hand. And what is their business at hand? Well according to BA sources there are 40,000 taxis and all of them need at least one driver. There are 144 bus lines running thousands of city busses and many of them need drivers. The subway line covers 46 kilometres with 80 stations and they need drivers, ticket sellers, security, and maintenance and so on. There are thousands and thousands of apartment buildings in dozens of Buenos Aires barrios and each one requires maintenance and cleaners and security. So here’s the thing. Instead of ever-sprawling suburbs filled with high profit big box stores found in Canada and America, BA neighbourhoods are manageable and self contained. They have small and smaller grocery stores, small shops of every kind and plenty of them, expensive restaurants, sidewalk cafes, toy stores, hardware, laundries, bakeries, hospitals, clinics, drug stores, parks, transportation – in fact every neighbourhood is entirely self sufficient. In a city of millions you live and shop in your own neighbourhood and you don’t need to drive your car for basic necessities. You support your local business and the business in turn supports the neighbourhood. It’s a novel concept. Why didn’t we think of that?
For sure one of the quirks of BA city life is this. Garbage. How does a city of 13 million, give or take, deal with garbage? Well here’s what we have observed. Citizens carry their garbage to assigned corners and place their bag, or bags, on the street. I know, I know, it doesn’t seem realistic. Or hygienic. And what about sipping café con leche in your favourite restaurant behind piles of garbage? Well we recommend that you choose your café carefully. As day passes into night, the piles grow larger. And then, quite late every night men with little carts come along and look inside every bag and remove the cardboard and bottles and whatever else they recycle for cash. So the beauty of all this is, at 7:30am every single morning you can hear the unbelievably noisy garbage truck roar around the corner a block away. You wait patiently as the collectors’ work their way along, clinking and banging and slamming, closer and noisier by the second. You hold your breath until they are outside your building, and then you let it all out when they move on. Miraculous really – by the time you head for your morning coffee, it’s all gone. We have wracked our brains to try and figure a more efficient, more sanitary method for handling garbage in such a large city and we have come up empty headed. Life is so tightly packed all over BA – no back alleys, no extra room for anything and they have developed a system that works in spite of what we think we know.
One thing that is a bargain in BA is public transport - trains, busses and metro. But don’t think it’s easy. You have to share everything public with a few million others and there’s never any air conditioning. Regular gasoline costs about CA$4.60 per imperial gallon, much cheaper than in Europe, more expensive than in Brazil but similar to what we pay in western Canada. Since our arrival we have not seen a single Hummer or very many SUVs or trucks, mostly cars, many new. Lots of motorcycles, scooters and power bikes. Clothing is sometimes expensive, especially name brands, but shoes are not. Leather goods are less expensive, electronics are outrageous. When we were in BA three years ago, internet cafes were plentiful and cheap to use. Now they are pretty much gone completely. Every restaurant, café, library and public washroom has free wifi. If electronics are so expensive, how do so many afford them? We don’t know. Since or arrival, twice there have been rumours about bank machines being out of cash and television interviews of frantic people unable to make withdrawals. Also, we have seen long lines of automobiles waiting to buy gasoline – gas shortage or news hype, we don’t know. On January 4th a big story hit the news. It was about the bank robbery – just like the movie the Bank Job – look it up! From a building rented six months earlier, thieves tunnelled 98 feet into a BA bank during New Years and broke into and robbed 130 safety deposit boxes. Many Argentines began storing their cash and savings in safety deposit boxes after the financial crisis of 2001, when thousands of people with bank deposit accounts lost a lot of money. Well you gotta feel sorry for them – it’s a sad way to start the New Year.
Beside our apartment and across the street from one of the sidewalk cafés is a little park. When we arrived on December 22nd, the park was alone all night and only busy with moms and dogs and children during the day. Lately though, the park has been occupied full time by a couple of homeless men, one with a wheelchair because he only has one leg. They sleep in the park and they sit on the retaining wall all day. We’re not sure if they use the sandbox, but they have become as permanent in the neighbourhood as a sidewalk cafe. Sometimes we say hello to them on our way in and out of the apartment. They are quite friendly. They ask for nothing. They are very unwashed, seem intelligent and in fact they seem quite happy - but to us they are oh so vulnerable and helpless. It is such a heartache. We feel for their situation but, even though it is inexcusable to do nothing, we realize there are thousands more like them scattered around this massive city. How do we help them? We do not know.
Well, the second cup of coffee is gone and it's time to move along. Any minute now someone will spot the empty table from afar and hustle over with their little dog. It is always coffee time at the sidewalk cafes in Buenos Aires.
Another post will soon follow with information about Jan’s visit and the sights of Buenos Aires.
Hasta Luego!
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