Discovering Buenos Aires

We’ve been off the radar for a while… that’s because we’ve been working away at the business that was the purpose of our move to Argentina.

We’ve finally gotten our website up, you can see it here: Stock Market Investing News

It’s been a long uphill battle, but we’re pretty happy with the results so far… Now all we have to do is get a ton of traffic there…

The website pulls together some of the best articles from the world of contrarian stock market investing.  If that sounds interesting to you, please take a look and let me know what you think.

http://www.contrarianprofits.com

Cheers,

Will

It’s nearly a year that we’ve lived in Buenos Aires. A whole hell of a lot has happened and we don’t even know where to begin… But, we’re not going to get into all that right now anyway… Instead, we’d like to shamelessly self-promote a project that we’re involved in.

If you can read Spanish and would like to know what’s going on in Latin American and world financial markets then be sure to check out this free daily email newsletter at: http://moneyweekes.com/

Here are some of the latest articles:

Baja de Tasas, Sólo un Remiendo

Más Acerca de por qué el Sector Inmobiliario Mexicano es Prometedor

¿Cuál Será la Suerte del Dólar?

Semana Negra…¿Hay una Luz al Final del Túnel?

Saludos!

Much more to come as we approach our one-year in Argentina anniversary…

Over the last 8 months of living in Buenos Aires we’ve had the pleasure of visiting quite a few of the city’s excellent restaurants. We had some family in town recently and on their final night here we decided to give them a fancy last hurrah dinner at one of the best restaurants in the city.

 We used this, normally very reliable, Argentine restaurant website to make our selection: http://guiaoleo.com.ar/list.php?orderby=Comida&ad=desc&Rank=true&pricemin=80

 We should’ve been paying more attention because the restaurant in question was French ‘haute cuisine’ and that’s not exactly what we were in the mood for… and we found out that the restaurant is haute price as well without the equivalent value… It was by far the most expensive meal we’ve had and the food was not notable in any way other way than the small oddly-presented portions… Also, there was an extreme lack of selections. We kept flipping back and forth puzzling over the two pages of the menu. The wine list wasn’t lacking in selections as long as those selections cost more than $100 pesos…

 There’s a fine line between fine dining and farce in the realm of haute cuisine… pretty presentation only goes so far when the stakes are raised by high prices… We’re sure one could have a fulfilling and sophisticated dining experience in this establishment, but we felt like we got worked-over like suckers.

Any day of the week we’d take a steak at La Cabrera in Palermo or the Balcony in Recoleta over that other clap-trap.

Until next time.

Despite the high profile robbery of Francis Ford Coppola’s petit-hotel in Palermo Viejo (Soho) two weeks ago, the area is nevertheless booming…

This weekend the weather was absolutely gorgeous and the streets of this small area of Palermo were packed with tourists, hipsters, regular ol’ Portenos, your editor, and his beautiful wife. The area has it’s detractors, but we’re not drinking the haterade…

No, Palermo Viejo is probably the most appealing neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Plaza Serrano, the hub of this little sub-barrio, can get old quickly, as it tends to get too busy, too touristy. But you can easily avoid it and enjoy the boutiques, the wares of the street-vendors, the bars, restaurants, and charm of the surrounding streets.

With the lower building heights, usually no more than three stories, the place just gets more light… it also allows for car pollution to escape more easily…

We’ve sometimes hesitated to give Palermo Viejo much acknowledgement in this blog because it feels like kind of a cop-out… The neighborhood has too many foreigners… It’s too gentrified… That may be true, but, those factors can also make the place more appealing. To each his own we say.

But if I were to place a bet on a neighborhood, we’d put our money there… but it can be tricky as there’s little for sale, plenty for rent, but little for sale… But we’ve seen some deals around.

Especially if there’s a dip in the economy here after the election, we’d watch this area like a hawk for any good deals…

We apologize for going missing in action the past two weeks… Our excuse(s)? Meetings and travel in Europe, a move within Buenos Aires, and turmoil in business have kept us busy buried little bees…

We’re recovering our composure and will get back to our regular blogging duties as best as we can starting today dear reader.

In recent news, we moved to a new apartment that has TV. We’ve been told that the mayhem level in Argentina is going up in advance of the approaching presidential elections… that various factions have an interest in arousing the displeasure of the populous. So, the professional protesters, the ‘piquetaros’, labor groups, and other political mafia organizations are mobilizing to instill a feeling of unrest.

We didn’t see it before, but, on the evening news these days there is a fair amount of chaos around Argentina. The news is obviously sensationalized. But there’s a good amount of real footage of real trouble. And the robbery of Francis Ford Coppela’s house was the icing on the cake this week.

Anyway, our daily life here in BA moves on uneventful, in terms of outside disruptions. The weather has transformed into perfect spring. Life is good. Perhaps we should return to the bliss of no TV…

In so many ways Buenos Aires is calm and safe. In so many ways it can be just the opposite…

News just came in that Coppola’s home and office was broken into last night, his employees tied up and his laptop, containing work for his new movie, stolen along with other electronics… Ouch!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/27/people.coppola.ap/index.html

From the Clarin in Spanish: http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/09/27/um/m-01507593.htm

Visit this blog for more about Coppola in Buenos Aires:

http://trendypalermoviejo.blogspot.com/search/label/Francis%20Ford%20Coppola%27s%20hotel

We hosted our first Argentine-style ‘asado’, for 20 or so people, on the roof of our apartment-building here in Buenos Aires on Friday.

Argentines take their asados seriously. Our spanish teacher was going to be there and our Argentine colleagues. We were a bit nervous about embarassing ourselves, and at first, most of our fears were realized…

I don’t know what it is, but, there’s something about being in a foreign country that sometimes causes you to lose all your senses… this happened to us on Friday when starting the fire for the asado… We’ve started hundreds, maybe thousands of fires in our day, back on the farm in Virginia and elsewhere. We know exactly what to do. But in the frenzy and pressure of hosting this asado our instincts and good sense just went out the window…

There we were having hastily thrown some charcoal and sticks into the parrilla grill, blowing and fanning a pathetic smoky pile as our guests started arriving… It must have seemed to the Argentines who were there that this was going to be some kind of slip-shod yahoo yanqui bbq. We could see the concern and pity on their faces… 

Luckily for us, an American friend who’s married to an Argentine helped us with the shopping, tipping us off to the items that we were going to need to do this thing right… And so when the fire finally got going (with some input from just about every male guest) all the other elements started to come together as well… The drinks and music were flowing from bottles and speakers. And with the perfect warm spring night air of Buenos Aires things turned downright pleasant.

Maybe it’s genetic, but a weird dicotemy started to manifest itself during our little shin-dig… The Argentines all seemed to drift over to the parrilla where the meat was cooking and the Americans and Anglos all seemed to huddle around where the beer and wine was… Imagine that…

Anyway, cliches aside, we thought a pretty good time was had by all… And that’s the story of Gringos’ First Asado. 

If you’ve been thinking about visiting Argentina… If you want to experience the vibrant culture, the friendly people, the opportunities, the beautiful and diverse landscapes… then you won’t want to miss this tour organized by my friends at Agora Travel this November 3rd-16th.

This tour is unique and exclusive (only 16 people) as it is done with a private chartered plane, so, you can travel quickly, comfortably, and hassle-free around Argentina, covering more destinations than you could with traditional airlines (especially Aerolinas Argentinas!).

The tour is also interesting in that it is oriented towards investment opportunities around the country: apartments in Buenos Aires, developments, vineyard and forestry projects, and rural estancias …

Over the years Agora Travel has established some excellent contacts in Argentina. This tour gives you access to those trustworthy and knowledgeable professionals, which is extremely important for you to be able to invest with confidence…

The investment aspects aside, the tour covers some of the most enchanting locations in Argentina: Buenos Aires… Bariloche… Mendoza… Salta (pictured above)… Misiones… the Iguazu Falls…

Basically this is a trip of a lifetime, a chance to explore the best that a beautiful country has to offer…

Click here to get all the details: http://www.agoratravel.com/investsouthamerica/wb/

FYI: We’ll be speaking to the people on this tour in Buenos Aires. We don’t know what we’ll say but, we’ll do our best to offer some interesting “off-the-blog” insights to Buenos Aires and Argentina, what we don’t want everyone to know about…

Last night we finally delved into the Buenos Aires art scene… We went to the gallery night event where many of the art galleries in Retiro and Recoleta stay open late and serve champagne on the last Friday of every month. The event is sponsored by a number of banks and local businesses and about 30 or so galleries participate. We went there with a group of expats, mostly Americans, including a couple of Argentine Americans… We had a very nice time.

We’re not exactly in the income bracket that purchases art, certainly not in the US, but here in BA we can almost pull it off. And, hell, when there’s free champagne involved you can consider us collectors!

But, in a gallery with a lot of uninteresting crapola you’ve got to play it cool. You can’t just go barrelling towards the free champagne and then run out of there, even though that’s what you want to do. The complimentary bubbly is usually strategically placed and guarded, so one must feign interest in order to win a legitimate refill.

Your editor at times found himself enquiring the price of some monstrous canvas or another so that he could suavely replenish his glass… And we know we were not alone in this…

That said, we did come across a couple very nice works… some high quality still-lifes… an interesting surrealist piece… and some intricate landscapes… We may well count our pennies and return to one of these galleries and see if we can come away with something.

All that gallery hopping gave us quite an appetite, so around 10pm (a respectable dinner-time for Portenos) we headed over to a parrilla restaurant to add the weight of some redmeat to the artsy evening. On the way there we came across a soccer-hooligan rally that was being closely monitored by riot police. Some in our group saw this as a photo-op and posed alongside the riot police standing by… surely a keeper for the photo album…

We enjoyed a great parrilla dinner and some nice conversation. It seems to us a bit of a copout to hang out with Americans when in Argentina. But the thing about Buenos Aires is that it attracts certain kinds of Americans, the more interesting types, who can make for good company… So, while we don’t spend a lot of time around expats, we tend to have a good time when we do…

Caetano Veloso doesn’t look like a rockstar. He resembles more a middle-aged tourist… And he doesn’t dance like you’d think a Brazilian rockstar would… instead his onstage moves were more like those of a drunk accountant at a wedding. But he and his band absolutely rocked the Gran Rex in Buenos Aires.

Most of the songs were technically impressive with tricky time-signatures and a lot of change-ups. It resembled American jamband/rock music,  but with a large blend of styles and some brazilian flare…

Argentines are generally very reserved at music concerts, but Veloso brought them to their feet on quite a few ocassions…

We and our friends were all very impressed with the concert. If you get a chance to see this guy somewhere we’d recommend it.

The Argentine peso is one of the few world currencies that has lost ground lately to the US dollar. Canada, Europe, Russia, Asia, even Brazil… virtually everywhere is getting more expensive for American visitors as the US dollar slides…

As a middle class American you can live well in Argentina… but only if you continue to receive an American wage in dollars… Unless you have some kind of special opportunity with an Argentine company or money to invest, we would not recommend moving to Argentina with the hope of finding a job here… You do not want to be beholden to the Argentine job market, as an English teacher etc, the wages are just too low…

What you can do is get some kind of online business going and get paid in dollars with your expenses in pesos, then outsource in rupees. (Of course, we recommend this to our Argentine friends as well.)

Getting an online business going from scratch is hard. But if you want it badly enough, you can do it…

We’ve been working and traveling heavily of late… which has cut down significantly on our posting… But we’re going to fight this trend and do our best to start posting regularly again.

We enjoyed our trip to North Carolina, it was familiar, easy, and relaxing… plus great to see friends…

But we’re happy to be back in Buenos Aires… where we have to stay on our toes in terms of the language, of course, but also in terms of opportunity… We met a guy at the wedding in North Carolina who had just returned from Argentina. He was extremely bullish and excited about our new home country… Evidently his business mentor told him, “if I were a young man, I’d move down here immediately”. He was trying to figure out how to persuade his wife to move the family (three kids) down… We, of course, identify with his enthusiasm. But we didn’t do him any favors when we accidently dropped the bomb on his wife by saying, “So, you’re planning to move to Buenos Aires?” “No.” was the abrupt reply… That little faux pas probably set him back a couple weeks in his plans, but, he still seemed confident that he could persuade her…

There are opportunities out-the-whazoo here. A couple of Americans recently opened The California Burrito Company on Lavalle in el Centro. When we went there the place was packed, business looked brisk, and the burritos were tasty… We’ve met a number of foreigners and Argentines involved in real estate, and the opportunities in this arena are virtually endless. There are places in Argentina where land is selling for less than $5 an acre…

We must admit to you dear reader, that we’ve been a bit tight-lipped about some things because we don’t want everyone to know about these opportunities… For that we apologize, but we’ll reveal all, or nearly all, in due course… Also, we don’t want to mislead you. As one Argentine friend said, “Argentina has opportunities, but it’s opportunity from crisis. Don’t forget that.”

We’re working with our Argentine financial writers, as that’s our biz, to prepare a report about what to expect in the markets around here in the short, mid, and long term. There’s anxiety here on the eve of the presidential elections, and certainly some pessimism. There’s inflation no doubt. Will it expand? Contract? What’s going to happen…? We don’t know any better than anyone else. But we won’t let that stop us from making some predictions…

Hasta la proxima.

We attended our good friends’ wedding this weekend in Asheville, North Carolina. It was well worth the trip. The wedding was held on the grounds of the Biltmore estate in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains… It’s the largest private home in the US, at 150,000 sq feet, and is still owned by the Vanderbilt family.

George Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius, had the house built in the 1880’s, it was completed in 1895. The place was stunning. We’ve visited many chateaux around Europe and this baby is as spectacular as any of them…

George Vanderbilt’s father built the family fortune up to $200 million by the early-mid 1800’s.  That’s the equivalent of around $87 billion in today’s dollars, double the individual wealth of today’s richest men. (There was no income tax in those days!) At the time the Biltmore was being constructed Vanderbilt’s employees where buying up the surrounding land. It took over 600 real estate transactions to cobble together the 100,000+ acre estate.

The Vanderbilts of today have done an excellent job preserving the place. Not only that, but we’d venture to guess that they might even be making a tidy profit off of it. No doubt the maintenance and operational costs are staggering. But the estate hosts around 1 million visitors a year. The place was packed when we were there and it’s not even peak season. The entry fee to the house, the basic tour, is $50. Then, there are upgrades galore available… the audio tour, the guided tour, the secret places tour, the rooftop tour, etc. The winery on the property is the most visited winery in America. The giftshops were humming with activity as were the restaurants. If the average visitor generates $50 in revenue, which is probably on the very low-end, that’s $50 million right there… the real numbers I’d venture are much higher.

The Biltmore was fairly pricey, but it delivered value… all the visitors we talked to were very impressed with the place. Speaking of delivering value, that’s one thing that, in business, Americans are pretty darn good at… We were impressed by the level of customer service we received at the Enterprise car rental in Charlotte, NC… With typical southern hospitality the office door was opened for us and we were greeted by a friendly, efficient, and clean cut young guy. Inside, the place was bustling with activity of these young go-getters enthusiastically executing the business of car rentals. The little economy car we rented was less than $30 per day… good value…

Likewise at the Best Buy in Asheville we shopped for some electronics… we were impressed by how cheap things were… $19 for a cell phone, $149 for a 7 mega-pixel digital camera, $499 for a laptop… All these things cost double or triple in Argentina… Argentina, however, delivers good value on other things like food, clothing, transportation, real estate etc. which is partly why we like living here.

Anyway, let’s get back to the wedding that we attended in the west Carolina mountains… The rehersal dinner was held at a ranch outside Asheville. Southern BBQ was on the menu and it was fantastic… We hadn’t had a good southern meal in a long time. The setting was a picture perfect lakeside pond and a converted barn… likewise, the wedding reception and ceremony were held at a converted historic barn on Biltmore estate. Everything was very natural and relaxed, but also elegant.

Our friends who were getting married invented their own service and wrote and selected all the vows and readings. It was non-religious, but not non-spiritual or non-emotional… It was original and special. We’re very happy for our friends. It was a long way to go for a weekend wedding, but we wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And we feel very fortunate to have gone…

It’s been a surprisingly cold winter here in Buenos Aires, not just for us, but for Portenos as well. It’s been one of the coldest on record… of course, it’s not that bad, but does take us delicate Floridians by surprise…

Anyway, we’ve been letting you down this past week dear reader, it’s becoming a bad habit with us…

It was a busy week, half of which we spent up in the northwestern corner of Argentina, in Salta province, on business. It was refreshing to get out of the city and Salta is way out… Where we needed to go, it’s a five hour drive, mostly on dirt roads, from Salta city. The land is like the southwestern US, high-desert. The big open sky was perfectly clear for our drive and the landscape was beautiful. But as we got close to our destination, the sky began to get sort of fuzzy up ahead…

There still wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but the wind was picking-up and we realized that the fuzzyness was airborne dust. By now the sky was dark with dust clouds and we watched as seemingly sentient walls of dust moved back and forth across the mesa. As we continued on our way one of these walls of dust slammed into the side of our truck and briefly blacked-out visibility from all windows… But the dust walls seemed to content themselves by staying to the other side of the valley. When we arrived at our dusty destination the roar of the wind was impressive and constant. It sounded like there was an ocean a couple of feet away repeatedly crashing against invisible rocks. The loud and powerful wind continued all night long and it seemed sometimes that the doors and windows might give way… We’ve ridden out powerful hurricanes before, and this was something similar. The next morning it was sunny and beautiful, with a light breeze…

Before this trip we had looked forward to showing off the new Castellano speaking and understanding skills that we thought we now had… But nay, it was not to be.

We were terrible. Maybe it was all the dust in our ears, or the altitude. Whatever it was, we spoke horribly, making even very simple mistakes… We could barely understand anything. Maybe it was that Saltanian accent, or the farm subject matter, that was throwing us off… No, no excuses can explain away the fact that we’ve made much less progress in the Spanish-language department than we thought we had. Luckily for us a bilingual friend was there to help out. But our plan of being linguistically independent and incisive, shedding the tourist foreigner label, becoming nearly Argentine with a slight accent, a Porteno out visiting Salta… was soundly dashed…

Until next time… and next time we might even write about something remotely useful…

At The Walrus English bookstore in San Telmo, our better-half picked up a copy of the historical chronical of the Buenos Aires Herald. This over-sized periodical contains headlines and story excerpts about Argentine history in English since September 1876… this is very useful for us to have a general idea of what’s been going on around these parts since then…

One hundred years ago the Herald was very British. Some of the excerpts from that time say things like, “The Prince of Wales visited dear Argentina and the entire country rejoiced in the splendor of his presence. Throughout his stay the people could forget all their worries, at least for a short while, and they loved him for that.” We exaggerate, but, only slightly…

Anyway, we’ll spare you any pompous commentary on the history of Argentina, other than to say that it’s been a wild ride…

The Herald has been a nearly continuous daily source of English-language editorial about events in Argentina for all that time. We salute them for that. However, some of the articles we read in the paper these days are a little shakey… perhaps written by non-native speakers. Well, with our 4th grade-level Spanish competency we dare not criticize…

Hasta la proxima.

Oh dear reader, we’ve really failed you this week… We’ve had to neglect our blogging duties in favor of more seemingly pressing day-to-day affairs…

But to bring you up-to-date… The weather got cold, we caught a cold. The next day the weather warmed and we recovered… We’ve been semi-diligently attending our spanish classes. One off-site conversational session was held at the tea-room of the newly renovated Hyatt Palacio Duhau, talk about fancy pants…

The Hyatt bought the place from a wealthy family just about two years ago. Renovations commenced immediately and the result is impressive… While the dollar plummets against all major world currencies, you really can still get bang-for-your-buck here (that probably won’t last long).  A tea, which includes four different polished silver vessels, costs $12 pesos, or $4 dollars, a beer is $5 dollars, all the while you’re waited on hand-and-foot in high-style. 

A harpist played in the background, old ladies with old money socialized, and yours truly butchered the conversational Castellano… There couldn’t have been a more elegant setting for a Maryland/Virginia countryboy to be linguistically enriched, that’s for sure.

More to come soon, we promise…

One of our contacts here is a New Zealander involved in real estate. He reports to us that there is a phenomenon of Kiwi farmers selling off their farms in New Zealand and relocating to take-up farming in South America where the costs of land, labor, and expenses are lower.

One favored location is Uruguay. There are evidently quite a few farms for sale in Uruguay for reasonable prices. So, these Kiwi farmers relocate with their families, selling off the pricey New Zealand land and buying a functioning farm down here.

New Zealand agriculture is highly sophisticated, primarily because the government lifted all subsidies for farming and agricultural products, so Kiwi farmers were forced to compete on the world market. What happened was that they did exactly what people have to do when competing in a free-market… they worked hard, they innovated, they were efficient… or they went out of business. The result was, predictably, that New Zealand is now a world leader in agriculture, having pioneered some highly successful methods of farming…

Could there be a lesson here for other countries? In the United States big-farm subsidies have lowered prices for junk food and for food additives like high-fruitose corn syrup, which have made these items ubiquitous in the American food supply… And we would wager that this is a major contributing factor for the expanding waist-lines of the American public. A big conspiracy no doubt, no pun intended… But, this is all fodder for another post, let me get back to those innovative Kiwis and their new farms in Uruguay…

So, when the New Zealanders relocate to South America they find themselves in the midst of a new and different culture of course. One issue that our acquaintance had noted was that if a Kiwi woman worked on the farm as Kiwi women are prone to do, they find themselves sometimes ostracized by Uruguayan women who wouldn’t be caught dead socializing with someone who does manual labor, let alone do manual labor themselves…

So, this culture clash can sometimes be an issue for these immigrants from down under. One could cry foul at the lack of ‘progressiveness’ amongst these Uruguayans, but that would be a waste of time… Instead these Kiwis have opted not to stray too far from the major cities, Montevideo, Colonia, Punta del Este etc so that they can go into these cities to satisfy their social inclinations… and as long as they get a good manicure before going to any parties… no one will be the wiser that they may have sweated during the week.

Anyway, we hear that the fancy farming techniques of the New Zealanders are paying off. They are grabbing market share for certain agricultural products. This spells trouble for inefficient and mismanaged farms in the area… and could create some resentment. We, on the other hand, praise these innovations and efficiencies born of the free-market and hope that this wacky idea spreads in South America and the rest of the world.

We’ve written before about the perplexities of San Telmo… and during our time in BA we’ve visited there quite a few times, and we’ve talked to quite a few who’ve lived there… (we’re by no means experts, and as always, we won’t let that stop us from pontificating) but we still have no resolution on our feelings about the place.

Readers have asked about the barrio, and because of our own secret fascination, we feel compelled to continue ruminating about it…

What we can say is that it feels on the verge of gentrification, but it’s certainly not there yet for better or worse. It’s rumored to have the largest expat community in Buenos Aires, but we have no confirmation of that theory. We believe Palmero Viejo may out-edge San Telmo in density if not number of foreigners, but we have no evidence for that estimate either.

Real estate prices, though lower than the more established barrios of Palermo, Recoleta, Puerto Madera etc, do take into account the interest of expat investors. So it ain’t dirt cheap for BA, as it once was, but certainly cheap by world standards…

Now most Argentines we’ve talked to about San Telmo practically despise the place… they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole… “It’s dangerous.” “It’s a good couple degrees colder than the other barrios.” “It’s dirty and full of poor people.” etc. Now, we’re doubtful of the temperature claim, but, in general it is pretty dirty, the people are poorer than the more upper-crust sides of town, and it does seem more dangerous, (yet we rarely hear of much happening there)…

We’ve gone there a couple times when we’ve looked around and just wanted to get the hell out. It looks really dingy. There are a bunch of sketchy looking dirt-bags hanging around… The ugly buildings that are unfortunately ubiquitous amongst the nicer ones seem to stick out to us. The shops only seem to have a bunch of useless junk. “Ugh. Take me back to Recoleta!”

But, other times we go there (the Sunday market is nice, when not too crowded) and we are really impressed. The architecture of the nice buildings just seems to stick-out to us. All the funky little shops seem so authentic, yet hip. There’s art and bohemian flavor in the air.  “This is the real Buenos Aires!” we think.

The Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde phenomenon in San Telmo is pervasive for us. We never know what we’re going to get when we go…

So dear readers we leave it to you. It depends on your taste. We’re not making a move to San Telmo any time soon. But we may well be jealous if you do…

As part of our onging sincere, yet lazy, efforts to gradually immerse ourselves in Argentine culture… We’ve decided to only read the giants of Argentine literature, who we’re embarrased to say we haven’t read before, like Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato, Julio Cortázar, and Aldofo Bioy Casares. [And some Márquez too, though he's not Argentine.]

So far we’ve cracked into the ‘Labyrinths’, a collection of short stories by Borges. We’ve realized that you don’t go casually flipping through a Borges story… If it’s a light, quick read you’re looking for these stories are not it…

Some of his work like ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ takes commitment and perseverance to stay on top of what’s going on… We read the classics in college and majored in philosophy (and math). From what we’ve read so far it’s an understatement to say that Borges is extremely well read, a formidable thinker, and wordsmith… a deservably world-renowned writer… We can’t wait to dig into more of his stories…

[NOTE: We're reading these in English... We bought some English-language books this weekend from a nice little shop in San Telmo, called the Walrus. It's on Estadous-Unidos at Peru.]

Travelers voted Buenos Aires the second most desirable city to visit after Florence, Italy… While we find that an impressive coup for this south american metropolis, it’s not surprising. The longer we stay here the more we like it…

Hasta la proxima.