Argentina, Part 1: "Disculpa, no yo entiendo. Más despacio, por favor."

So, I made it down here in one piece. This was the first time I'd flown Continental Airlines in years, and I was pleasantly surprised. Compared to United or Delta, their planes are pretty new and in excellent shape. Best of all, they actually give a somewhat substantial snack/meal during the flights--- even for a relatively short jaunt from San Francisco to Houston. It's clear that the airline is pinning its hopes on its inventory of Latin American routes. Their flight staff are all bilingual, and all in-flight announcements are in both English and Spanish. It certainly was no Singapore Air in terms of general "shininess", but it beat the heck out of most US airlines.

The days immediately preceding my departure were partially spent trying to find a place to stay once I got here. I knew that I needed to find a hostel of some sort, since hotels--- while certainly cheaper than in the US--- are still a bit too spendy to stay at for a week. Beyond that, however, I didn't know much. There are dozens of different hostels in Buenos Aires, and I didn't have time to do any kind of serious research. I solicited recommendations from several Argentines of my acquaintance, sent off a bunch of emails, and hoped for the best. By the day of my departure, I had heard back from a few hostels, and none of them had any vacancies. Luckily, about ten minutes before I boarded my flight from Houston to Buenos Aires, I called home to have somebody check my email for me one last time, and, lo and behold, the hostel that I'd been most interested in had replied and had rooms available. I had somebody send a reply reserving a private room (only 10 pesos more per night than a communal room, and worth every centavo), and proceeded to board my flight.

Upon landing around nine in the morning, the English got turned off, and the Spanish got turned on. I'll surely discuss the language issue in more detail in a subsequent post, but suffice to say that, in my case, "turned on" is a somewhat misleading phrase. It makes it sound like flicking on a light switch and suddenly having a ton of light. In reality, it's more like starting up an old, leaky, backfiring Model-T with one flat tire using some sort of hand-crank apparatus: it takes a while, doesn't sound pretty while you're doing it, may require hours of poking and prodding with wrenches and what-not, and, once you've finally got the thing running, it doesn't even drive very well. Long story short, language-related hilarity has been ensuing on a more or less continuous basis since I got here.

Anyways, I was able to make it through customs without being arrested and change dollars into pesos without being ripped off too badly. The next challenge was to obtain a taxi. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, as the airport has little kiosks for several of the reputable taxi companies. You simply go up to the counter and tell them where you're going. They quote a price, you agree, and then an employee takes you and your bags to the waiting taxi. Then, said employee tries to solicit a tip, which you, not yet having learned that nobody tips in Argentina, happily give him.

Once in the taxi, we left the airport and started heading for Buenos Aires proper. Prior to coming on this trip, I'd heard horror stories about BsAs's crazy drivers and awful traffic. While there was in fact a great deal of truth to the stories, I'm pleased to report that the drivers here are nowhere near as bad as they're made out to be. I've developed a sort of mental logarithmic scale from one to ten, where one is "No particular fear of death upon entering a vehicle" and ten is "Fully expecting major trauma or organ system failure as a direct result of the drive". The scale is normalized such that Portland is a one, and Calcutta is a ten. New York is maybe a two or three. I'd put Argentina as a whole somewhere between six and eight, depending on who's driving and where you are (e.g., on the bus heading downtown at rush hour, in a taxi at three in the morning, on the highway outside of town, in somebody's personal vehicle etc.). Crossing the street can be an... exhilarating experience, but by and large it's not too bad.

Anyways, after an only very mildly hair-raising ride, we made it to my hostel. I stayed in a neighborhood named "Abasto", which is kind of off the beaten tourist path. I chose it largely due to its close proximity to the hospital where my only BsAs contacts worked, and knew nothing about the neighborhood itself. I found it to be a wonderful location: right next to a subway stop, with lots of interesting shops, cafes, and bars nearby. It is perhaps a ten-minute subway ride from the main downtown area, and a very pleasant 30-minute walk. One of the granddaddies of modern tango--- Carlos Gardel--- lived there, and it continues to be a major hotbed for local music. Because it was so far away from the major tourist areas, prices at restaurants and stores were incredibly low. A gigantic, tasty steak dinner comes to perhaps five or six US dollars. Å ten-dollar sweater closer to downtown would cost maybe seven dollars in Abasto.

The hostel itself is in the top two floors of a converted apartment building or brownstone. You enters from the street through a pair of typical Argentine doors--- ludicrously tall, skinny, and heavy--- and goes up a narrow marble staircase. At that point, you're in the main living area, which contains a few couches, a dining room, a hallway leading to the kitchen and one of the dorms, and also a staircase going up to the second floor. My single room was upstairs, at the very end of the hallway.

The crowd staying at the hostel was your typical motley multinational assortment of students, travelers, etc. I found that there were very few residents who spoke English, which gave me a sort of trial-by-fire when it came to conversation. Everybody was very friendly, and we had a "good ol' time" running around BsAs together. A number of the people there were in Argentina for extended periods of time, so their local friends frequently dropped by.

My first order of business upon arrival was to obtain a cell phone. This is astonishingly easy in Argentina. Any given city block has at least two stores where one can buy a phone, activation chip, and phone card. Through extensive use of hand-waving and dictionary consultation, I managed to pick the whole package up for about 100 pesos, or about thirty dollars. The number was ready to use within minutes, and no two-year contracts were required. Absolutely wonderful.

The next order of business was to obtain lunch. Using an extremely scientific process of "wandering around", I found a nice looking restaurant where I obtained my first taste of Argentina's amazing beef. The dish was called "asado", not to be confused with the cultural practice of "asado" or the Mexican dish "carne asada". In this case, "asado" refers to a particular cut of beef. It is sort of like a transverse section through the ribs. In other words, rather than having the ribs be present as long skinny bones, the meat is cut such that the rib bones appear as small, short cylinders. For nine pesos (three dollars), I got three gigantic pieces of meat--- perhaps consisting of four or five ribs each, and maybe an inch or two think. Grilled right there, fresh to order. Absolutely delicious.

I also learned something about Argentine salads: they are extremely literal. If the menu says that a salad is, for example, a potato and tomato salad, that is exactly what you'll get. A giant bowl of diced tomato and diced potato, in roughly equal proportions. If the menu says that a particular salad is a celery salad, you'll get a huge bowl of diced celery and nothing else. This is not necessarily a bad thing; however, it is somewhat surprising the first few times.

On my first night in Buenos Aires, I got a crash course in the ludicrous hours kept by Argentines. Some of the other residents of the hostel invited me to go bar-hopping with them, and I of course accepted. None of them spoke a word of English, but I was able to follow enough of the conversation to understand that we would be leaving "pretty early", perhaps around 11:30 or 12:00. We ended up walking halfway across the city to a neighborhood called Palermo, which is currently the trendy part of town. It was founded at least a hundred years back when the residents of San Telmo--- which had been the former trendy neighborhood--- were forced to change neighborhoods by yellow fever.

This is actually something of a recurring theme. Most of the nicer neighborhoods' histories seem to follow a general plot description along these lines: "Nice Neighborhood XYZ was first established by an influx of wealthy residents from the former nicest neighborhood of ABC fleeing a Yellow Fever outbreak." From what I read and saw, it sounds like Yellow Fever, in fact, seems to have historically been one of the major driving forces in urban planning in Buenos Aires.

At any rate, we made it to Palermo and began the hunt for an appropriate bar. This took a good half-hour, and involved sticking our heads in probably half a dozen bars. I was never really able to follow exactly why any given bar was deemed inappropriate, but by a aggressive program of smiling, nodding, and following, I managed to keep up. Finally, at probably about 1:00 in the morning, we found what we were after, and proceeded to hang out until about 4:00. At this point, the bar was still totally packed. In fact, in the three hours since our arrival, it had grown steadily more crowded. Our table was immediately grabbed upon our departure. This was a Thursday night, and people were still actively arriving at bars at 4:00 in the morning!

The next day was Friday, and I was scheduled to meet with the informatics team at the Hospital Italiano. The hospital is located about ten blocks from where I was staying, so it was a very straightforward walk down there. I was met by the director of the informatics group, whom I had met during her visit to Portland earlier this year.

The hospital itself is (partially, at least) in a gorgeous old building and is more than a century old. It is one of the largest private hospitals (i.e., not part of the public health system) in Buenos Aires, and is considered one of the top hospitals in South America. In addition to the main hospital, there are a variety of satellite outpatient clinics as well as a health insurance plan. My main interest in the hospital is their informatics program, one of only a few such programs in Latin America. Medical residents can choose to do a full residency in the informatics group just as they might choose to do a radiology or general surgery residency, and medical students rotate through the department as well.

The main activity of the informatics group seems to be working on their fascinating homebrew electronic health record. It is used in both the ambulatory and inpatient settings, though there is no order entry in the inpatient system due to Argentina's lack of legal digital signatures. The whole thing is built on top of the Spanish-language version of SNOMED-CT, and the terminology system that ties it all together is a thing of beauty. The crown jewel, as far as I'm concerned, is a master thesaurus of something like 40,000 Argentine medical phrases, acronyms, idioms, etc. The residents and students spend a great deal of time modeling locally-used medical concepts within the SNOMED framework and combing through progress notes and other user-created content to find things to add to the master index. It's actually a pretty slick bit of DHTMl hacking, and is quite usable.

The whole thing is a really impressive piece of work, all the more so when one considers the paucity of resources under which it has been developed. I met with about four or five of their programmers, and they are really working miracles. Comparisons with similar setups in the US are very difficult due to the completely different nature of our health care systems and the fact that I'm hardly an EHR expert, but I'd say that their system in general, and their terminology server in particular, are at least on par with anything I've seen anywhere in the US. The prescription component was certainly comparable to Vanderbilt's, and, again, the terminology server was absolutely incredible.

Given that I visited the hospital on a Friday, the informatics residents were curious about my plans for the evening. At that point, I didn't have any, so they took it upon themselves to dig up an incredibly comprehensive list of every party, concert, show, etc. taking place in the entire city of Buenos Aires that night. This was how I heard about a show called the "Choque Urbana", whose Friday-night performance I ended up attending. Apparently somewhat well-known in Argentina, they are somewhere between a musical act and a "performance art" group. Sort of like Stomp, only more... Argentine. The show consisted of an extended percussion concert making use of pots, pans, oil drums, paint buckets, the floor, a large organ-type thing made of copper pipes, megaphones, bicycles, etc. etc. etc. The whole thing was hung over some sort of basic plot, which I was (of course) completely unable to follow. So, for me, it was a primarily musical experience. The small theater it took place in was three blocks from my hostel¹, and excellent seats were 25 pesos (approximately 8 dollars).

When the show got out at 11:00 or so, it was time for dinner. This ended up being my first taste of Argentine pizza. Due to a large number of Italian immigrants in the 19th century, Argentina has a serious love affair with pizza and pasta. This seems like a good time to mention an important observation about restaurants in Argentina: essentially all restaurants, no matter how small, invariably have three main staple items on the menu. The first is an astonishingly wide assortment of meat served fresh from the parilla, the omnipresent barbecue grill found in every home, business, street corner, hospital, soccer stadium parking lot, etc. in the entire country. A full discussion of the social, zoological, and gastrointestinal implications of the parilla could easily fill multiple volumes, and will have to wait for a later essay. The second basic category is pasta, typically spaghetti, ravioli and perhaps one or two other varieties (gnocchi is quite popular). The third is pizza, invariably cooked fresh to order in a stone oven.

Since the pizzas are so fresh, and are invariably cooked in a proper oven (as opposed to one of the weird conveyer-belt-style ovens so frequently found in the US), they are almost always excellent. The crust is usually pretty thin, and there is always a ton of cheese--- either mozzarella, provolone, or occasionally blue cheese. There are, however, two major shortcomings. The first is the topping selection. Pepperoni seems to be unknown here; the only meats commonly found on pizzas are ham and occasionally anchovies. The second major shortcoming involves the sauce. Namely, their nearly complete lack thereof. Most pizzas here will contain the merest hint of tomato sauce, which causes problems given the thin crust and massive amounts of cheese and topping. Pizza, as a food group, must strike a delicate balance between the four pillars of crust, sauce, cheese, and topping. Too much of any of these relative to the others results in a culinary experience which, however tasty it may be, falls short of perfection. Argentina's pizza tends to be somewhat philosophically lopsided. (Now there's a sentence that can't come up too often!)

Sauce-related deficiencies notwithstanding, the pizza here is generally excellent, especially when one considers the (relatively) miniscule price. Also, they introduce a cheese-related innovation that might be ready for its American debut: some forms of pizza involve slices of provolone cheese augmenting the standard mozzarella, which gives them an interesting flavor and texture. Incredibly delicious. Future research is needed to determine which toppings go best with provolone, or if it is possible to get the cooks to use more than just a light brushing of sauce. Luckily, I was able to secure external funding to cover food expenses while in the city of Rosario, so we may be able to obtain results on this trip. If not, future investigators will have to pick up where we left off.

Well, that's enough of a side-track. The next day was Saturday, which I spent sightseeing. Buenos Aires is a gorgeous city, and reminds me more of Prague than anyplace else I've ever been. The buildings are gorgeous--- brick faced with marble and terra-cotta, with balconies at every window. As previously mentioned, the doors are very dramatically proportioned, which makes everything seem even taller than it really is. Some of the streets are still cobblestone, and the sidewalks are mosaics of smaller tiles rather than large cement slabs. Apparently, in 2000, Bs As was considered one of the world's most expensive cities, on par with Tokyo and New York. Then, when the convertibility system that had been artificially pegging the peso to the dollar collapsed, and took the Argentine economy down with it, Bs As became known as one of the best bargains in the entire continent of South America. Of course, along with the bargain travel came a corresponding increase in street crime, and guidebooks from the 2002-2004 period feature many dire warnings about how to avoid kidnapping and mugging. Today, things have rebounded quite a bit, which has helped with the street crime. I felt very safe at all times in Bs As, even in areas that were clearly not squeaky clean. Compared to Calcutta, beggars were relatively few and far between, and the few stray dogs I encountered were mostly wandering about on their own as opposed to in packs.

Mobile phones are everywhere, and the bars and cafes are always full. Even after rebounding somewhat, the city remains an incredible bargain to American travelers. A decent lunch can be found for $5, and a stellar dinner for under $10. The subway is 0.70 pesos per trip, which works out to something around 25 cents.

My first goal on Saturday was "The Obelisk", a large monument constructed right in the center of downtown Buenos Aires. It is found at the intersection of Corrientes (one of the city's major arterial streets) and Ave. 9 de Julio (both Femoral and Carotid arteries combined). It seemed like a nice "getting one's bearings" sort of destination for my first real day of sight-seeing.

The walk to the Obelisk took about an hour, and involved passing through several of Buenos Aires' less touristy neighborhoods. These included one called "Once" (pronounced "on-say", just like the Spanish word for "eleven"), which historically has been one of the city's larger Jewish neighborhoods. Various books and people had told me that most of the Jewish residents have moved elsewhere, but there was a definite ultra-orthodox presence on the streets and in the shops. Several Sephardic sects have apparently set up shop in the district, and on this Saturday morning there were several large families clearly walking to or from synagogue.

Once is also one of the largest shopping districts in the city, and Ave. Corrientes from Abasto to the Obelisk is lined with stores of all sorts--- clothing, electronics, books, music, food, etc. The side streets are similarly full of shopping possibilities, and the total result of all of this is that the place is packed with people. Families, kids, old folks, all types. It makes for fascinating--- but slow--- walking.

As I walked downtown on Corrientes, the shops got progressively more expensive and upscale, until finally I ran into Ave. 9 de Julio. "Ran into" is definitely the phrase to use--- the experience was roughly comparable to hiking through the woods for an hour and then suddenly hitting the Pacific Ocean. 9 de Julio is the single biggest street I've ever seen in my life, featuring at least nine lanes of traffic in each direction. It takes two traffic signal cycles to cross, and is an incredibly harrowing experience. Even when the lights are supposedly in your favor, there are so many interlocking lanes of traffic that people are constantly turning, changing lanes, going up on sidewalks, etc., and it's not always clear where the various lanes deposit traffic.

Once I eventually managed to cross this behemoth, I found myself in what was unquestionably the downtown heart of the city. The businesses were mainly large banks and other downtown-ish types of organizations, punctuated by the occasional tourist-oriented pedestrian walkway full of overpriced leather stores and sidewalk vendors selling maté gourds.

Also found downtown was an excellent and mysterious art museum. I say mysterious because it lacked any signs about its name, and nobody I asked later on seemed to think that there was such a museum anywhere near where I had been. Mystery notwithstanding, the place was clearly a large, established museum with an extensive collection of contemporary Argentine art, and two major traveling exhibitions in residence.

After wandering around downtown for a little while, I began heading towards my next destination: Tribunales, the Argentine Supreme Court building. This involved re-fording the mighty Ave. 9 de Julio and then heading back uptown several blocks. The Tribunales building is supposedly one of the loveliest in the entire city. Unfortunately, it is currently undergoing restoration, and its exterior is completely covered by a huge black tarp, except for the doors. So, while it certainly should get some sort of award for, say, "Largest Tarp", or something, it can't really lay any claims in the "Lovely" division at the moment.

However, immediately across the plaza from Tribunales lies the Teatro Colón, the city's primary opera house. This, too, is undergoing restoration, but only on one of its faces, leaving the main edifice spectacularly visible. Several times on this trip I've found myself wishing I knew more about architecture, the better to describe the buildings I'm seeing. This is definitely one of those times. The building is gorgeous and impressive, and the main lobby is even more so.

This lobby is mostly marble and mosaic tiles, with a great vaulted ceiling and huge windows letting in amazing light. The room is filled with display cases containing various opera-related artifacts, and there are some absolutely incredible marble sculptures dotted throughout. I don't know whether it's that I've never paid attention before, or maybe I've just never seen any decent statues, but until the Teatro, I'd never seen a marble figure that looked alive before, or whose clothing looked like frozen silk and not marble. Absolutely incredible stuff.

One block away from the Teatro is one of the oldest synagogues still in use in Buenos Aires. Built some time during the 1800's, it is a beautiful and very solidly built building facing the same park/plaza that the Teatro and Tribunales buildings face--- a very central location. This is also the location of the Jewish Museum of Buenos Aires, which I was keen to visit. Unfortunately, the museum's hours are extremely limited, and emphatically do not include Saturday.

That night, I went with some other folks from the hostel to a party at a different hostel in Palermo. We took a cab to the general vicinity, and then wandered around for a bit trying to find the place. When we finally did, it turned out to be behind an essentially unmarked locked door on a quiet, completely shuttered street. Some rapid-fire Spanish was spoken over the intercom, and somebody who apparently knew my companions came to let us in. The door turned out to open to a long, dark alleyway, which eventually led to a sort of open outdoor courtyard area. The courtyard was pretty small--- maybe twenty feet on a side--- and featured doors leading off to a kitchen and a side room, and also had a large staircase going up to what was presumably the hostel's main level. A DJ was spinning a really interesting mix of North and South American dance music from the balcony on the second level.

Since it was pretty early--- barely past midnight--- there weren't all *that* many people there. The courtyard was pretty full, but it was still possible to move around. This rapidly began to change, and by the time we'd been there for an hour, there were so many people that just going to the kitchen for a drink refill meant making ten or fifteen new and very close friends. The crowd kept getting heavier, which had certain repercussions vis-a-vis the Ideal Gas Law--- imagine people as atoms in a gas state, stuck in a rigid volume. Add more atoms, and pressure and temperature both have to increase. The crowd was mostly made up of younger hostel types, but there were a fair number of obvious "grown-ups", which I found confusing at the time.

Around 1:30, there was something of a commotion over in one corner, and the DJ's music stopped. The commotion turned out to be four older guys with drums, who proceeded to give an incredible performance. I later found out that these guys were a well-known Cuban drum troupe, and were possibly the raison d’être for the party in the first place. This explained the relative diversity of ages amongst the guests, and maybe even some of the crowding.

By the time we left, at about 4:30, the party was so crowded that nobody was dancing- we were all sort of just bouncing semi-rhythmically off of one another. I'd never really understood when books talked about being "swept" along with a crowd, or used aquatic metaphors like "tide" or "wave" to describe crowds. This party changed all of that--- I now fully understand the tidal metaphor. Whenever a new group of people arrived--- which happened every couple of minutes, from who-knows-where--- the whole crowd sort of surged a few feet in one direction to make room for the newcomers. I'm not quite sure how this worked, since the courtyard was consistently completely full, but somehow we managed. Nobody seemed bothered by the fire-escape-related implications of the whole thing, so I tried not to worry about it too much.

Whenever I travel to another country, I often find myself having to consciously tell my standard-issue American, worry-about-everything "inner safety monitor" to shut up. On this trip, this has generally taken the form of not worrying about seatbelts in cars, not worrying about sharing maté straws, and being willing to eat various strange and terrible parts of cows (more on this in a subsequent post). That night, though, it took the form of telling my inner fire marshall not to worry.

¹: Although the theater was located very close to my hostel, actually finding it proved to be a little bit challenging, as the roads in that part of town are not exactly on what I'd call an orderly grid. During my wandering about, I passed a large building with a Star of David on the outside, and with many people coming and going. "Aha!", I thought to myself. "You've found a synagogue! It's Friday night, you should go check it out!" I began walking up to the front door, and was almost immediately stopped by a police officer, who said something to me very quickly in heavily accented Spanish. I tried to explain that I was Jewish, and was curious about what was inside the building, but did not have much success. The first police officer summoned a second one (at this point, I noticed that there were quite a few police officers around this particular building, and that there were no cars parked for a block in either direction), who spoke even faster and with an even heavier accent. Eventually, they decided that I was more confused than dangerous, and gestured for somebody from inside the building to come and talk to me. Luckily, this newcomer spoke a little bit of English, and was nice enough to speak very slowly in Spanish so as not to confuse the gringo too badly.

Him: "What do you want?"

Me: "I'm just curious, what's inside the building?"

Him: "It's a... um... cómo se dice... a club."

Me: "Ah, a club for Jews?"

Him: "Yes, that's right. A club for Jews."

Me, starting to walk towards the door: "Great!"

Him: "Wait! Are you a member? You can't go in unless you're a member."

Me, thinking that he means "member of the tribe" or something: "Sure, I'm a member!"

Him: "Do you have proof?"

Me, wondering whether he expected me to (for example) drop my pants in public to demonstrate my Jewish-ness: "Umm... what sort of proof?"

Him: "You need a membership card."

Right around this point, I had begun to notice that all the people going in or coming out were carrying backpacks or gym bags, and that many of them were in workout clothes. When he asked for a membership card, I realized that this was a Jewish athletic club. At the same time, he realized that I thought it was a synagogue. We were quite quickly able to sort the whole thing out, and I went on my way, but it was far from the last time that this sort o thing happened. Language is a funny thing- sometimes, I think it'd be better not to speak any Spanish at all, rather than speak just enough to get myself in trouble.