As a city dweller you know these little parcels on the sidewalks, and when the four-legged friends (sometimes also two-legged friends) also do their number one on the sidewalk, then it smells a little stronger. Buenos Aires is by no means an exception. It makes you feel a bit like at home in Dresden’s Neustadt!
If you walk through the streets of Buenos Aires at a later hour, however, you sense a completely different kind of scent. The kind that, unless you are completely averse to animal food, creates a hole in your stomach. Restaurants where grilled meat is served are everywhere. ‘Bife Chorizo’ (rump steak) and ‘Bife Lomo’ (fillet of beef) are the famous Argentine steaks. However, as the locals tell us later, the quality has diminished. The cattle no longer get to pasture but are kept in the stable instead. Why? Well, because the land is needed for soy production. And where does the soy go? You already suspect it: to China, of course, so that the pigs have something to eat there. Without exaggerating, globalization has also reached the middle of nowhere in the pampas.
The restaurants in Buenos Aires are well attended, only at other times of the day than we are used to. Before eight o’clock in the evening you don’t get anything to eat in many places, simply because the restaurants are closed. Luckily not all of them, because most of the days we are hungry earlier. Outside the pubs, however, we get the feeling that for some reason the passers-by are not feeling particularly well. Is it the winter or the economic situation? Probably a little bit of both.
Argentina is what you would rightfully call a troubled country. Argentina went bankrupt in 2001 and has since recovered, but since the new president Macri came to power, according to our hosts, many are worse off than before. This can be seen in the queues at the official exchange shops. The peso loses value so quickly that it is better to exchange it for euros or dollars. For us, therefore, the cheapest way to get pesos is to exchange our euros. The rate in the exchange shops or on the street is better for us than in banks and we don’t have to line up. At the ATM you pay a staggering 10% fee, which we are happy to avoid.
Despite the inflation, the Porteños, as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called, cannot be deprived of two things: their music and their art. For the national holiday we visit a tango milonga with a show, then take an introduction tango course, go to a hip jazz club with really outstanding musicians, let us explain street art in the chic district of Palermo, dance to bombastic drum rolls and marvel at works by Van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin and many more in the Museum of Fine Arts.
Of course, a city like Buenos Aires also thrives by the diversity of the “barrios”, i.e. quarters of the city. To get to know them, tourists often go through them without any plan. Fortunately, we unexpectedly get help. Nacho, who visited me last year via couchsurfing in Dresden, actually lives in Eastern Europe. As luck would have it, he is in his home town right now and has time to tell us the back stories and show us his favorite district. We quickly realize that Buenos Aires is a very political city. Everywhere there are more or less hidden symbols, which remind of current or past events. At present, many men and women wear green scarves or dye their hair or fingernails green to make a statement on abortion rights. Green stands for the relaxation of abortion laws. Light blue is the color of the anti-abortionists. A vote on this is about to take place in Parliament. Nacho says that the vote is perhaps a distraction by the government, which is actually against abortion, but only wants to conceal the bad economic situation. Nonetheless he is wearing a green sticker.
No matter where we meet people in Buenos Aires, they are a bit reserved, but extremely friendly, charming and likeable. If only they spoke Spanish a little cleaner and slower… Live here? I could imagine that for a while, I think integration would not be so difficult. Because throughout the two weeks of Buenos Aires we have the feeling that the Porteños are very similar to the Europeans. At the end of our stay we meet Nacho again for a craft beer and chat about Argentina and the rest of the world. On the street in front of the bar we sniff a well-known scent. Not meat, but something purely plant-based. Now that really feels like home.
