A Month in Buenos Aires
This might not come across in my Instagram stories of me drinking wine in the vineyards at the foot of the Andes but the reality is that I booked a trip to Buenos Aires to stay busy after my break up.
In the nomad community I joined in Buenos Aires, I expected to be somewhat of an exception. I thought that the large majority of the people in the group would be the modern day version of Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, non-conformists consciously choosing nomad life for the freedoms that it had to offer.
And while there certainly are some people like that in my group, the average person looked a lot like me, but even more so. As the trip went on, I found that most people in this nomad community had recently gone through some major trauma prior to the Argentina trip, ranging from divorces to deaths of loved ones. Although this initially surprised me, it made sense after a while - for a lot of people, it takes a major life event to live in another country for an extended period of time.
When it comes to recovering from trauma, it’s often said that time heals all wounds, which I’ve come to think is largely bullshit after talking to my friend M who I met on this trip. If you just let time pass without doing things, then there is no recovery, M told me. It’s the things you do that help you move along in life.
Time, in other words, is just the medicine bottle while life experiences are the antidote inside.
As you would expect it’s pretty rude for an American to blabber on to an Argentine about how cheap everything is. On a Reddit thread about working remotely in Buenos Aires, the advice was to avoid the topic even when Argentines bring it up. If they ask about how cheap everything is for you, the Redditors advised, just say that some things are cheaper and other things are more expensive - like electronics or imports.
Inflation has gotten to the point where it’s common knowledge even amongst foreigners that you never exchange more than $50 at a time. There’s the obvious reason for not wanting that $50 worth of pesos to become $40 in pesos in a week’s time. But also, who wants to carry this much cash in their wallet anyways?
Setting aside the hyperinflation though, there’s a lot more to Buenos Aires, one of the most artistic cities in the world. For one, it’s the city with the most bookstores per capita in the world. Also, therapy culture is huge - Argentines are notorious for raising an eyebrow when you say you don’t have a therapist that you see regularly. And similar to New York, there’s a vibrant theater culture here - Corrientes Avenue is their equivalent of Broadway.
And of course, there are all the murals. Here’s one created the day after Maradona’s death in the Boca neighborhood where he grew up.
Another thing that doesn’t come across in Instagram travel accounts is the amount of loneliness one ends up feeling on a long trip. Loneliness seems to thrive in certain situations while abroad, like lets say, texting your ex for the first time in several months to sort out escrow details while alone in your apartment late at night.
Back at home, I would have a whole list of things I would do if I ever felt too down on myself. I would have gone to the gym to lift weights or to play pick-up basketball with some of the regulars. I would have gone to Sevan Chicken on Glenoaks for their rotisserie chicken special with a side of hummus, fragrant rice pilaf, and extra servings of their sharp garlic sauce.
But in Buenos Aires, I couldn’t lean on that familiarity for comfort. Instead, more often than I’d like to admit, I’d sometimes just look at the calendar, counting the days until my return back to the States.
There’s a large number of Armenian restaurants in Buenos Aires - descendants of survivors from the Armenian genocide who were fleeing the Cilicia region of Turkey. It was fun speaking in Spanish with some of the Armenians in Buenos Aires about Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles where I grew up, that’s infamous amongst the Armenian diaspora for being an Armenian satellite city.
Maybe the most surprising thing about Buenos Aires was how strong the prevailing historical narrative is here, where the Peronist political party plays the dual roles of victims of the military junta and champions of the pueblo.
On multiple occasions, locals referenced the desaparecidos, the 30,000 people who disappeared during the reign of the military junta in the 1970s. There’s virtually universal revulsion of the military dictatorship, even amongst most conservatives.
This is in stark contrast to a country like the Philippines. Despite the thousands of extrajudicial killings during the Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s, the Filipinos had no problem electing Marcos’ son by a landslide just a few years ago.
Relative to the Filipinos, the Argentines seem to have a longer memory. Sure, there was a right-winger elected recently, but the past has already been set in Peronist stone.
I loved running into Asian people in Buenos Aires. There’s a bit of a song and dance here.
Usually, I go with the nod and the smile, an acknowledgement of how weird it is to be surrounded by these strange people who seem to prefer eating their meat with boiled wheat flour rather than rice.
Sometimes, the smile and the nod would be a bit too convincing. One time, an old Chinese woman began speaking to me in machine-gun Mandarin, causing me to have to explain that while I’ve got some great-grandparents who were born in China, I’m pretty much 100% Filipino culturally. “Dale dale, ningun problema,” she said with an embarrassed smile as she walked away.
There were other times on the trip where Asian Argentines would approach me at the coffee shop or on the street, asking me in Spanish where I’m from, but not in the way Clint Eastwood would ask it in Gran Torino, but in a way that was more like, “We’re so far away from the country of our ancestors, speaking a language from a country even further away, so how in the world did you end up here?”
While some people might be offended or annoyed by that sort of question, I couldn’t love it more. The world is a crazy place and people have interesting stories to tell. Understanding how someone got here isn’t a bad place to start.
On the last full night of my trip, I was at a Michelin star restaurant with M, H, and S, friends I met in Argentina. The restaurant had just gotten its Michelin star this past year, so chef R hadn’t yet gotten bogged down on a book deal, a TV show, or a cookbook. Instead, R was right in front of us for the whole night, cooking while conversing with us on various topics.
The night had the feel of arriving early at a friend’s apartment for dinner, the kind of dinner where your friend insists on you sitting down next to the kitchen island with a drink in hand while he cooks.
R had the deadpan humor of Ron Swanson in Community and the gruff genius of Jeremy Allen White in The Bear. For the culturally uninitiated, he was the kind of fine-dining chef who would be more at place grilling pupusas behind a flat-top in some gritty sidewalk in San Salvador.
At some point in the night, I asked the others what their go-to dish would be to bring to a potluck. S talked about her sweet-potato gnocchi. M said something about a curried cauliflower dish.
H went last and talked about her famous pizza dip -
“What the fuck is a pizza dip?” R had put down his chef’s knife and was staring daggers at H. “I’ve been cooking for 26 years, and I’ve never heard of this before.”
“Well - ” H stammered.
“Maybe it’s like the marinara dip for the Little Caesar’s breadsticks?” I offered.
“No,” H shook her head. “There’s some mozzarella, some cream cheese, and -”
“Jesus Christ, cream cheese,” R muttered as he went back to slicing apples. “Please tell me there are bacon bits. For the love of God.”
There might have been, but at this point, H couldn’t stop laughing, and the rest of us couldn’t stop laughing about H not being able to stop laughing, so we had to settle for pizza dip being some glob of lukewarm cream cheese and melted mozzarella.
Over the rest of dinner, conversations ranged from R’s weekly 20-hour drives to Paraguay to H’s formidable graphic design talents to R’s hot takes on Thomas Keller’s French Laundry cookbook. By the time we were outside calling an Uber, it was 12:30am and I was just over 24 hours away from my flight to Los Angeles.
When traveling, deadlines are short and goodbyes are always around the corner. Unless you’re one of the true digital nomads, there tends to be a date for your return flight back home.
This is pretty unique to most things in life. We don’t know when we’re going to leave our job or get laid off. We don’t know when we’re going to have kids or get married. We don’t know when we’re going to die.
Not having a deadline causes us to assume that we have a lot of time, an assumption that causes us to get stuck in jobs we don’t love or relationships we’re lukewarm about for years, if not decades. There’s plenty of time to course correct, we think to ourselves, right up until the moment we’re on our deathbeds thinking to ourselves that we all should have done it so differently.
The beauty of travel is that it that it unsticks us and forces us to ask the right questions. With a return flight looming and so many things I want to do, how do I best live out this day?
This question is nearly identical to the question that philosophers have asked themselves for millenia. With a limited amount of time and an infinite number of desires, how do I best live out this life?
It’s a question I want to wake up to every day of my life, whether it’s my last day in Buenos Aires or a Thursday morning in early February in SoCal.