Monedas

I'm pretty sure that I wrote about this same subject when I was here two years ago. Anyway, it deserves a second go.

Monedas are coins. They come in the form of 5, 10, 25, and 50 centavos, as well as the coveted one whole peso piece. At that point, the money turns into bills, with 2 peso bills being the smallest denomination.

There is a shortage of monedas in Buenos Aires. According to the owner of where I live, Pat, the bus companies, who are the main acceptor of monedas, horde the coins in Buenos Aires and create the seemingly insane demand for these pieces of metal. There is a saying in Buenos Aires that a peso coin is really worth two pesos.

And such has been my experience for the past couple weeks. I take the bus to and fro the hospital every day. And every morning, I pass by the kiosk on the corner and ask the kioscero, who is always the same old man, to buy a little dulce de leche candy bar. This is the only way I can get some coins in my hand because there is a sign on his store, the same sign that every kiosk has, which declares "no hay cambio". So I buy this little candy bar, he always proceeds to ask me if I can pay in monedas, and then I get 1.20 in change.

At least that used to be the case. Now I buy the same candy bar, and without my consent, says "A Caramelo!", places a caramelo on the counter and gives me one peso. This has happened three days in a row — with the one twist that he gave me an orange fruit candy instead of a caramelo today. So I'm basically paying double to ride the bus.

Monedas are really no laughing matter. A bus drive was stabbed to death last week — I'd post the link I wasn't too lazy to look for it — because the ticket machine in the front of the bus "swallowed his monedas". As a result, there has been a strike by bus drivers which means that what is normally a 24 hour bus service does not run between the hours of 10PM and 330AM.

Otra Vez...

He regresado! This one's gonna be a little boring cuz it's the intro. But look forward to page turners in el futuro. Also, this was posted a week after it was originally written...

I’ve been in Buenos Aires for three nights thus far. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve done so far.
I took a 7AM flight to Panama City on Copa Airlines — very nice service and food, movies could have been better although I was able to enjoy some parts of Be Kind, Rewind and Drillbit Taylor. From Panama City, there was a 6 hours flight to Buenos Aires. I arrived at 9 at night, which turned out to be a bit of a problem.

My plans for that night were extremely poorly-thought out. I thought that when I arrived, I’d just go the hostel I stayed at for a month when I was here two years ago. When we got there, it was closed. Luckily, the hostel was located in Palermo, which is home to a monton of hostels. All closed. Hotels were available, but the minimum price of those was 50 dollars a night — not a good prospect in a cheap town, especially when I have four bags to lug around and wasn’t sure how many nights I’d need a place to stay (didn’t yet know where I was going to be living).

Finally we found a hostel in the ritzier neighborhood of Recoleta which put me back 34 dollars for the first night and what would be 14 for the next night. Pretty sure I got ripped as my roommate the second night paid less than the total that I did and was staying for twice the time.

I awoke my first night and travelled to the CEMIC (Centro de Educacion Medical y Centro de Investigaciones Clinicas). Unfortunately, there are two main locations for the hospital and I went the wrong one. Thankfully, there was a one peso private bus that travelled between the two. I got there and met with my contact person. Got everything squared away except health insurance — I need to buy a plan. Still figuring out exactly how the healthcare system here operates. This may take me a while as I am working in a private hospital. I also figured out exactly what I’ll be doing. I’m going to be in a class of sixth-year medical students (that sounds funny to me, even though I assume all the students are going to be younger than me) — the last year of medical school is called the internship. I’ll find out exactly what that entails in the next few weeks.
Once I got that figured out, I walked to the house/apartment of what was my best housing prospect — the place of a woman named Pat who I’d been emailing with for the past couple weeks. It was in the neighborhood of Belgrano, which was walking distance from the CEMIC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgrano%2C_Buenos_Aires

The place is great and not to ruin the surprise, but that is where I am writing from now. We had a nice conversation — first impression is that she is a stand-up, laid-back, extremely nice woman and landlord. She explained to me that her unit is called a P.H. I forget what the P stands for, but H is horizontal. The terms means that the apartments in her complex all originate from the first floor. Hers is located in the back and opens up into the main patio, the patio from which my bedroom opens into.

I left Pat’s place thinking that I was going to live there even though I was going to check out another apartment (which I never ended up doing because I couldn’t get in touch with the landlord). I returned to the hostel and hung out a bit with my roommate Matt, an English fellow who just finished his doctorate in World Geography (which to me sounded a lot like anthropology even though he felt as though there were some key differences between the two). I heard about Buenos Aires Pub Crawl, a pub crawl organized by American guys, which was happening that night. Matt was game for checking it out with me.

Pub crawl that night was meeting in San Telmo, a neighborhood in the southeast of the city which is home to many university students as well as many bars. We paid our 60 pesos for the pub crawl and enjoyed an hour’s worth of unlimited pizza, empanadas, and beer. Turns out no one else showed up to the pub crawl besides myself and Matt so the organizers decided to cancel the night’s activities and give us a refund. Sweet. Matt and I headed to another bar, each had a beer, and then decided to call it an early night.

When we returned, we found Alvaro, a Chilean guy we’d met earlier in the day, at the hostel watching the end of 40 yo virgin. Alvaro started talking about how Argentinians were cheaters, and I brought up the subject of Alvaro’s own living situation. He’d told me earlier in the day that he was going to be living in the hostel until this December. I questioned to financial judgment of doing that — he said it was 1500 pesos a months, which he felt was a good deal — or at least that’s what he’d been told by the hostel workers. I showed him the deals on Craigslist to prove to him that there were in fact much better deals out there, some half the price. He seemed really upset, busted out his own laptop and starting scouring the rental section of the site.

The next day, I left the hostel and moved into my new place. I hung out with Pat for a little while once I got there, got my stuff unpacked, and walked around the neighborhood a bit.

My last day before work started, Pat invited me to spend the day with her and her friends — who were coming over to celebrate what happened to be Friends’ Day in Argentina. Not having friends day in the U.S. is kinda like not putting sugar and fat on top of a croissant — it’s easy to do and makes like a little sweeter. One of Pat’s friends, Sandra, made a dope polenta bolognese. Pat had worked on a mousse the day before which turned out to be excellent as well. Okay, lo corto. This is getting too long...

Tomorrow I start Argentinian medical school. Loco.