on closer examination...

Cultural differences abound, everywhere, and I try to be conscious of my U.S.A.-centric baseline, principally when it comes to what I’ll call overall rationality of daily living. On an objective scale, I am convinced that certain aspects of Argentine society simply make no sense, and, with that, dear reader, I shall now unabashedly launch into an overly biased tirade regarding the insanity of Argentine customer service and other sundry irrationalities.

Previously in this forum, I have addressed the most notable inconvenience – the mierda de las monedas. Reconnaissance indicates that the necessity of paying busses in coins, which nobody wants to give you, is a nagging inconvenience due to the bus mafia: the bus companies sell the change for more than face value to black market middlemen who push the coinage back into the market. Today I saw a sign on the front of an ice cream store: “Free kilogram of ice cream after payment of 100 pesos in change.” A kilo goes for about 36 pesos.

However, I am perhaps equally as dumbfounded by the utterly inexplicable lack of change in all but the highest-end retail establishments. We’re not talking loose coins here, we are talking enough bills to make more than a few dollars worth of change for ordinary purchases. For example, in the late afternoon, I went to the post office, a government entity (which, admittedly, probably makes it less likely that they would be fiscally organized, but nonetheless) and sent a few letters. The bill came to twenty-nine pesos (~u$s 8.50), and I paid with a 50 peso note (~u$s15). Cashier #5 (of 6) asked me if I had anything smaller. I answered that I did not (I lied, since it was eminently reasonable to pay with a fifty, and I needed to get rid of that bill when the payment proportion was reasonable, as it is very infrequent that I make any purchase of over twenty pesos). Cashier #5 nodded and left her desk, and returned shortly thereafter to ask me if I was sure that I did not have anything smaller. I repeated my previous (false) statement. (What was I going to do, pay her with all my small bills and then have to buy my seven-peso vegetables with a 50??). After interrupting each of the lower-numbered cashiers to request change, cashier #5 returned with twenty-one pesos.

Now, I cannot comprehend how Cashier #5 could not have had twenty-one pesos to give me. My bill, for a very pedestrian international shipment, was twenty-nine pesos. Surely in the six previous hours, during which time there was a constant twenty minute wait for (mediocre) service, this cashier (indeed, each and every one of them) must have received twenty-one pesos in payment. It would astound me if she had not received several hundred pesos in payment. I myself was paying her twenty-nine pesos, all at once!

Sadly, the lack of change is nothing new to Argentina; all of Latin America suffers from this profound and mysterious affliction. Over the course of a day, the money received by cashiers unfailingly disappears, and with truly devastating rapidity. In my experience, the most absurd episodes of this baffling phenomenon take place in Peru, where small women scurry to the next-door store any time the patron pays with more than two dollars. Nonetheless, the Argentine version of this insidious spectacle is impressive for the part it plays in the country’s already singular culture of customer service; that is to say, lack thereof. The nearest chain-grocery store to my house, the Leader Price, never fails to have exactly one (generally unenthusiastic) cashier working at peak hours, leaving the other four checkout lanes to rest easy. Thus, one can always expect a lengthy wait, exasperation which is, of course, exacerbated by the common cashier practice of calling the manager in order to get change for a 50. (The closest American approximation of the experience waiting in a typical argentine check-out line is the Giant Grocery store at 8th and O in Washington, DC - it’s the one with the police tape out front. I regularly brought my 20-pound law textbooks to the grocery store to head-off certain checkout idleness).

Indifferent, lax, and downright rude customer service is rampant in Argentina – indeed, that attitude represents the leading half of a sub-par service sector dance, working in tandem with dissatisfied but complacent clientele. No customer complains, because everybody knows that complaining will get you nowhere; no employee heeds customer complaints, because workers aren’t used to hearing complaints and have no qualms about screwing the occasional dissident. I write this not to complain (though I’ll admit plainly that I have played the part of the screwed dissident customer on various occasions), but simply to point out what I see as a real cultural difference between Argentina (and other Latin countries) and the United States; Argentines generally tolerate less – and thus, they get less, they don’t tip, and they neither complain nor commend the service on appropriate occasions. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, and me, well, I too often end up cracked and broiled.

My next favorite Argentine irrationality is a new one, historically. Argentina is in a single time zone, Argentine Standard Time (Argentina would never tolerate being in someone else’s zone), which coincides with Brazil, even though Brazil is located almost entirely to the east of Argentina, and the countries directly north of Argentina (Bolivia, Paraguay, sharing the same longitude) are an hour later. You can travel north and change time zones. Now, the country is not wide enough for it to be absurd that there is only one time zone (indeed, it spans fewer degrees of longitude than the U.S. Eastern Time Zone), and Argentines have indicated to me in any case it would be “crazy for the same country to be on different time zones” (granted, on other occasions, Argentines have insisted to me, among other things, that Niagara Falls was man-made). It would make no sense, the reasoning goes, for me in Buenos Aires to call my friend in Salta, in the west, and have it be a different time there than it is here. How would you ever know what time it is there??!!

Since last December, there is a new twist to the time zone tango: Daylight Savings Time. This year, on October 19, clocks sprung forward one hour in exactly 10 of Argentina’s 23 provinces. Thus, rather than having actual time zones, whereby different longitudinal zones are constantly 1 hour apart for the entire year (which, recall, would be crazy), there are now 10 distinct and geographically disparate provinces which are one hour different from the others, for one half of the year. The rest of the year, all provinces are on the same time. The lunacy of this situation requires no further explication.

Small Appliances.

When alone with a stranger in the United States, the commonly employed silence-killing device is talking about the weather. There is always weather. And everybody has an opinion (even not having an opinion counts as an opinion. In fact, that kind of apathy may be even MORE interesting, when the goal is to kill time). When I am in Argentina, my attempts to talk about the weather are futile.

In per-chance interactions, there are two common topics:
1) What I think of the women in the country
and
2) I forget the other one.

People are always trying to ask me what I think of the women in Argentina. Well, I tell them (and honestly), that they've got some darn fine women here. In as many words. In this vein, today I had an especially peculiar and interesting interaction:

I needed to buy a fan, because it is damn hot. (And let us NOT deny that the weather affects our moods, our small-talk, and our consumerism of small medium and large appliances). Also, my bedroom is directly next to the sidewalk (I commonly receive pizza and ice cream delivery through my bedroom window), which makes for a very noisy night if I keep my window open, and fans are as good for white noise as they are for moving air around.

So I went to my neighborhood small electronics store, two blocks from my house. The store was about 10 feet by 8 feet and packed with stuff, like most niche stores in the neighborhood (and those are the only kind of store. plastic thing store, for instance. Or womens undergarment store). I navigated through boxes of floodlights and ducked under some low hanging display chandeliers on my way to the counter, where the store owner was chatting with an old woman.

I should say, he was looking at an old woman, and she was talking towards him. This woman was what many would call - endearingly - a real piece of work. She is definitely somebody's favorite grandma. Appearing about 75, clunky white shoes matching her short cropped white hair and fake pearl necklace. White polka dots held it together over her blue dress. Herself and her grandmotherly paunch held court in the electronics shop, and I have no doubt the stool she was sitting on was well molded to her presumably equally grandmotherly behind. She held a red leash granting a mere six or seven feet of slack to a small white scotty dog who licked my toes intermittently throughout the purchase of my fan. The store owner, in classic small-appliance mold, had an easy smile, a receding hairline and a red beard. He would give his (totally unbuttoned) polo shirt a little tuck-in every time he came out from behind the counter.

I interrupted kindly to let the owner know I was looking for a fan. The old woman, we'll call her Myrna, quickly answered, to let me know just which fan I should get. Of the two fans in the store.

Unfortunately, Myrna's preferred fan was twice the price of the other one. I have to admit, her choice fan sure was a beaut, standing clear as tall as Myrna herself, and just as white. A lot more active even. "You don't have to set this one on a chair!" she said. "just sit there and have lunch and it blows right on you. No trouble at all."
"Well, I don't know," I said to the store-owner.
"I really think you should go with this one here," Myrna answered back, pointing at the oscillating free-standing fan, her finger energetically rotating like the fan (or was she shaking?). "It's great for when you are sleeping, too."
I asked the man to show me the cheaper fan.

Just then, a bald fellow with a striped polo shirt sauntered in, and as he too ducked under the chandelier, the store owner said "what do you say, Pancho?"

I was not sure if he was calling me Pancho, or if this man was Pancho. (A hotdog here is called a Pancho. A really long hotdog a "SuperPancho"). I made an non-committal noise.

"Todo bien," said Pancho.

"You know," said Myrna to Pancho, and pointed to the store owner, who was plugging my fan in, "he used to be quite smitten with my daughter."

brief silence.

". . . but that girl he's dating now is really pretty."

The store owner smiled and flipped my fan on.

"How is the air, Pancho?" he asked, as Pancho was standing directly in fan range.

"Feels good from here," Pancho replied.

I paused to think a minute, and the store owner made a great stab at a pun.

"El tema es el peso, o los Pesos, eh? el peso o los pesos?" (is your issue the weight, or the cost, but weight and cost are essentially the same word here). I told him it was the pesos, and he nodded understandingly. Myrna didn't have a comeback, but Scotty began licking my other foot.

“I´ll take the cheap one,” I told him.

As the store owner was packing my fan into the box, he asked me where I was from. I suppose I could have referred to my Harbor Springs basketball shirt, but I thought “United States” would probably suffice. He inquired when I was to return, and:

“what if you fall in love with an Argentine. What then?” he suggested as he and Myrna smiled.

“Well,” I reflected, “Love matters more than anything.”

And there, the store owner, Myrna, the Scotty dog, and I each pursed our lips and silently nodded, amongst the electrical coils and designer light fixtures.

Pancho was on his way out the door. Some kinda weather out there.

Where Were You?

As the polls closed on the East Coast, it was 11pm in Buenos Aires, and I was savoring the last bites of leftover flank steak, with eggplant and zucchini from the my preferred Peruvian produce vendor, a squat white-haired man who gets red onions special for me and sets up shop in the doorway of the Korean grocer´s ("el Chino," to my roommates) at the corner of Lacroze and Delgado. My roommate Leandro had a Jethro Tull album (that was not Aqualung) playing at a low blast from the next room. Alone at the kitchen table, a desk salvaged from the street and refurbished by my roommate Vero, I pretended for a moment that I would not eat all of the bread I had bought from the Confitería Iris, where a thin red-haired bread lady always asks how my studies are going and laughs when I do not know the name of a single one of the innumerable sweets stacked high on the counters. I killed the last of the bread along with the bottom half of a bottle of Callia Syrah-Malbec, which sells for 12 pesos at El Chino. The wine was still decent, though opened five days ago, on Halloween (I had sworn off drinking following my debaucherous debut as Freddy Mercury, and just Tuesday morning shaved my mustache, a lasting disgusting relic).

The water heater above the sink growled as I scrubbed our primitive toasting apparatus, for use on the stove, and I winked at the multichrome Warhol-esque images of Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe stuck above the drying rack.

The computer moved slowly. Clicking on counties led to listless loading times, heightening my hopeful anxiety. The map turned blue. Slowly. Slowly. Turned. Blue. We expected this would happen, but these percentages and graphs and cautious network calls added up to something momentous, something with momentum. Rapt eyes glued to eight open internet pages, I tried to explain to Leandro and Vero what this could mean, but it was too big. I did not realize it when the Tull album ended, and Leandro looked up from his book to request that I skip back to the beginning.

They called Ohio. Luke's status message, posted from the UAW hall in Taylor, MI, read "it's too close to call... in Arizona." McCain aids had already said it would take a miracle. Obama climbed over 200, and I needed a breather.

The eased nerves, the wine, the steak, the sticky relentless humidity. I was drowsy, almost resigned to sleep before the election was called. I laid down, my guitar on my chest, waiting. waiting.

I twitched, strumming my guitar loudly, my subconscious ringing the doorbell, reminding me that this date was worth my attention. Worth being awake. Reticent, I closed my eyes again.

and then, it happened. My Election Moment.

Through the night's heavy haze,

through my open window, a sound

first scratchy and mumbled, but

approaching, ever clearer

an old radio, a car window rolled down,

one single audible phrase as it screamed by my room

a phrase inspiring true American fist pumps,

its energy as American as the Miller Light those fist pumps so often spill:

"Don´t stop

...


Beliieeeevin"


The car vanished. I walked to the computer, refreshed, and saw that Barack Obama had been elected President of the United States of America. A Journey, indeed...

.................


"Barack and Roll" T-shirt on, I climbed into a cab headed to Puerto Madero and mentioned to the cabby that Obama had won. The driver was most interested in discussing Argentine politics, specifically the situation of insecurity that he feels is the most important issue facing the country (in my conversations, crime is by far the number one thing Argentines are concerned about and wish their government would better address.) For fifteen minutes he talked about how he is afraid every night that he may not return to see his wife and children. He wanted an empathetic ear, and that's what I gave him. I like to think we elected Barack Obama because he will lend that same ear.

I arrived at the party, at a club on the docks, around 2:15am. Things were just getting going. The graduating class of law students at my university, Torcuato Di Tella, were throwing the party, and the 17 graduating women were identifiable in their (skimpy) police outfits. The five graduating men had unsurprisingly failed to hold up their end of the bargain, as they were not dressed like narcotraficantes. I had four cans of Quilmes, danced through the sweat rings, and hugged a lot of people.
As the bartenders locked up and left the club, I sat on the lawn with a bottle of water, discussing in half-sentences what a great night this was with my compañeros from the law school. I hitched a ride back to my neighborhood with some of them, and I heard Oasis and an Alanis Morissette dance remix on the radio. Squished beside me was the daughter of a former "guvernator" of a northwest Argentine province, who had been named after Petunia. Not the flower, the girlfriend of Porky the Pig. I live in an acid dream.

I opened up my computer once more and fetched a corner of bread that had escaped my fiendish gluttony hours earlier. Obama was over 300 in the EC now, and I sought out the speeches. First, McCain's gracious speech, emotional as much for its textual calls for unity as for the tone, a noted contrast from the stiff rancor which seemed to define him in recent weeks. Next, I read Obama's humble victory speech, and as the sky slowly lit up the heavy air, I took deep breaths, realizing in some small part what a journey it had been for him; and for us; and how far we all have to go.

I cried. And I fell asleep in my chair, an open jar of peanut butter at my feet.