My friend Michael came to visit me in Buenos Aires in 2006. He had a grant proposal that he had to write so we decided to stay in instead of going out. When I said “let’s get ice cream” he said, “I don’t want to go anywhere.” Oh no, my dear friend, you don’t have to go anywhere in Argentina to get THE BEST ice cream in the world, you just have to pick up the phone, and they bring it to you.
I have no less than 7 menus from ice creameries around my neighborhood who, within 30 minutes, will bring me 1/2 kilos or full kilos or multiple 1/4 kilos (1/4 is about a pint) of luscious, creamy, dreamy ice cream.
I have wondered for a long time about why there is no delivery ice cream in the U.S. being that we have delivery pizza, Chinese, Thai and other things. I suppose it’s a question of logistics. Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Córdoba, Tucumán, Bariloche, Salta, and basically all of the remotely big cities in Argentina have delivery ice cream (and pizza, parrilla, asado, “rotisería”, etc.), and they are all much more densely populated than most American cities. New York obviously being the exception.
But also I think it has to do with the fact that they use tiny mopeds to do deliveries. Persicco (the ice cream shop), has an armada of small mopeds decked out in Persicco branding parked in front of their shops. Intercontinental Pizza has this too along with many other businesses.
Oops! The doorbell rang. Gotta get my ice cream. 
This may sound strange, but as soon as I got off the plane today when I arrived at the Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires I noticed the smells. Plural.
Faint odors of cigarette smoke abound. Bakeries have a righteously pungent aroma. The air is damp but not tropical. The tell tale waft of asado pierces my nose and my salivary glands squeeze.
In Portland, the cleanliness of pine trees dominates the odor palate. It’s wonderful. It’s all Portland. But it’s so clean and sort of non committal. So white washed and devoid of danger and romance. Not that Portland can’t be romantic, it’s just that it’s more of a sleepy small city in the Pacific Northwest.
Buenos Aires is anything but sleepy. It wreaks of party noises, screaming and shouting, dog barking, music and traffic till the wee hours. Yeah, there’s dog shit on the streets. Yes it takes an hour to get your check.
Is one better than the other? I say no. It’s just a collection of differences. A summation of dissimilarities.
www.anuvawines.com
http://austin10.cityspur.com/2009/10/28/global-cost-of-living-ranking-1-april-2009/
That link there shows you the top 300 or so cities in the world in descending order from most expensive. Buenos Aires comes in at number 252 on the list meaning that it is incredibly cheap to live here. Cities in the U.S. are listed on there as well for comparison purposed.
The irony, however, is that although rent, transportation and food are quite inexpensive when compared to the rest of the world, clothing, electronics, “exotic foods” (like sushi) and actually wine as well are all as expensive or more so than the United States.
Compare ipods, iphones, TVs, bluejeans, Levi’s, Banana Republic, Old Navy, etc. All of this stuff is on the order of twice as much money in the U.S. as in Argentina. Even Starbucks costs more in Argentina than in the U.S. That last one is actually boggles the mind because in the first list, the reason for the price difference comes down to shipping and taxes, but for Starbuck’s, well, they’re just greedy.
Look at Alamos wines (from Catena) or Norton, Trapiche, Las Perdices, Mairena, or Mevi: all of these wines are comparitively 3 times as expensive in Argentina as in the U.S.Why is this? Well, in the case of electronics and clothing it is due to extremely high import duties as well as increased shipping costs. Don’t be fooled though, it is the import duties that account for 99% of the difference where shipping only accounts for maybe 1%.
So why is domestically produced wine (the only wine in Argentina) so much more expensive in Argentina than in the U.S. Keep in mind that I am comparing the same brands. There are many brands that exist in Argentina that you can get for less than a dollar. But none of those are sold in the U.S.
The reasons, according to my friends in wine circles, that wine in Argentina costs the same if not more in Argentina than in the U.S. comes down to three things: greed, import duties, and value added tax. Again, don’t be fooled, it is greed that accounts for 90% of this equation. But not just on the part of the wineries and distributors: greed of the government. A 21% V.A.T. is added to all goods. And in Argentina it’s added 3 times: once when the winery sells to a distributor, once when the distributor sells to the retailer, and once when the retailer sells to the public. This accounts for a 77% increase in the price of the wine due to taxes.
But that’s not all. Why is it that you cannot find any imported wine in Argentina? Literally I can count on my hand the number of restaurants and wine shops that offer something from outside Argentina. And I’m including Chile, which is their next door neighbor. A huge import duty (50% at times) exist on all imported wine as a protectionist measure. Could you imagine what wine would cost in Argentina if this duty was reduced to say 5%? The market would become much more competitive and local producers would have to reduce prices to compete. Right now that huge import duty allows them to inflate prices without consequences.
A week after arriving in Buenos Aires in 2004, I had a hankering for some peanuts. Having been educated in Spanish for 6 years, and trusting every word my teachers said in addition to my extensive experience in Mexico, I assumed I knew basically all of the vocabulary that a foreigner should know.
So when I walked into a supermarket and asked to find the “cacahuates” (Mexican and Central American for “peanut”) I got some really strange expressions. “Que carajo es un cacahuate?” I got at the second kiosk I went to. Finally I arrived at a bigger supermarket and the owner was smart enough to ask one of his employees, an immigrant from Bolivia, what I was talking about. “Ooohhh, vos queres mani!” (Please note that the keyboard I am typing on has no accent function and there should be an accent over the “i” in mani, making the pronunciation mah-NEE). Joy, I had my peanuts finally although no peanut butter.
Other vocabulary changes: palta = aguacate = avocado; remera = camiseta = T-shrit; camiseta = uniforme = jersey/uniform; colectivo = autobus = bus; manteca = mantequilla = butter.
On pretty much any table in any restaurant in the U.S. you will find a bottle of ketchup.
With pretty much any order of fries, hotdogs, chicken, or milanesa (breaded fried chicken or steak) in Argentina you will find a serving of mayonnaise.
Why the difference?
One clear and distinct answer lies in the history and invention of these two sauces. The invention of modern ketchup is credited by some to H.J. Heinz, the founder of The Heinz company. His adaptation of the Chinese “cat-sup” (still seen written this way on some company’s bottles) made its way to market in the late 1800s, originating in Pennsylvania, which explains why it penetrated the market so much in the U.S. It didn’t arrive to Europe or South America until much later.
Mayonnaise on the other hand, was invented much earlier, and indeed by the French Duke de Richelieu in, uh, France around 1756. This gap of 150 years or so with mayo and without ketchup in Europe is probably the reason for the majority of why American’s prefer and use ketchup over mayo and vice versa in Argentina, South America and Europe.
Now the hard data was really hard to come by, but I think that there is another reason for the respective preferences for ketchup vs. mayo in different regions: the palate.
Ketchup is basically sugar. With 2 of the first 3 ingredients in ketchup being high fructose corn syrup and sugar, Ketchup fits America’s need for sweet products, sweet/savory combinations. Ketchup has no fat in it and is basically entirely sugar. This produces a drastically different hormonal effect in the body when consumed (sugar high, followed by huge insulin spike, followed by lethargy).
Mayo is essentially entirely fat with the main components being egg yolk and different oils (depending on the recipe). Strangely, mayo takes on different colors in America vs. Argentina. In the U.S. mayo is starkly white. This strikes me as odd for a food that is based on the yellow egg yolk because in Argentina, it is much more yellow.
The 100% fat content of mayo satiates the appetite and gives people a full feeling. This hormonal effect of satiation is much different than the roller coaster sugar high effect of ketchup.
Not to mention that the flavor of mayo is not sweet at all. It is entirely savory, another thing that illustrates the two countries’ preferences for sugar vs. fat, sugar high vs fat satiation, ketchup vs mayonnaise.
The odd thing about the practice of serving the two condiments is that ketchup in the U.S. is omnipresent. It’s on every table in every restaurant. ANYTIME fries are served, ketchup is there, even in high end establishments. Mayo would be odd in that circumstance. I invoke here, the movie Pulp Fiction where the John Travolta character, at the beginning of the movie has just returned from Europe and tells the Samuel L. Jackson character about how they “drown [their fries] in that shit (mayo)”, and they both remark about how strange they find that custom.
In Argentina, fries are served without anything and I have always had to ask for ketchup, and since I view fries basically as a ketchup transportation system, I have been frustrated when restaurants do not have ketchup. What a nightmare.
As a huge fan of efficiency, one must wonder why I ever chose to live in a country like Argentina. People have different types of priorities and personality traits when it comes to different facets of life. In work, efficiency and productivity rule (for me as for most Americans). But in my social life, I don’t mind having flexibility and spontaneity.
After having spent the last 3 weeks in Oregon (fabulous Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris!), I have to say that the following exemplify some of the gems of American life:
The garbage disposal.
Not only do I abhor, loathe and detest reaching into the sink to pick out soggy bread, inflated noodles, or minced mystery meat mixed with hair (inevitably), the process is simply inefficient and unsanitary. It’s impossible to get all of the food scraped off of one’s plate into the trash. Sauce and grease always act as an adhesive, inviting that tiny piece of fat you cut off of your gorgeous Argentine steak to stick around and have a paramecium party on your plate. With a disposal, you rinse this into the sink–where you wash the dish–and don’t have two separate processes for scraping the plate, then cleaning it, then cleaning the sink. One time clean. Efficient. Also, why would we want to keep organic waste in the house? It will only attract bugs, bacteria and fungus. Big thumbs up for garbage disposals.
Recycling.
This is another abhorrent practice in Argentina although I hear things are changing. Now in Portland, the land of hippie tree huggers (I proclaim with love), everything is recycled and you will be looked at with a death stare from the nearest vegan bicycle rider sporting dread locks and a mate gourd (yes, they are drinking mate–there is even a mate BEER! It’s awful though 
). In Argentina, we throw things away and let the street people deal with it. This is truly sad.
A wide variety of everything.
Here we are arriving at a middle ground. I love variety. Sushi, seafood, spicy, mexican, and especially the beer and wine selection at the supermarket. The problem here is, especially when it comes to food, that we are overly clean (which is really just a form of efficiency and order). American’s artisan products–mirco-brews, small batch wines, mom and pop restaurants, etc– get swallowed up by the giants. There are plenty left, don’t get me wrong, but when it comes to cheese, for example, your options are chemically processed orange looking blocks of chemical that have no cheese funk to them whatsoever for 99 cents or some gorgeous French imports that have you salivating all the way home for 10 dollars per pound. No middle ground. Whole Foods sells their REGULAR boneless skinless chicken breast for 7 dollars per pound.
Cons:
Cars, cars, cars. GOD AMERICANS LOVE CARS. I FUCKING HATE CARS! Excuse me, I don’t like to curse in my writing, but seriously, I fucking hate them. Fuck cars. Never has there been an invention that has divided humanity, polluted the earth, caused noise and waste, than the automobile. The car divides through physical space as well as economics: physically, instead of sharing space on the sidewalk, public transport, or the close contact of a bicycle, everyone has their own mini-house with wheels. They eat, talk on the phone, download music, do business and more from their cars. The walls of a car allow people to be as little as 2 meters from one another (at a stop light) and avoid basic greetings. When was the last time you said hi to someone at a stoplight?
The car is also “mine”. Instead of the concept of shared space, shared transportation, or the close contact of bicycles (no walls), people have their own mobile space. America, the richest country ever in the history of the world, surprisingly ranks only 16th in car ownership per capita (http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12714391&fsrc=rss) but people always are battling to show of their rides. TV shows, drag racing, car racing and so forth dominate American culture.
Driving is a nuisance, annoying, infuriating, anywhere you go. The difference is that in most other developed countries (the 15 ahead of the U.S.), public transportation is a viable option whereas in the U.S. it is not.
Just as we found that only approximations for the moral sense of the word right exist in Spanish, and no direct translation is really 100% accurate, the case for the word wrong is worse.
Wrong has many denotations in English, just as right did. Some of these definitions certainly capture their approximate translation counterparts in Spanish. These include incorrecto, erroneo, equivocado, etc. We would take these, in the appropriate context in English, as incorrect, erroneous, and mistaken although none are truly right for wrong.
As always, I go back to the exercise of translating a given phrase back and forth starting in one language and moving to the other: If I ask any bilingual person to translate “That’s wrong” into Spanish, they would most likely say the best translation would be “Está mal”. Literally, this means “That’s bad”.
What is extremely interesting, and indicative of the absence of the real meaning of the word wrong in Spanish, is that on particular lists of translations of the word wrong into Spanish, the word bad does not even show up. Other Spanish translations include falso, al reves, injusto (false, the reverse, injust).
When we say “that’s wrong” especially when referring to a moral argument, none of these translations stand up to what wrong actually means in English. I would be very eager to have a conversation with someone who is anti-abortion and bilingual who can explain to me the nuance of meaning that is lost when translating the phrase “abortion is wrong.”
Abortion is bad? Incorrect? False? Unjust? Incorrect? Mistaken? The REVERSE? No, abortion is wrong.
Other great examples are the phrases and words wrong way, that’s so wrong, wrongful, and wrongdoing.
Wrong way kills me because the way it is used and translated in English and Spanish are so extremely different. When driving in the U.S., signs are posted that say “wrong way” (typically preceded by “do not enter”) to indicate that traffic will be coming out of that street, and if you see that side of the sign and enter from where you see those words, you will be going against traffic. Funny enough, the translation for this is contramano in Spanish. Literally meaning “against hand” and deriving from the Spanish origins of direction (a mano derecha, or, a mano iziquierda), “mano para allá” means “that way” and so forth. Again, we can see that they don’t say mala indicación, dirección equivocada, dirección incorrecta or any other derivative of the word wrong as it is translated.
“That’s so wrong,” is also funny because it is such an idiom even in English. Frequently, the whole phrase is “Oh my God, that’s so wrong,” when talking about a disgusting, dispicable, or extremely embarassing moment. How is this translated? Está remal is the closest I can come. Está jodido could also work but this is more expletive just like es una mierda. Most Spanish speakers I have talked to simply say that it doesn’t translate and say they would use a phrase directed more toward the person who did the wrong and call them a name: es un forro, es un desgraciado, etc.
Wrongful is most often translated as ilegal or injusto. Both of these taken as definitions are not wrong (ha) when taken in a more legal context, but it is again, the status of something that is wrongful that is not completed by these definitions.
Wrongdoing is translated as fechoría which when translated back to English could also be misdeed, transgression or misdoing. Again, in the legal, factual sense, these definitions are not, ahem, wrong, but fail to capture the moral context of what wrongdoing is. Misdeed, transgression, and misdoing all have an indication/connotation that the person committing these acts is going against a set of law or societal rules, perhaps, and not necessarily against some moral imperative.
I wonder if the absense of the English definition of the word wrong in its moral sense in Spanish indicates how the respective cultures work? Does the absence of this definition, or even stronger, the absense of the idea of wrong, and the extremely infrequent use of words like inmoral and injusto indicate that a society is predisposed to conceive of right and wrong in different ways?
I certainly think so. I look forward to your comments.
I know this post is very off topic, but I feel it’s my civic duty to inform as many people as possible about the bird-shit bandits:
If you live in or are visiting Argentina, the following may happen: you are walking down the street, minding your own business and you feel something splatter across your arm or pant leg. It looks white and disgusting and immediately a “good samaritan” will offer to help you clean off your clothing. It may be an old lady, or a young boy. It doesn’t matter. That person is part of a team of thieves scheming to get your money and valuables.
As this first person helps you clean off, a second and even third will try to pick your pocket, take you backpack or otherwise rob you.
I have personally met 4 people–all tourists–who have mentioned that this happened to them. Two of them recognized what was happenening about half way through the scam, and the other two did not and ended up without their wallets.
Please spread the word!
You would think that in the land of beef would abound the best hamburger in existence. Wrong. Here is where asado reigns and even steak is hard to come by (that might be an exaggeration).
But let’s start from the beginning.
The word “asar” literally means to grill or roast. Thus, an asado is a roast or a grill. Not too far from barbecue but you’ll see why it is momentarily.
The word “barbecue” actually is thought to come from the Spanish word “barbacoa” that certainly refers to the grilling, smoking or curing of meat over coals (usually) and has taken on much more meaning in the U.S., especially since Kingsford, Heinz, and other assorted charcoal and sauce companies have become involved.
So why is asado so often translated as barbecue and why is it not?
First, an asado takes, well, forever in many cases. At least 4 hours or so when you attend a real one at someone’s home or a house in the country. The preparation of the coals–which by the way are never made from sawdust and treated with lighter fluid like in the U.S., but rather people use either wood directly and shovel the “brasas” (lit coals) under the parrilla (grill) or they use carbon made from distilling wood which comes in big chunks that resemble the logs they came from–is the first stark contrast. In the States in many cases there aren’t even coals present. You push a button on your gas grill and poof.
Second, the cooking process is long and slow in Argentina, especially for a large group where the “asador” (grillman) will usually want to get the entire section of beef ribs. He (yes, always he), will cook it over the course of about 2 hours. The aroma is painfully delicious.
Third, the role of women is clearly defined. I am in no way attempting to offend anyone, it’s just that standards and practices in Argentina are such that the women set the table and make the salads and potato dishes while the asador cooks and the rest of the men stand next to the parrilla waiting for scraps.
Fourth, the cuts of meat. Here is where the greatest difference lies. The principle cuts of meat are asado (beef ribs in this case, not the grill itself) and vacio (flank steak). It is odd, at somebody’s house, to have them do an asado with bife de lomo (filet mignon), colita de cuadril (rump steak), bife de chorizo (porterhouse) or any other steak cuts that we are used to in the U.S.
In addition, achuras (offal) make up about half of the meal! Riñon (kidney), chinchulines (intestine), chorizo (sausage), morcilla (blood sausage), molleja (sweetbread), tripa gorda (tripe) and sometimes even rarer things are always present at an Argentine asado.
They are also always served first and together. Then comes the meat. Then dessert. It’s a whole ceremony. You end the day or night stuffed for sure and maybe drunk as well. But certainly happy.
In the States we do things much faster and we do burgers and dogs and sometimes steak. There is never mate (hierba mate), most people don’t even know what that is, we usually drink beer, and quite often sports are involved.
The idea of a gas barbeque in Argentina could be offensive.
So what do these two methods indicate in our cultures:
1. The importance placed on time. Cleary Americans are much more time conscious than Argentines. It is bred into our culture. “Time is money.” We do things faster. Not only that but we are always doing something. We have drinks, or go bar hopping, or watch the game…. We do these things at a specific time normally. Having coffee is done at a specific time. So is having drinks, watching the game, etc. In Argentina, having coffee can take 2-3 hours. And clearly, the time it takes to do an asado vs. bbq and when people show up to the asado and bbq illustrate the cultural differences.
2. The differences in what is considered “good meat”. Many Americans are grossed out by offal. We prefer steaks and hamburgers. Why not offal? I found many of those items incredible when I came to Argentina. In the U.S. we throw them out (or perhaps make hot dogs out of them).
For the Americans out there who don’t know, voting is obligatory in Argentina. It seems somewhat anti-democratic to me to force people to vote through the threat of fines, and it seems ridiculous to me to stop selling alcohol the night before in order to prevent people from having hangovers. Can’t you just stock up on beer during the day and drink yourself to death anyway? If you don’t know anything about the cadidates or issues isn’t an uninformed voter probably more dangerous to society than an absention?
