Mike Down South

Every year for the past 4 years, my friend Jeet and I have done a Spring Break vacation together where we fly someplace far away and mostly drink and nap a lot. I was worried we’d break the streak this year, but luckily Jeet flew down to meet me in Buenos Aires to keep the tradition alive.

I was really excited to take a vacation, which might seem strange because – well, what am I doing already? While I’m traveling, there are projects I’m working on, things I’m trying to achieve before I go back and I feel lazy if I don’t dedicate part of my day to anything productive. I think about money a lot – trying to stick to hostels and restaurants cheap enough that I don’t run out of money before I’m ready to leave. So I could go on vacation just like anyone could go on vacation – by taking a break from caring about the things I usually care about.

The vacation was a lot of fun and exactly what I’d hoped for. We got a fancy hotel room:

Fancy relative to what I’m used to at least, though I think at this point I’m pretty easily impressed by accommodations. I was overjoyed by things like having a place to leave my laptop always out and online instead of having to grab it out of a locker and wait for it to boot up every time I wanted to check my email or screw around online (and screw around online a lot I did!).

The hotel claimed to have a complimentary breakfast buffet and I was pretty dubious, considering that on this trip I’ve been promised many a breakfast buffet only to have my heart broken when I realize this “buffet” is just a big basket of stale bread rolls and maybe (if I’m lucky) orange juice. This hotel turned out to have the breakfast buffet to restore my faith in breakfast buffets. Fresh fruit, croissants, fruit pastries, cheeses, ham slices, and the most amazing scrambled eggs I’ve ever had in my life.

Jeet was obsessed with the breakfast buffet coffee. So much so that on a night we got home at 7 AM and had breakfast buffet to end our night and were planning to crash immediately after, Jeet had two cups of coffee that kept him up 3-4 hours longer. “Still worth it, though.”

Getting lots of delicious food was a big part of the vacation. Argentina has really good beef, so steak here is amazing and fairly inexpensive. Starting on day 2 of the vacation, I’ve eaten steak eight nights in a row. They’re big on dulce de leche here and I discovered during the week that bananas covered in dulce de leche is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Also, this gigantic ice cream / fruit / wafer tower thing was pretty good, but took both of us out of commission for a while after our unsuccessful attempt to finish the entire thing.

And since it was Spring Break, we hit the bars and clubs every night, continuing to be mystified at how Argentinians can go out as late as they do and return to work the next day. We met these two guys in Recoleta who were getting drunk with us at 2 AM and telling us about the big meeting they had to be at the next day with the head of their company at 9 AM.

They told me the next day that the meeting went great. I still don’t understand how they do this.

We also met this girl whom I felt a strong kinship with because we had matching tiny eyes that always seem closed. She also hit me with this curveball:

Her: Where are you from?
Me: The United States. New York.
Her: No! Mentiroso! [Liar!]
Me: What? I’m American. I’m from the United States.
Her: Mentiras! [Lies!]
Me: Why don’t you think I’m from America?
Her: Your English is too bad.

I don’t have that many “going out” clothes with me and we quickly realized that one of the perils of going out in Buenos Aires is that you come home in the morning reeking of smoke. I still haven’t washed this button down yet and to go anywhere near it at this point, I have to hold my breath (which is why I’ve almost died of suffocation when I put it on to go pick up a sandwich this morning).

So that was Jeet Week. Now: back to the grind.

I don’t understand operating hours in Argentina at all. Businesses seem to open and close at random times throughout the day. I’m convinced that the supermarket next to my first hostel in Buenos Aires was somehow toying with me and closed up shop every time they could sense I wanted to buy food. Here were my passes by in a single day:

I also got a week pass for the gym, figuring I’d go all 4 days I’m staying in the Palermo neighborhood, but then on Thursday and Friday, the gym was closed for the holidays. I went in on Saturday, fully prepared to get in a (likely futile) debate with them to convince them to give me back my money since they didn’t tell me they’d be closed, but it turned out they actually were open, just from 4pm to 9pm. There wasn’t a schedule posted, but I feel like Argentinians magically know schedules somehow. One of the few schedules I’ve seen was when I tried to go to my favorite sandwich for lunch on Sunday, but found a schedule posted saying they’re only open from 7:30pm until 10:30pm. Who picks these hours?

The craziest schedule to adjust to are the bars and clubs. The bars don’t start filling up until around 2 AM and people don’t seem to go to clubs until around 4 AM. The weird part is that starting at midnight, there are tons of people walking around the bar areas; they’re just not in the bars. I have no idea where they’re coming from or going to, but I can confirm that it’s not the bars because they’re totally empty until 2.

“The cheapest way for an American to visit Europe is to go to Argentina.”

On my 24 hour bus ride from Arica, Chile to Salta, Argentina, the Canadian guy sitting next to me told me this. I thought he was kidding, but it turned out to be very true when I got to Salta. I mean, come on! This looks like Europe!

Further evidence that Argentina is actually part of Europe and not South America:

• People have mullets
• There are bidets everywhere
• Stuff’s a lot more expensive
• I’ve met people who don’t like the show Two and a Half Men (it had unanimous approval in Ecuador in Peru)

Certainly lots of differences from Peru and Ecuador. My favorite so far is that I can drink tap water! For the past 3 months, I’ve been buying like 3L of bottled water per day, which is just more irritating than expensive. The extension of the safe water is that I can eat all fruits and vegetables without risk of getting sick (I’d previously been avoiding certain ones after getting sick in Mancora).

My Spanish teacher in Arequipa warned me that coming to Argentina would ruin my Spanish and it is certainly harder to understand people. They seem to talk faster than they did in Peru, but the big change is that they pronounce ‘y’ sounds like ‘j’ so it constantly sounds like they’re talking about someone named Joe, but they’re really just saying “yo.” They also have the “vos” form, which is a conjugation that replaces the informal second person plural “tu” form. I don’t really want to learn this, so I’ve only been making friends with people who are really formal or who don’t mind being addressed collectively in the 3rd person plural.

The conversion rate is another unexpected perk. The conversion rate in Peru was 2.78 soles to the dollar, which is not convenient for mental math. In Argentina, it’s almost exactly 4 Argentinian pesos to the dollar, which is a super easy conversion. It’s actually a little too easy because I can convert so fast that I sometimes forgot that I already converted the price. For example, I asked at a peluqueria the price of a haircut and the woman said 40, so I converted to $10, thought it was reasonable and got the haircut. At the end of the haircut, I took out 10 pesos and converted again thinking, “Wow, $2.50 is cheap for a haircut!” before the price suddenly shot up $7.50.

I’m currently looking for apartments in Buenos Aires, but it’s way harder than I expected. I’d briefly checked out craigslist in Lima, but it was all luxury apartments for business travelers. I was told that craigslist is actually useful for backpackers in Buenos Aires and I got excited when I looked at the apartment listings and saw dozens of posts per day of rooms to rent in apartments shared with native speakers for $300-450 / month, which seemed perfect. On Wednesday, I enthusiastically began sending out e-mails, certain everyone would want to rent a room to a friendly American guy who sort of speaks Spanish, but 3 no’s, 3 no responses, and 1 “you’d have to stay longer than a month.”

I met a French girl today who’s been looking full-time for 3 weeks and has found nothing and she’s looking in more neighborhoods and is staying longer. After this conversation, I decided to expand my search to short term furnished studios. These are a lot more expensive, but I’m rationalizing that it won’t be too painful for just a month and it’ll be cool to have a whole place to myself. I’m really just looking to take a break from hostels for a bit.

I left the US on Dec. 16th, 2010 and arrived in Quito, Ecuador on Dec. 17th so, depending on how you count, today I’ve hit the 3 month mark of my travels or the 3 month and 1 day mark. Let’s do an assessment of where I’m at and what I’ve got planned for the rest of my travels.

Money

I’ve spent about 30% of the money I set aside for this trip and I’ve done so in the following fashion:

It’s hard to project this into the next few months because it includes a lot of one-time costs at the beginning of the trip (gear, evacuation insurance, etc.), but also was in countries that are cheaper than the places I’ll be for the rest of the trip. If I had to guess I’d say my money can last me about another 6-9 months.

Expectations vs. Reality

I knew I wouldn’t be able to predict a lot of what I’d do and feel on the trip, but I did definitely have some expectations for the trip, many of which turned out to be hilariously wrong.

Expectation: My time is unlimited! I can work on whatever I want and my only limiting factor is interest. I will devour books like candy and I’ll pump out programs I have ideas for writing almost as fast as I can think of them.
Reality: Even without a job, it’s still hard to find enough time to do what you want. Much easier, sure, but the limiting factor of doing a lot of things I expected to do remains time and not motivation. Programming takes a long time! Especially in C++. I had ideas for 3 programs to write, the first of which is a toy program for my own use that I expected to take me about a week to finish and I’m still not done. I’m still reading the first novel I started on this trip (though in fairness, Infinite Jest is a crazy long novel).

Expectation: I spend every night in hostel dorms, sharing the room with 5-10 other people and paying $6-12/night, then go to a library / internet café if I want to get work done during the day.
Reality: I almost always choose to have a private room when I can. It’s way easier to just have a private room so I can leave my stuff strewn about, I don’t have to leave to work on my programming projects or read, and (most importantly) I have total napping freedom. In Buenos Aires, I’m going to look for a short-term apartment rental and get out of hostels completely.

Expectation: I will enjoy not having a job and not get bored or miss having a structured day.
Reality: I LOVE not having a job or having a structured day! It seems weird to me now to look back and remember that I had a 9-5 job (okay, more like 10:30-5:30 with some WFH hours) for 3 1/2 years. I’m deathly afraid of going back to having a day job. I never get bored because I have books to read, projects to work on, and Spanish to learn and I enjoy doing all of that stuff.

Expectation: I’m constantly in danger of being pickpocketed, robbed, drugged, kidnapped, etc. and consequently always stressed about it.
Reality: I’m definitely always conscious of danger, much more than I would be in the US, but there are a lot of ways to minimize the risk. I’ve asked a lot of people about trouble they’ve gotten into and I’ve heard very few stories of violent attacks (let’s ignore survivorship bias) and almost every story I’ve heard where something bad happens, it immediately followed the person doing something stupid and preventable. I don’t get stressed out about danger as much as I did at the beginning (though the place where I started was the most dangerous city I’ve been to).

Expectation: Spanish would just click. I’d struggle the first two weeks or so and then I’d be mostly conversational, needing only to ask for a few unfamiliar words here and there, reaching fluency in about 2-3 months.
Reality: Learning a language is hard! I’ve taken about 45 hours of classes since I got here and I talk to locals, but even now I’m barely conversational. I can have a smooth conversation, but there’s a lot I still will not understand or will struggle to say. My goal is to be able to speak Spanish well enough that I can trick other Americans who meet me into thinking that I’m not American and then surprising them with a switch to American English. A girl did this to me in Quito and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Expectation: Meeting lots of new people is fun.
Reality: Meeting new people is fun, but leaving people is unexpectedly tough. In all the cities I’ve stayed in for more than a week or so, I’ve found people I’ve really liked and it’s always hard to make the decision to continue on to the next city because it means leaving the people I like, too. The relationship dynamic ends up being very unusual because they’re always these hyper-accelerated relationships where I spend a lot more of my time with the person than I ever would with people in the US and then it’s suddenly over when I leave and we may never see each other again.

Expectation: The emotions of travel will be extreme highs and extreme lows with not much in between.
Reality: This was true at first, but now I’m almost always in the same mood, which is relaxed and pretty happy. At the beginning, everything seemed to matter more. If the first few days of my trip didn’t go so well, that suggested the next few months wouldn’t go so well. At this point, so much of the trip has been fun that occasional bad days (and I can’t even remember any recently) are unlikely to indicate any kind of pattern. There are only a few things I need to make me happy and it’s not very hard to find places that offer those things as I travel.

Coming Home

As much as I love traveling and not having a job, I’m really looking to coming home when I eventually do come home. When I was estimating costs for the time I have remaining, it meant looking up prices for flights home and things I plan to buy when I return (badass computer, Android phone, my own bed). It reminded me how much there is to look forward to and looking at flights to NYC makes it almost tempting to just buy one. There are a lot of minor hassles to traveling that I’ve gotten used to and don’t really notice anymore, but when I think about returning to the US and all of those things suddenly going away and having all of the luxuries of a permanent residence in an American city, I get really excited about my eventual return.

At this point, I’d estimate the remaining time on this trip to be about 6 months, placing me back in the US by about September or October 2011. It’ll likely be a tight race between my desire to keep traveling and my remaining travel money, but I think the money will probably narrowly outlast my interest.

About two weeks ago, I was walking back to my hostel in Arequipa when I saw a group of little boys with water balloons fleeing in my direction from down the street. I continued on and as I got to the corner, I saw a group of three 6-8 year old girls with a bucket of water balloons smiling mischievously at me. I interpreted the smile as “we’re going to ambush those little boys with water balloons,” so I smiled back and continued walking by them. It turned out that in Spanish, that smile actually translates to, “we’re going to completely soak you with water balloons.” When I got back to the hostel still dripping wet, they told me, “Oh yeah. The kids are playing Carnivale. They love to get foreigners.”

A week later, I was walking back to my hostel in Puno, but found that a huge stretch of my hostel’s street was shut down for a Carnivale block party. The kids didn’t have any water balloons, but they did have some sort of aerosol cans which fired a white, soapy-looking spray. I tried to look non-foreign and inconspicuous and managed to make it the 3 blocks back to my hostel without getting attacked.

Two hours later, I went out for drinks with these two German girls who unfortunately looked really foreign. As soon as we stepped out onto the street, a bunch of little kids yelled out, “Gringas!” [“white girls!”] and started chasing us with their spray cans at full blast. There were women on the corner selling cans for ~$1.50 each so we each bought one to defend ourselves and ended up in a full scale war with all the little kids at this block party.

The funny part was you’d get into these standoffs with the little kids where there are like 3 surrounding you and you’d all be pointing your spray cans at each other waiting for somebody to make the first move. You’re both covered in foam, but the little kids stand there not firing like, “Well, I don’t want to escalate this to actually spraying each other…” But then of course you always end up spraying each other and running off.

The real danger were the older women, though. I was minding my own business, spraying a 6 year old Peruvian girl in the face with a can of foam, when all of a sudden I felt a sharp, stinging pain in my ass. I turned around and saw a woman holding a little weapon and smiling. They were these little compressed bags of sand (sort of like stress balls) sitting at the bottom of these long elastic socks, so they’d swing the sock and whip me in the ass with this speeding bag of sand. This happened over and over, but I’d never see it coming, because they always wait until you’re distracted by the little kids.

When we came back from the bar, the kids were still going strong with the spray can wars. Our cans were still mostly full, so when we made it back to our hostel, we gave away our cans to a group of cute little girls who were sitting outside with no cans of their own. They were initially grateful for the cans, but that was quickly replaced by their taste for blood and the realization that we were now defenseless so they chased us back into our hostel, spraying us with our own cans. Adorable Peruvian girls are evil.