Vivo

There´s a key concept in Argentina known as vivo. This concept is essentially the same as swindling someone, getting something out of someone else, or taking advantage of someone else. To vivo someone, you screw them. The prime example here is with the cabbies, who will do all kinds of tricks in order to give you incorrect change or fake bills as change.

I paid 700 pesos, which is roughly 230 dollars to live for a month in an apartment owned by a woman named Marianna. Marianna was an okay host. She wasn´t really around that much, so it´s kinda a stretch to call her a host. She also did hard drugs. So that was cool.

Last week, I asked Marianna if my friends could stay with me (I had two friends from med school visiting me this week). I assumed that it would be okay since I´m renting out the room. I kinda assumed that I could do anything I wanted to in the room, including keep people in there. Well, I shouldn´t have made these assumptions. Marianna started going off about trust issues with extra people in the house and how she already doesn´t like having so many people in the house because it doesn´t make her feel as though she´s in her own home. Apparently this also means that I´m not allowed to have guests over. This pissed me off. She continued to say that if I wanted my friends to stay over, I would have to pay extra. You have got to be kidding me. I knew that I was right in the middle of a good ol fashioned vivoing. And there was no way I was paying to squeeze my two friends and myself on a couple small matresses for four nights.

Well, that got me thinking. My month of rent is almost up. Am I really happy in my apartment? After thinking about this for a ratito, the answer was an obvious no. It´s pretty lonely in that place. The only person who is ever around is this Polish girl who is pretty nice but also very annoying because she likes to teach me about alternative medicine. And then her roommate, another Polish girl, likes to blast 90´s hip hop in the morning, which wouldn´t be so much of a problem if there was a real wall and not a makeshift shade separating our rooms. PS, I cannot stand the sound of Polish. When those girls would speak Polish, I felt as though my head were repeatedly being hit with a hammer. Then there was their friend, who told me that I shouldn´t rehydrate with cold water when I exercise, but hot tea instead. When she explained that the physiology behind this idea was that it´s bad to shock the body (which is warm durante exercise) with something cold. I almost socked her in the face. Anyway, the point here is that I didn´t think it would be very difficult to find a living situation that would be more pleasing to me.

So I decided to move out. I looked at this all as a vivo back in the face of Marianna. She doesn´t let my friends stay over, I don´t pay her the 700 pesos she´s expecting for next month. But I had to find a new place to live. I decided to live in a hostel. All of these decisions were essentially made at the same time as my friend´s flight got in on Sunday. So when they arrived, I made them come with me to look at some hostels. After looking at three places, we finally stumbled upon giromino, a cozy little place in a neighborhood named Palermo Viejo. Great location, safe, cheap. I got a room for the next night. My friends found a hotel.

So now I´m living in a hostel in Buenos Aires. I live in a four bed room with one other dude, a guy from Spain named Andres who works as a cartoonist here in Buenos Aires. So that´s pretty awesome. It´s a little scary here at times, and there are people here who are really young so that makes me feel old. But mostly, it´s more exciting than my old place. So that´s where I´ll be staying for the next month. I kinda hope that no one else moves in to our room, but if they do, so what. Anyway, I feel as though I vivoed the shit out of Marianna. I told her that I was leaving about an hour before I actually moved out. Vivo!