A few weeks ago, I ran into a German woman at MALBA, a well-known Latin American art museum, and translated between her and the ticket seller. The German had only been in the city a few days; while Buenos Aires was nice, she complained that the people were all unfriendly.
It was raining when I left the museum, an hour or so later. A few minutes into my walk, a young woman (who turned out to work for a law firm) offered me a space under her umbrella, and we chatted. Barely 30 seconds after our paths diverged, another woman, probably 40 years old, shared her umbrella with me, happy to tell me about interesting cultural centers. She walked two blocks out of her way to bring me to the door of my university.
While it’s true that you can’t set your bag down in a restaurant for fear of it getting stolen, and that men will whistle at you on the street, especially if you have any bare leg showing, Argentina is an amazingly friendly country. Pull out a Guía T map book, and strangers will come up to you and offer directions to anywhere you want to go.
Yesterday, I tried to go to a community tango class. The teacher and us had a confusion over the every changing start time, and missed each other. Not wanting to go straight home after the hour bus ride here, a from my program and I and an Argentine who we just met, ended up hanging out. The Argentine, Fernando had planned to come to the class for the first time that day. Who knows what the he had planned for his day, but he took the time to come have dinner with us for 2 hours, then invited us to a friend’s birthday party that night. I ended up going, and it was astounding how friendly the people were. It was a grand mix of 20-somethings, mostly law or political science grad students (everyone in Buenos Aires seems to be a lawyer), including among the Argentines an El Salvadorian, two Brazilians, a Venezuelan, and several people from the US, here teaching English. No one cared that I didn’t know the man who’s birthday it was, and everyone was eager to talk. (I’ve been feeling more like a real Argentine now that I’m taking in a bit more of the night life, though tonight I went home at 3:30am. I think that’s about the earliest it’s acceptable to leave in Argentina, but still makes you a little lame).
Today, several friends and I went to a neighborhood called La Plata. It’s an hour away from Buenos Aires central, and is a nice little town, that sports some beautiful European architecture. There’s an impressively tall and elaborate church with gleaming stained glass and a nice crafts fair (every town seems to have one of the weekends). The city was one of the first planned out cities, and is structured around 2 major diagonals. We mostly wandered about, and found that every few blocks seemed to have a park complete with playgrounds. In our part of the city, all the playgrounds have fences around them, presumably to keep out homeless at night, and it was nice to find playgrounds that didn’t seem to judge you for entering. On the way there, we met two men from La Plata. One seemed quite the hipster: skinny jeans, oversized bright blue sleeveless T-shirt, and a small mustache. He’d moved to Buenos Aires to escape the violent treatment he got in La Plata for dressing the way he did. Though Argentina is liberal enough law-wise to allow gay marriage throughout the country, the further you get away from the city, and it seems, the city center, the more conservative the people are. These men assured us that we could call them for anything we wanted (and they weren’t hitting on us, we had two guy friends in our group), and that it was important for them that we feel at home in Argentina.
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