Getting to grips with how it is and how it isn't

It is shortly after midnight on the sixth night of my fourth escapade in Buenos Aires. I decided to have an early night to enjoy the rain in my little wooden bed. I shouldn’t have had that cuppa, though. The caffeine wouldn’t let me sleep. The last few days kept on rolling around in my head, so I decided to get up and get ‘em out into this blog.

A dry cough and a bad back make a singularly cruel combination, but not cruel enough to dampen my spirits on getting here. Passengers arriving in Buenos Aires have the delightful habit of applauding on landing. It happened on Alitalia. It happened on TAM. Can’t say I’ve ever come across applause on Easyjet, Ryanair or even British Airways. I like it. Arriving is definitely worth celebrating. I guess I should have clapped when the suitcases showed up as well, but I didn’t want to be sectioned. What, I wonder, is the opposite of clapping? It’s what I would have done when they brought me the hospital dinner on the Alitalia flight. I thought Italians were all about food. It’s also what I wanted to do when I discovered the remises had gone up from 135 pesos, last visit, to 180. That is naughty.

Coming home to Paula was like coming home to a receiving angel. Always warm and friendly and prettier than ever, she had the fridge stocked up and made me a delicious, healthy lunch. I am so lucky to have her. It’s the sweetness of the people, above all else, that magnetises me to this city.

But... Buenos Aires comes at a price. One forgets. It's rather like remembering the ecstasy of holding your newborn, but forgetting all about labour. Yesterday, I went to Personal to get my phone chip activated and queued for an hour. When it was my turn they said, really sorry, but the system is down. We cannot do anything to help anyone, today. They kept on doing this to everyone in the eight or so queues, who were waiting to state the reason for their visit and to be give a numerito to get seen to. Couldn't they just have made an announcement? The next day was a Groundhog day.

Then I queued for half an hour to withdraw money and when it was my turn, a security guard came out and said no more transactions. The machine is being serviced. So I went to another machine. Tried several times to withdraw money from ATMs at different banks and again and again, the computer said no. I later found out that it was because there is a shortage of notes and at times the ATMs just can’t cope with the demand. I now know that on a good day, you can withdraw a thousand pesos at a time. This is worth knowing because just a year ago, it was only possible to withdraw three hundred pesos at a time and with the commisions and bank charges from both ends, that was scary.

Exhausted and deflated, I went to change my travellers’ cheques, queued for forty-five minutes (such a lot of red tape) and was told I was in the wrong queue. Even though it said Foreign Exchange on the counter at which I was queueing. Coughing and aching, but needing to get hold of some money, I went into the 'right' queue and waited half an hour to be served and a further ten minutes for them to process the cheques. Then I came home and collapsed on my little wooden bed and discovered that one of the US$ 100 bills I had received was fake. The next day, I returned to the Bureau de Change and to my amazement, they took back the fake note without a fuss and exchanged it for a pukka note. They are, as I said, a very pleasant people.