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 moved firmly into the expensive side of things. I would say prices are more generally along the lines of what you would be willing to pay in the united states if you are accustomed to living cheaply there (like an unemployed liberal arts grad for example). Randomly, some food things will be exceptionally cheap (a kilo of mandarin oranges for 75 american cents or a bundle of onions for the same) whilst other things remains inexplicably (relatively) expensive (3 dollars for 400 grams of butter, garlic for 50 cents a head). Poor college student food remains quite cheap (noodles, eggs and the like) but meat and dairy (and any interesting fruit) is pretty much american prices.
The problem is earning in pesos, and not earning very much. The English teaching market here, though perhaps the gentlest, is about as exploitative as any other based on the labor of unconnected immigrants. Jobs range in price from about 20 pesos an hour to 40+ hour (pesos). They don't seem to hard to get, although there is a large pool of applicants. Most applicants are here on some poorly founded concept of adventure and admit that to their potential employers, saying that they will only be here for 3-6 months. Humorously, are totally bewildered when they find themselves without work for the duration of their "working" vacation. Needless to say, making a serious commitment to Buenos Aires, or at least pretending to make such a commitment, is great help in getting a job. I said that I was funny in my cover letter and that appeared to be the sole basis for accepting me for an interview.
But the exploitation. I have accepted a job on the bottom end of the pay range (20 p an hour) because I am compensated for almost all of the hours that I work. Also, if I ever get around to doing the paperwork, I can be here legally, but that's a detail. I was also working at another english institute which compensated me 35 pesos an hour, which is a pretty good pay at first glance. I recently quit the job, because after some calculation, it wasn't worth it.
I received 35 pesos an hour for every hour I was in front of a class. That's fine, but I was not otherwise compensated for the time it took to prepare for these classes (which, as a novice, I can assure you is lots, especially considering how much time you end up wasting running around making copies). On top of that, the institute required a great deal more planning than what I am told is normal here. I was expected to come up with my own annual plan (based off of some textbook that were given to me) and the supplement it with certain items that, though requested specifcally, were completely left up to me to design. Two movies a school year, broken into small parts with prep and breakdown worksheets, class lessons related to cultural events from my own country (halloween, 4th of july, etc) exam design and grading, and participation in the end of school year concert and all of these things made entirely of your own hand. And they wanted us to attend two uncompensated meetings a month for which they don't even give some pesos for the subte (now 1.20 a ride) For veteran teachers, its not such a bad deal, as they might have accumulated some of their things in their experience and are probably efficient in designing such things. Also, if your passion is teaching, I'm sure you would become an expert pretty quickly. But I'm certainly not in this country to help some parents force English onto their kids and certainly not for that price.
When I told other argentines that this is what I was doing for 35 pesos an hour, their eyes bugged out and there was a moment of stunned silence, surpassing, even, the portenio ability to have a comic line for everything. Teaching is a profession notorious for the hours of work outside the paid hours of work, but for comparison, my working in the white, employed by the government teacher friends made 85 pesos an hour for their work.
And furthermore, conscious or not, English teaching jobs like these are taking advantage of Americans and other gringos who come to Buenos Aires to work. People like me are muscled into the pay range you see here by Americans who pop down here for a months, rely on their savings to pay rent and use their income for booze money. Also, the expectation that I should show up early for work, give two weeks notice or not take unexpected vacations or sick days, while normal in the anglo-world, was considered to be a enormous courtesy--or even luxury--to my employers by the Argentines to whom I described my working relationship. If they are employing me in black, then they have to understand I'm not actually obligated to do anything that they won't fire me for,
These things however, were outlined in my contract and were vocally impressed upon me by my employer. Furthermore, they rely (begrudingly, I'll say perhaps unconsciously) on the fact that teachers are unlikely to walk off the job because of emotional attachment to their students.
So I'm very happily at Wall Street where they pay me 20 pesos an hour, but I don't do anything more than wear slacks and show up and gab. And I'll get better health insurance if I file that fucking paperwork.
So, if you want to make any semi-real quantity of money here, you have to either work like a dog or work like a smart dog and get private students. Which typically pay 40+ for classes and are much easier to prepare for. The only catch is that you have to find them. I've just begun on this myself, so I can't relate how difficult it is, but like many things in Buenos Aires, I think it requires a good network of contacts.
The real game here in Buenos Aires, in turns of creating a financially stable existence, is getting your costs down. This is really hard to do in a city with such a well-developed tourist infrastructure, AKA, oiled system of separating unsuspecting yankees from their money.
Step 1 and trap 1 one is rent. Glancing at the Buenos Aires craiglist would lead you to believe that the low end of prices for rentable properties in BsAs is around 300-400 dollars a month, which will get you an apartment in a nice part of town with really nice furnishings. Further analysis of craiglist will lead you to believe that there are no unfurnished apartments available for rent in Buenos Aires and that it is customary to describe rent in a ratio of dollars to the week or day.
If you're lucky, one day you describe this to a guy from the city and he says "No!" emphatically and tells you for that kind of money you could have a 1 bedroom apartment all to yourself, if you were just willing to live outside of all these fancy districts you had just mentioned to him. What your friend doesn't know and what you just realized is that no one advertises these sorts of properties to foreigners. So the lesson there is that any international or english language resources are going to break your piggy bank, to speak politely.
The most conventional way to rent property is to look in a the newspaper on saturday and see the properties listing, which can be dizzying in terms of contractions and argot. Sadly, most properties require something called a garantia, which means someone with property in the city vouches for the fact that you can pay, and if you don't pay, the will. Foreigners (and many Argentines) don't typically have a garantia.
So the search is limited somewhat to "alquila due~no" which means that the owner is renting the property and doesn't have an agency (inmobilaria) representing him. There you cut out a very expensive middleman, and may eliminate the garantia. May. It does cut down your options quite a bit and requires a lot of cold-calling and trial and error.
Being that there are a ton of argentines and foreigners milling about the city with garantia, there are some services on the internet that have surfaced to help them. comparto depto, solo duenos and a number of internet resources attempt to organize the barbaric latino horde. But its a decidedly web 1.0 affair, there is no central website and information is often out of date or false and posted by a scheming inmobilario that hopes to interest you in another, probably less perfect property. It's pretty gruesome and requires ALOT! of legwork, but this is probably the best option for an unconnected foreigner arriving in the city. But it takes a lot of time. A few conversations I've had with other strapped-for-cash argentines revealed that they spend several months searching for an apartment before finding something that suits their needs. The difference is that they can rely on social capital and live with their parents or friends where as people like you and me Sam, have far less social capital to spend.
Other options include subletting a single room from a family apartment or something like that. But that was a relationship I was definitely not comfortable with, although it might have been wiser in a purely economic mindset. Those arrangements are somewhat easy to find and can be a rock bottom price (500 pesos a month, ideally) but are usually somewhat expensive and its usually done by people used to working with foreigners (1000 pesos a month).
For my part, I have worked what little contacts I have made here in the city and came up with the place I am now in. It's 900 pesos a month for a small (perhaps 3 by 5 or 6 meters) concrete box on the roof of a very large house that is shared by a number of other argentines, one chileno and one peruvian. The room itself is pretty shitty and definitely doesn't deserve the 900 pesos I pay for it. It has no insulation, doesn't block the sound of the nearby highway and I have to go down a flight of stairs to use the bathroom that I share with 3 other people. But, it's cheap as I could find
that gave me any level of autonomy, and I like the neighborhood, which is safe and cheap (Boedo) and its been fun living with all the people in the house. Plus, I can practice trombone and I don't bother anyone. And the roof, (kind of like my patio, is enormous and cool)
After rent, its just learning how to live in the city and limit expenses, but I haven't found that to be too challenging. Use public transportation, save taxis for emergencies, don't eat out often, buy alcohol at liquor stores, not in bars, etc etc.
And I think that's as complete an answer as I can give. Ah, yes, one more important piece of advice. Take all advice with a grain of salt! Too many times I've gotten advice from foreigners who've spent what seemed like a long enough time in the city to be hip, only to find out that these idiots are still paying 400 dollars in rent, or have split a 2 bedroom apartment between 5 people to make ends meet. Other gringos can be more helpful than argentines in many ways, but only gringos who themselves are not morons. Although I only have some 9-10 months of experience of buenos aires all added together, I appear to be a lot smarter than the average gringo bear. People who know as much as me about the city usually have been here at least 2 years.
Yeah, so that's a complete answer. Hope you actually read it!
Comments
Ha :D