Drugstore Gaucho

After hearing so much about the occasionally lauded, more often derided, Argentine public health care system, I decided that it merited investigation. Or my girlfriend wanted me to get tested for HIV, gangrenous penis and other sexually transmitted boogiemen. In either case, I went to the hospital and was treated to brief (thank god) anthropological journey through medicine in another country. Being that I've still not finished/done my paperwork to be legal here in Argentina, and thereby get the health insurance my company would provide, I'm on the public plan. I'm not sure as to what the limits of the public plan is, in light of the fact that I have done zero actual research regarding the topic. So I can only offer what I might call hearsay, or what anthropology might call the data from my informal interviews. In conversation and eavesdropping with my friends and co-workers (that is to say, a statistically non-representative sample, but c'mon, how do you know w...

(This post from some time ago last year, in 2012) It's with a heavy heart that I make post number 70 on this blog and eradicate the 69 from post count that has stood so long as warden to this mostly ignored corner of the internet. I thought I would write something, it being late and I being bored, but reading previous entries has moved me to make a post in the vein of the spotty narrative that has sort of evolved out of the last couple of entries. This country, despite it's great size and previous importance to international politics, exists in a paucity of information about itself. As far as I know, my blog is the only English language source detailing the day-to-day in Buenos Aires that isn't run by an idiot tourist/exchange student breathlessly detailing their life-changing experience. Well, that's not true exactly. My gringo friend Ben has a friend Paul (our names truly are hideously monosyllabic, aren't they?) who has some kind of internet presence, but he ...

I took a trip to Brazil and this scene has been on my mind ever since then. I can't explain why. My girlfriend and I were staying with her cousins, people who definitely inhabited the upper half of that famously abrupt divide between the rich and the poor in Brazil. We had been staying in their daughters playroom--a little space about as large as a walk-in closet, but every conceivable surface covered in dolls and toys. When we laid down on the inflatable mattress that we nestled in between the overstuffed bookshelves (stuffed mostly with toys, no books) we would look up towards the ceiling the three tiers of shelving bolted to the wall, so full of dolls that they leaned precariously outward, looking down at us with their shiny fake eyes. The father of this toy-laden child told us that it was impossible to reduce the number of dolls that she had; that if one were to go missing she would know instantly. I doubted it, being that at least half of the dolls were obstructed from view ...