Grumpy

I've just come home from a dance class, very hungry and very angry. I have had to eat into my day's budget unnecessarily because of the ludicrous lack of coins in this country. I allowed an extra half hour to get to my class, this morning, so that I would have sufficient time to stop off at a bank to exchange a note for a few coins. Some banks will exchange as many as five pesos – enough to take five buses, but many will only do three, so you just have to accept that you may need to kill off two half hour slots in one day, before three o'clock, queuing at a bank. You can be lucky and get to the front of the queue within a matter of minutes, or you can be unlucky, as I was today, and queue for half an hour. At the end of the half hour there were still six people in front of me, so I had to abandon the queue and take a taxi to class. After the lesson, I stopped off at three different places to buy things, just to get some change: a kiosk, a grocer's and an internet cafe. At each of these places, I bought or tried to buy something small: chewing gum, a prepared salad, a phone card. Not one of them was able to give me a single coin in change. Unless I can get some change somehow, after lunch, I won't be able to go to a milonga tonight. I was supposed to be meeting Lili at Club Gricel and that's too long a distance to walk and another cab would just screw up my budget. As for my afternoon class, I'll walk there and back and resign myself to writing off an extra hour.

I talked to the cab driver on the way to class and asked him why there was such a chronic shortage of change. He said it was because the Chinese buy all the coins for one and a half times what they are worth. I asked him how he knew this and he said he had a friend who worked at a bank. It does sound highly improbable, but then so does the coin shortage. He also said that if I wanted coins, I would have to get myself to a bus terminal: it was the one place you could count on getting change. The thing is, I would still need a coin to get me there!

I am eating a solitary meal at home, on my terraza, as I type: a portion of Argentinian shepherd's pie from the local grocery and a readymade salad. I am airing my gripe simultaneously, because if I didn't, I wouldn't have any appetite. The meat, as everybody knows, is excellent. And the cheese is divine. I do find that there is a tendency to over-salt and over-sweeten food, though. I have looked in a couple of supermarkets for freshly squeezed juice and there doesn't seem to be any: only sugary fruit 'nectars'. But I am not complaining, merely observing, for 'We hae meat and we can eat / for it the good Lord be thankéd.'