Hahaha - drugs are not a bad idea. One of the best businesses I've seen here is based on large consumption of large amounts of alcohol. People wait in line outside two particular places I know of in order to get in and suffer horrible crowding while inside. Ladies drink free beers, beers are cheap for the guys and everyone gets out of their mind drunk. On and on...
I was going to reply earlier to try to put up some of my previous comments that were botched but ended up getting caught up in a family problem related to local issues. Heh.
Seems that Cristina brags a lot about the state of education in the country, but maybe too many people (including expats?) see the country as Buenos Aires (and the good parts like Centro, Recoleta, Palermo, Belgrano, etc).
My wife's oldest sister has three kids, including a new baby. Long involved story about why, but they've been living with us for the last few months while we get them housing. She doesn't have the money for an apartment nor a guarantee - they're quite poor. Pensiones won't take babies (at least they are extremely few and far between) and some won't take kids at all. So we started looking outside the city and found some houses and apartments that they could (barely) afford but we didn't like where they would have to live. So far nothing out of the ordinary for here, most poor people that don't live in pensiones and such live outside the city (or in villas!).
So she found a place out in Jose C Paz where some land was for sale cheap and a poor neighborhood was being constructed. We've been building her a cheap house where they can live decently, although the commute is going to be hell - but again, nothing new there.
She's been looking for schools lately and found that there are zero vacancies in any public schools out there. In fact, she couldn't find any public schools here in the city either and we are paying for them to go to cheap private schools since the school year started before they had their house ready. We were talking today with one of her neighbors out in Jose C Paz and it seems this is a common issue amongst many of the poor out there - a large percentage of the kids don't go to school because there are no public schools available and they can't afford the private schools out there. BTW - everyone I know out there are legal residents, although I'm sure there are some that aren't. But free school sure doesn't help them, nor many in other places.
I mention this, even though it's a little out of the subject of this thread, because it occurs to me (and not for the first time) that a lot of people who love Buenos Aires don't have to put up with what a lot of local people have to put up with, or even what expats who earn in dollars here have to put up with.
I often wonder if the expats who love Argentina unconditionally, or easily "get over" the issues that come to them, ever get outside of the city, or the "good" parts of the city, to see what life here is really like for quite a large percentage of the people. Or if they have kids and have to deal with things at the "beginning" or near it. (I know some people just naturally let things slide off them - wish I was one!) While personally I don't have to deal with some of these worst things for me and my "immediate family", I do have to deal with far more than the average person here in trying to help my wife's family. It is one of the reasons that I am at times a bit negative on life here.
I have a good friend, a lawyer from California, who lives here most of the year. He owns an apartment in a good part of town and has many good Argentine friends. However, his friends are all of the upper-society variety - he is always having a dinner party at his place or going to friends' houses for dinner. He doesn't have any real friends in the lower levels of society. He listens with fascination to many of the problems that we have, but it doesn't really get him in the heart - he simply doesn't see these things and it's often like the "starving children in Africa" that many of us were told about as we tried to hide our peas in our napkins as kids.
Many of us don't have a lot of choice, for one reason or another, on needing to live here. We've made decisions that have difficult consequences and many of us have been here quite a while and watched things go downhill. We found ourselves needing to deal with things, pretty much as many Argentine people (though again, I know I'm much more lucky than a very large portion of Argentinos because of how I make my money).
Isadora, the only real advice I have is that you will either get used to what surrounds you, the interactions you must make, friends that will come along (who can be quite a help in understanding how to get along here), or you won't. But it probably won't be easy if you're seeing these things as a newcomer (i.e., no "honeymoon").
My first year here was my honeymoon. I was doing business, I'd met a wonderful woman and we were getting closer and closer. I was renting temporary apartments and didn't have to deal with guarantees, with getting services installed, repairing things (except for the occasional issue, but it didn't affect me very much), buying things I needed (not just wanted), etc. I didn't have my residency yet and I certainly didn't have any family here which required me to deal with things at the root levels of society. Business was a bitch, but I was making lots of money (as were my Argentine employees).
As we decided to get married and make a life together, we started also helping her family come here and get residency and find jobs. She already had residency and I got my residency when we got married. We brought her next youngest sister to go to school. The more I got into real life here (to an extent - I earned [and still do] my money outside the country), the more frustrating things became. It didn't help when my business went bust and I had to make do with much less money (a year without work pretty much took out my savings!). We now have two of her younger sisters living with us and going to school (one at UADE in university now, the other in a private high school), 5 of her brothers and another of her sisters (mentioned previously) living their lives as well.
At one point, I simply got used to things. It is much easier when you have a support group of others that are going through the same thing, and with such a large family we've managed to make friends, as well as contacts of some very useful types. You learn how to deal with the little things and when big things hit, you have a group of people who can help you.
But it's not for the weak of heart - unless things just slide off easily.
Buenos Aires is the first country in which I have lived for more than a few months. I used to work for an offshore drilling company and traveled the world for them for about 9 years. Sometimes I stayed for months, sometimes for weeks. I spent about a total of a year in Brasil (mostly in place called Macae, just north of Buzios and in Rio itself as well), over two years' time, and never saw a lot of what I've encountered here. I spent a couple of months in Italy living with expats in Ravenna and never heard of so many problems getting things done as I have here, even when getting caught in strikes (and one memorable strike dealing with water taxis in Venice when I had to catch a train to Rome comes to mind). Places that were worse than here were Nigeria and Angola - I spent months in Angola and weeks in Nigeria and wouldn't want to go back to either, under any situation. My first trip overseas was to India in the early 90s, and though I saw a lot of poverty I saw a lot of signs of improvement even then - but I don't think I would have wanted to live there at the time. I could go on and on...
I've spent quite a bit of time in Paraguay and see that they are slowly but surely, even with a dictatorial government, making positive progress. My wife comes from the most poor "department" in Paraguay, Concepcion. The poor there (my wife's family lived in thatched-roof huts with dirt floors until fairly recently) have public schools. The poorest have a place.
Find the good things here and concentrate on them. They're here, no doubt about it. Beautiful architecture, a sophisticated culture, sometimes even polite (I mean really polite, when it counts) people. Beautiful women, I'm sure the same with men, which is always nice on the eyes. Some very earnest people, sometimes even pointed in the right direction, against a tide of "it just doesn't matter".
Try to ignore the things that frustrate you. And for me, at least, "exotic herbs" at the end of a long, stressful day, surely help. They give me no hangover and I don't have to pee all the time (I was known as beebee-bladder at university!)
