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Good news, we have a home when we return to Baires in February…a home for two months anyway!

There is a reason for the two month rental: furnished apartment rents are through the roof here — crazy expensive — and, I believe that travel is going to be way down next year due to a worsening worldwide recession, which means that I don’t want to lock something in right now at the sky high rents everyone is charging.

Instead, we are going to rent for a few months when we get back in February from our summer travels and see what’s going on in the world.

Our new neighborhood is going to be Palermo.

The girls are resigned to the endless moving. Tom and I figure that if we keep this up, we could live in nearly every neighborhood in the city!

With neither of us working, our sabbatical is supposed to be an opportunity for Tom and I to do more together.

That sounds easy, right?

Well, it’s not as simple as I thought. It really requires a phase shift in thinking — surprisingly. You see, once you have kids, everything is planned for time maximization, and because someone has to be watching the kids, tasks are always divided.

We still fall into those patterns. If we have time free together during the day, our knee jerk reaction is to think, okay, how can we split up and get a bunch of stuff done? “You pick up the kids from school, while I run to the store and start dinner.” Or, “I’ll go to Spanish school this week while you use that time plan our summer travels and make reservations.”

We are slowly changing our habits. We now try to forget about being productive and instead focus on what we can do together!

So yes, we’re getting into the swing of things. What’s astonishing is that we had to work at it!!

…and other evolutionary dead ends in the home.

This place is a wonder of old fashioned technology. Pictured to the left is the light switch/maid switch combo that is located in the bathrooms. One switch turns on the light, the other buzzes the maid in the kitchen. (I’m not sure why you would want to call the maid in the kitchen while using the bathroom?)

For the first week here, you could tell when someone was using the bathroom because it would be preceded with buzz, then, “sorry.”

Below left, you will find the hood vent over the stove. You tilt the windows out and prop them up over the stove, as shown here, and then turn on the fan that is vented out the nearby window. Now that is a big greasy area to clean up.

Below right, you will find my personal favorite, the clothes drying cabinet. This puppy is gas fired on the bottom, and then you hang your items to be dried on the bars and close the cabinet doors. It’s like a little sauna for clothes!

Honestly, it strikes us as a bit of a fire hazard, so we just use it as an air drying rack with the doors open because it scares the crap out of us!

I begin this post with a *monster sigh*

We didn’t think that finding a temporary furnished apartment somewhere convenient to the girls’ school would be too hard, especially with a start date in February — hardly high season. And indeed, we found the perfect place, had multiple communications with the agent, who assured us it was available and that the owner was ready to rumble. We were negotiating terms…blah blah blah.

Then, all of a sudden, today, the agent informs us that the owner of the apartment doesn’t actually rent it out during the school year because she lives in it, so it’s not available.

I felt like I had run into a brick wall. It was all I could do to restrain myself from writing, “You f***ing liar!” (See, I am growing and maturing.)

Anyway, our experiences with temporary rental real estate agents here have been less than savory when trying to locate a property and determine if it is available. Sadly, they all seem willing to tell you that they have checked with the owner, that they are in constant communication with the owner, that they represent the owner’s negotiating position, when really, they haven’t talked to the owner at all.

Between having to find the tiki lounge (as we refer to our new apartment) and trying to locate an apartment to come back to in February (after our travels), I feel that I’ve spent every waking moment of the last 3 weeks apartment hunting and getting my ass handed to me.

Needless to say, NOT HAPPY about covers my mood. Time to eat another bon bon.

Tom’s Spanish teacher, Lorena, described the Argentinian diet as consisting of the following four meals a day.

FIRST MEAL: Coffee (the most important component of the first meal) and some sort of sweet pastry.

SECOND MEAL: This would be analogous to our lunch and is generally empanadas (meat stuffed pastry dough) and/or pizza (bread and lots and lots of cheese). Possibly a sandwich could be substituted here.

THIRD MEAL: Third meal is taken at around 5:00 pm and consists of coffee (the only thing that gets you through until dinner) and a small cookie/pastry. If you are hungry, you might eat a tostada (bread, thin slice of cheese, thin slice of meat, toasted).

FOURTH MEAL: This is the big meal of the day and is generally some combination of meat and potatoes with whatever else you may choose to eat (perhaps a salad). This meal is eaten at 9:30 or 10:00 pm. Lorena said that people go to bed directly after eating dinner during the week. (Mind you, on the weekend, it is common to eat much later.)

Lorena asked Tom what our eating schedule was in the States. He told her, with kids, that we generally tended to eat at 6:30 pm or 7:00 pm and then we would go to bed around 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm. She couldn’t believe that there was such a big gap between when we ate dinner and when we went to bed, during which she claimed she would starve.

This knowledge led us to conclude that the big steak at the end of the day in Argentina is really just a time-saver because it acts as your undigested breakfast for the next morning!!

Look out! Here’s another rare post from Tom…

While prices in general have risen quite a bit in the past several years in Buenos Aires, food prices are still dramatically less than what we’re used to in the States. Let’s take a recent example, in which I decided to cook up some steaks on the stovetop.

My selection was the Bife de Chorizo, which is the equivalent of a NY Strip steak. (Argentine cuts of beef can be quite a bit different than US cuts, but the bife de chorizo maps pretty exactly.)

Four thick steaks equals about four pounds of beef.

Total cost: $10 US dollars, or about $2.50 per 1 lb. steak.

Checking the New Seasons Market web site (where we shopped in Portland) shows that back home, the NY Strip steak would be about $15/lb. Can’t complain about that!

Please note that the above is a pre-cooking photo. While I like beef on the rare side, this would be a bit excessive…

…What Happens when Countries Go Bankrupt?

There is a very interesting article in Spiegel Online from November 4th that I didn’t notice until today. It talks about the myriad challenges that bankrupt nations now face and uses the 2001 crisis in Argentina as an example of what happens when a country goes bankrupt.

They also discuss Argentina’s current economic prospects:

“And the sound of pots and pans being banged together is back. President Cristina Fernandez, who succeeded her husband Nestor Kirchner in 2007, increasingly resembles the hapless de la Rúa. Last week, she presented her version of the “Corralito” — the term used to describe the freezing of bank accounts in 2001 — when she ordered the nationalization of private pension funds, allegedly to prevent the funds from going bankrupt.

But economic experts believed that Fernandez’s true objective in nationalizing the private deposits, which are worth $30 billion (€24 billion), is to avert a government bankruptcy. Columnist Mario Grondona criticized the president, likening her to “a captain trying to save a sinking ship by bailing it out with a bowl from the kitchen.“

Interesting and relevant reading no matter where you are.

Are you single…without kids…able to attend lots of cultural events? Do you have a ton of valuable experience to relate to your fellow expats?

Okay, aside from being envious (*smile*), I thought you should know that you can now turn your intellectual pursuits and on-the-ground knowledge into cold hard cash from BA Expats. Every month, they will award $100.00 US to the most popular post in one of the following two forums: 1) reviews of cultural events in their Culture Forum; or, 2) general guides to any aspect of expat life in Buenos Aires in their Articles Forum.

Please check out the details here.

It’s time to talk about our new apartment…our new very retro apartment. This bad boy was state of the art — in 1969!!

Each floor of this building has two apartments, an A and a B side. Each side has it’s own elevator, which opens into a sort of private entry chamber that leads to the front door of your apartment. (It is essentially a private elevator that opens directly outside your front door.) We have dubbed our entry area the “Bamboo Decompression Chamber” because the tiny little room has a low ceiling, and is outfitted floor and ceiling with a bamboo print wallpaper, which you can see below.

Lest you think that having an elevator opening into your pad is kind of cool, I will have to continue my story. Today, Ian and I were trapped in the apartment because the elevator wasn’t functioning and the one set of back door keys (which leads to the stairs) were across the city with Tom. (To get in and out of all doors you MUST use multiple keys from the inside. If this place goes up in a fire, we are in trouble!)

To further give you a sense of the retro-ness of our apartment, I have taken a picture of the upholstered walls and ceiling of the master bedroom for your viewing enjoyment. Please do enlarge the photo so that you can get a real feel for it!

Perhaps my favorite feature of the upholstered walls and ceiling (there are so many features, it’s very difficult to resist listing them all), is the fact that every surface manages to hold a generation’s worth of strange odors!

Having said all of that, the living and dining room are quite spacious, the WIFI coverage is great, and the move was easy because it is located in the building next door to our last apartment (the one with the dishwasher we are mourning)!

Renting a temporary apartment, with little lead time, during high season, is a bitch!

When I worked for an aerospace corporation in Fort Walton Beach, FL, there were many transplants from the NE United States working there. Said transplants were constantly complaining about how long it took to get things done in NW Florida, which has much more in common with its Southern neighbors than with Miami. (Me, I didn’t complain at all. I was just happy that they gave me my first real job out of college and that I had my own office!)

My uptight co-workers estimated that it took 3 times longer to close out projects than they felt it should, and dubbed this delaying effect the “Florida Factor.”

Well, Tom and I are encountered the Florida Factor here in that it takes us about 3 times longer to complete any task than the amount of time we initially allot for that task. *Sigh*

For instance, we went out to find a temporary gym the other day, and were going to “grab” a bite at a cafe. The “grab” took nearly two hours, start to finish. I love that, as a people, the Argentines take the time to enjoy their dining experiences, whether they are taking a cup of coffee or a whole meal.

But, in this instance, it meant that we looked at one gym (the one by the cafe) and had to blow off the rest to go pick up Zelda!

Grocery shopping is another good example. The lines are horrendous, so if you shop at the wrong time and compound that error by picking the wrong line, which we have an uncanny knack for doing, it takes about 5 times longer to check out than it does to shop.

Suffice to say, we are not a well oiled machine at this point!! But, we bury our sorrows in massive amounts of gelato and move on…tomorrow is a new day.