Posted in Drink on 31. Aug, 2010
In case you weren’t aware, coffee is quite popular nowadays! The internet tells me that over 400 billion cups are consumed every year worldwide – rather a lot by anyone’s reckoning.
Buenos Aires certainly contributes its fair share to that total. Indeed, at first glance, Buenos Aires seems to be the proud owner of a deep and abiding coffee culture: meeting for a coffee is indisputably a pillar of Argentine social life. This is aided and abetted by the fact that the lines between café, bar and restaurant are blessedly blurred in Argentina, meaning that you can get a cup of joe just about anywhere that has waiters.
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Argentineans might just be the best and most prolific users of nicknames (‘sobrenombres’ or ‘apodos’ in castellano) in the entire universe. One has only to look at the Argentine football team to get some choice examples. I give you:
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(In Part Two of this guide, we look at ‘the squirt’ and at muggings and shakedowns. Enjoy!)
The squirt
The squirt is really just pick pocketing with a specific misdirection technique, but it’s become so common that we will give it a section all of its own.
The squirt usually works like this: a perp comes up to the victim and spills or squirts something onto their clothes, often onto their back where they won’t notice it right away. If the perp is being observed, they’ll make it look like an accident. The substance is usually food: mustard; chocolate milk, tomato sauce or something similar. This is the first step.
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Buenos Aires is, unfortunately, a pretty easy city to get robbed in. Shock! I know. It’s quite a revelation. The number of expat or tourist forum and blog posts dedicated to the topic is pretty staggering; you’d think that every single foreigner who ever set foot in Buenos Aires had been robbed at least once.
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I think we’d all agree that Buenos Aires is pretty well-served by public transport. The subte is very cheap and convenient, taxis are relatively cheap too and ridiculously plentiful, and once you work out how to read a Guia-T and get access to the buses as well then you have a Triple Threat of transport options that can take you wherever you need to go.
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It’s a puzzle to many Argentinean people. Why do so many people from so-called ‘first world’ countries such as the UK and the USA choose to leave those countries and live in Buenos Aires instead? A lot of Argentines would give their eye teeth to live in a first world country – with the standard of living that entails – so why is there so much traffic in the opposite direction?
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