A Mexican in Buenos Aires...

Friday, 12 September, 2008

Yesterday my friend Mauricio arrived from San Diego. Well, technically, from Tijuana where he lives. He’s staying with us for a few months to help us put our new home together. Today we closed escrow on the apartment. Once more we went to the Casa de Cambio (change house) and collected money from a wire transfer, over $100,000 this time. We sat with our stack of money counting it out, almost 1000 $100 bills, until we had satisfied our escrow officer (escritura) that the full amount promised for our small apartment with a big view had been paid. It was a strange experience for me, coming from a technically advanced country where I didn’t often touch my money, not even for a $3 cup of coffee. Sitting at a table and handing over almost $100,000 was a very sobering experience. I watched as the man who sold us our apartment stuffed the bundles of cash into his pockets and socks and headed back to his office to finish the week’s work. He did not go to a bank. I don’t know what he’ll do with the money, but he won’t deposit it in an Argentine bank. That wouldn’t, for reasons I still don’t completely comprehend, be wise.

Tomorrow Jimmy will take Mauricio over to the store and they will begin to equip him with the things he’ll need to get started working at our apartment. When he leaves in December we hope we’ll be living comfortably in the space he’s remodeled. Jimmy, and sometimes I, will be his crew. We’ll work exclusively on that, when we aren’t working on our new studio space, or coaching, or teaching yoga, or painting, respectively.

Today we crossed a line of demarcation. There have been many moments in the past 9 months when we’ve passed points of no seeming return, but finally, today, we really crossed over. We now own a piece of property here that is worth more money than we can afford to abandon. We are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. During the weeks leading up to this day I have become more comfortable here. I have gotten used to doing things differently than I did in San Diego and have come to be more cautious about making assumptions. I ask more questions, am more patient with explanations and more ready to be flexible to get around things when they seem insurmountable. Still, there are things that I will never like about doing business here. There is a rigidness that I see in the way people work that stops the free flow of ideas, money and other forms of energy.

I have come to understand that there are ways, quiet ways, to move the mountains that stand in the path of progress in this strangely backward country filled with forward thinking people. Companies like Microsoft, Siemens, and 3M didn’t set up shop here for nothing and there are people in Argentina who are hungry to step firmly and surely into the 21st century. They trod about in illegal boots because walking a path of change here is often illegal, or simply “not done”. While this is not the place I want to spend the rest of my life I have come to believe that if I simply work hard, keep my smile stubbornly in place and insist on my own way of thinking, if not my own way of doing things, I will make a difference here. Buenos Aires has lots of brick walls. It also has lots of pathways under, over and around them if I am just patient enough to look and tuned enough to ask the right questions.

We ate our celebration dinner tonight at a local Mexican restaurant. We intended to go to the typical, very acclaimed, Argentine place just down the block. We didn’t go at 8 when we were all hungry because we thought it wouldn’t be open yet. Instead we waited patiently until 9:15 to leave only to arrive there at 9:30 and find it packed, no more tables. Just when you think you’ve got the thing figured out, a new twist appears. I’ll have to ask around about this tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Mexican food wasn’t bad. There will never be any danger that San Diego will be replaced by Buenos Aires as a hotspot for great Mexican cuisine, but it was a warm and friendly dinner among friend beginning a project together tomorrow and that is all we really wanted anyway.