Buenos Aires Travel Blog Uno

I’ve arrived in Buenos Aires.

On my first day I met a whole bunch of other solo travellers. They were overwhelmingly European. One thing I’ve learned about euros is that they love talking shit about other euros. I think my favourite was the chain smoking (I’ve never seen that before!) older Dutch lady who kept sending out racist dog whistles and told me about how all French people are complete assholes and that I shouldn’t visit France.

I found it hard not to be the rich arrogant American. Seeing these Europoors fiddle over who is supposed to get the 27 cents of change at a restaurant instead of just overpaying and leaving really brings it out in you.

I spent most of the day chatting with these strangers, but the real adventure started after midnight.

Here I am at the entrance to a massive indoor food market. It was like a good version of St. Lawrence Market. Your teachers wouldn't take you here on a school trip since it'd be too much fun and someone'd spill beer on you.

The adventure was food poisoning. Oh man I vomited like a gallon of fluid all at once. I slept maybe one hour in total that night, and the misery of being sick and needing to shit every fifteen minutes was made worse by being in these awful hostel accomodations and feeling bad about disturbing my dormmates (one of whom was a nineteen year-old who faked psychosis to get out of the Israeli army).

In the morning I noticed my vomit was the kind that indicated gastrointestinal bleeding. Healthcare is free for everyone in Argentina, which I figured meant long lines and worse service so I took an Uber to a private hospital that seemed like it’d have English speaking doctors.

I was eleven hours into this food poisoning by then and I was pretty delirious from dehydration. I was losing water far faster than I could consume it. I felt truly awful. I think the Uber driver thought I was dying so he was ripping through the streets of Buenos Aires while I did big vomits out his window. I tipped him a hundred dollars and was having trouble moving under my own power by the time we arrived at the hospital.

They have this interesting cemetary where all the Argentinian institutional big shots get to design their own houses where they stay when they're dead or something like that I don't know. La Recoleta Cemetery.

In a private hospital in Argentina, you have to pay before you get any services. The receptionist told me through google translate “A consultation will cost $10,500” and I thought “well shit, better than fucking dying, good thing my credit card doesn’t have a credit limit”. It took me maybe ten seconds to realize that was Argentine Pesos and the cost was actually $30 USD. Phew.

Inbetween a lot of waiting the doctor diagnosed me as severely dehydrated and unlikely to be internally bleeding, but ordered some tests to be sure. So I paid $100 for an X-ray, an ultrasound, and an IV. What a bargain!

They drained a couple of rehydration fluid bags into my arm, ran all the tests, concluded my guts were fine, gave me some pro- and anti- biotics (I guess they couldn’t make up their mind?), and sent me off.

I checked into a nice hotel and spent the next twenty hours walking the fine line of drinking water to keep myself from dehydrating but being extremely careful not to drink too much lest I vomit up all my accumulated progress. It was like resource management in a video game. Looking back on that time, I was definitely in delirium. I struggle to make sense of the delusions right now, something about being three different personalities depending on how I lay down in the bed?

The goal of travel is to learn, and I guess I know what dehydration is like now.

A version of chess where you really gotta ask yourself what you're fighting for / Bootleg Spirit Island.

Anyways as I write this I’m feeling the pleasant sensation of being a little overhydrated from drinking too much water so I think I’m out of the woods, except I’m still going to restrict myself to bananas and crackers for another day.

So I really haven’t done much travelling, but I still have some observations:

Argentina is going to collapse.

Let me weave you my totally uneducated narrative:

The politics in Argentina are about who can unsustainably bribe voters the most. Energy prices are subsidized, healthcare is free, post-secondary education is free. Housing is subsidized. It’s a very ummmm, ‘robust’ welfare regime. And since Argentina keeps defaulting on its debts it isn’t really able to borrow from abroad, so instead they print money.

This chart isn't Argentine pesos to a dollar, this is the inflation rate. I think inflation was around 40% for a few years before the start of this chart.

And apparently the politicians argue about whether to institute UBI or not. They’re completely captured by populism and it’s all going to collapse. Or not, since apparently various economic disasters have been befalling Argentina for 20 years (or maybe a century?) and the people are veterans of economic hardship. Who can say, but it does mean that:

Everything is very cheap

Four bucks bought me a twenty minute Uber ride. There were no seatbelts, but still it was only four dollars! I bought a nice tote bag at the grocery store for a fifth of a penny! You can buy empanadas for thirty cents (and they’re not tiny)! I feel very good every time I buy something for cheap.

Other misc observations

The keys to my AirBnB are very interesting.

• It’s a very late night city. 24 hour ‘kiosks’ are seemingly everywhere. There’s a good amount of restaurants that open at 10pm. Not just party restaurants serving drunkards, there’s a vegan restaurant near where I’m staying that closes at 2AM on Friday and Saturday. There’s no laws about closing bars at a specific time, so many of them run until 5am (or later!).
• The graffiti here is very political. I don’t really understand it but I don’t think “sexualidad existencial” is a phrase used by hoodlum taggers. I do understand the “communism o muerte” graffiti though, and it feels a lot more legitimate in South America than it does coming from the mouth of some twenty-something white enby in Seattle. So it was cool to realize that there’s authentic old-school revolutionary communists in this city.
• Despite the economic hardships, the people here are very chic. Lots of people in alt-fashion walking around. Youth culture here feels like a neat mix of homegrown culture and imports from America. I hope to understand this more.
• Seems like automatic transmissions haven’t made their way to Argentina yet, most cars I’ve been in have been manual.