Drugstore Gaucho

Another technical account of getting started up in Buenos Aires. Per my training in anthropology, I would like to whine defensively that this is based purely off of my experience living in Buenos Aires and is no way representative of what living in Buenos Aires is an standard/typical/objective sense, if such a thing could be established. A different friend informed me that he is planning to come down to live here had some questions after reading my previous posts. Therefore, I answered them and now, published them, grammatical worts and all. Thank you. That did help me gauge where I'll be stepping off, I think. My goal is to be down there in September. Would that be shooting myself in the foot from the get-go? Also, who did you fly down with? I'm planning on buying a ticket this week. What's your story with health insurance? I don't have a TEFL certification. Is this necessary going in or could I take a class while there if necessary? What would a good cushion be going

This is a Facebook message I wrote to a friend who was thinking about moving to Buenos Aires himself. It's funny how I respond much better to prompts than to total freedom. I blame education. Sam old buddy, howdeedoo, Funny you should ask a question that is so eminently on my mind. Regarding your questions, BA is exactly how I remember it. Kind of a pain of the ass, kind of great. The moneda situation has been rememdied, the people are still short tempered, it's still over crowded and a pain to get around anywhere. The primary difference would be my economic standing now that I'm here under my own power and, more importantly, earning in pesos. But even from a dollar perspective, the city is a little rough. Inflation has struck the city pretty hard in our absence, and food prices have also risen pretty extremely. Whereas before, on the dollar, I always said that Buenos Aires was not cheap exactly, but a surprisingly good deal considering what you were getting, now it has mov

Hey. Been awhile, Drugstore-fans, hasn't it? Right now, I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen of the same house that I was staying in when we last met. It was somewhat freezing when I woke up this morning in the concrete box of mine on the roof, so I went to where I am now to seal up the kitchen and use the oven, thereby creating my own personal summer. I'm making banana bread, that wonderful method by which my mother prevented the waste of bananas. Of course, here, they don't recognize this as bread, so much as they recognize is as "budin," which I take to be somehow related to pudding. The nice thing about that is that it does give lie to the idea that banana bread might somehow be healthy, being that it is not, containing more sugar than all of the export of the Dominican Republic. I have successfully completed what I imagined to be the 0th and 1st stages of my plan here in Buenos Aires. In stage 0, I came to Buenos Aires, resumed with most of my old cont

There's so much to say. Where have I been, what have I been doing? I know you'd like to know, or you wouldn't be reading. . How I wish I could Twitter every little inane thought that comes into my head and every strange happening that happens to me. For instance, the other day, I read about the saying here, its free to dream or dreaming is free, or whatever. And then I halfway managed to execute the phrase with one of my housemates and he taught me to use it more better. Then yesterday, I bought a scratchpad to write on and I remarked to myself that to dream is free, but to write it down costs 5 and 1/2 pesos. The last month or so has been so totally dedicated to finding a job and getting an apartment/place to stay. I like to think that I did good job exerting myself towards the goals, a commendable effort when its so difficult to chart progress. I often thought or writing a blog post solely about doing these things in Buenos Aires. I guess you're looking at the paragra

"To a foreigner, a Yankee is an American. To an American, a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is a Vermonter. To a Vermonter, a Yankee is someone who still has an outhouse." Everyone in a spanish speaking country has a nickname. Un apodo. So it seems, anyway. Mine is yankee. Except written yanki and pronounced shan-kee, due to the eccentricities of pronunciation here around the Rio Plata. Many people believe that this word is "despectiva" which I take to mean disrespectful. I tell them that it´s not and that the only time I´ve ever heard the word was mainly in the song Yankee Doodle, which does not cause me a feeling of disrespectedness, to say the least. Then I realized I´ve never really been to the South and I found this quote, which I assume to be something in general usage.  As a guy from the midwest, I said to myself self, huh, well I guess the word can refer to me. Now I realize that

Hello and welcome back. This blog is ready to begin in seriousness, once again, as I am back in America of South in the country of Argentina. This means a return to form in many ways, there will be a grand detailing of my adventures and misadventures, boring report of my success, hilarious recounting of my failure. There will be many awkward sentences that are born of a Spanish thought straying into my author´s consciousness and gumming up the flow as I awkwardly latinize words into existence that ought not to exist or throw phrasal verbs into the path of oncoming formal sentence structures, terminating in a little self-reference that hopes to excuse what is otherwise an unforgivable run-on? But what is different? Will it be different? Or will it be just more of the same DrugstoreGaucho, that dark-hatted figure, silhouetted in the doorway of adventure? The same guy that threw himself to the rapacious lions (first writing, loins) of the gay argentine dance club? That stalwart fellow tha