Once in a while you have a moment to breathe and take a step back, become aware of your surroundings and assess what’s going on around you.  These moments don’t happen that often for me.  Or more honestly, I don’t let them happen for me. I keep myself too busy with life’s errands, to-do lists, and general life management between my career, my marriage, and my kids.  That’s why I have to force myself to throw in multiple weekend trips, vacations, and other breaks to well…take a break.

So it’s odd to get used to a lifestyle where most of it feels like well…a break.  We’re not on vacation, but it seems like we should be on one.  Perhaps because we still have errands, school, and starting a new life to worry about, the right way to think about it would be ‘half vacation’, if these existed. We have a lot of free time to ourselves as a family and as a couple. Cognizant of this newfound freedom, we don’t want to waste it.  Yet, we also don’t want to fill it with errands and constant exploring, so we’ve been trying to strike a balance but we’re far from getting it right.  I recognize this is a ‘first-world’ problem for which I’m grateful, yet there seems to be intense pressure to make this year count (admittedly self-imposed).   Rob and I are on an opposite ends of the spectrum which helps us find a good flow for most of our days.  I’m focused on organizing our lives and he wants to ensure that we see all of BA in the next 12 months.  We meet somewhere in the middle.

The first month has flown by.  We found a new school for the kids and a new apartment for all of us.  We moved.  We found a Spanish teacher and arranged nearly daily Spanish lessons.  We found our favorite gym and started working out.  We found our favorite butcher and vegetable market.  I started taking a writing course and Rob is busy with drumming lessons.  We have met new friends and shared meals and new experiences with them.  We’ve gone out on dates and started to experience the night life a bit. We have explored several museums, festivals, parks, and cultural centers. We went to the cemetery.  We have started playing soccer. A lot, including on our rooftop, parks, or any green space we can find.

Through it all we’re starting to feel like we’re in a little bit of a groove so we thought we would share  our favorite and less favorite things from the first month.  Some of these are more attributable to the move from the suburbs to the city, others directly to living in Argentina and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.  Most are not that exciting (but we find them amusing) and would likely be similar if we moved to any other metropolitan city anywhere in the world, though some are very specific to Buenos Aires.

Top 10 Discoveries, Month One:

1. Walking everywhere.  It’s amazing to wake up, run outside and grab fresh bread for breakfast for $0.50 and be back home in less than 30 seconds.  I don’t miss our cars. We’ve yet to figure out how to rent one for a weekend trip, but for now putting in 15K+ steps per day has lead to many new adventures.  We augment our exploring with buses, subway, taxis, and Ubers – all extremely affordable.  The added benefit of teaching kids about public transportation is nearly priceless (not from their point of view, unfortunately).
2. Speaking of fresh bread, we love all the carbs and sweets you can buy on the street everywhere.  Early on we discovered our favorite empanada place which is a little whole in the wall run by a father and his daughter, Claudia.  He makes them right there on the spot and we have at least one everyday for our after-school snack.   To top this off, kids love the opportunity for pastries and candies at every corner of which they remind us of…well, at every corner. And of course there is dulce de leche; we’ve had some delicious tastings and we’ve started to seriously incorporate it into our diet.
3. New friends & connections.  We have met parents at school (even though our Spanish is very limited), friends of friends, friends from FB and others.  Playdates, birthday parties, afternoon exploring, and evenings out have been fun – we’ve started hosting some new friends and have been hosted.  It’s inspiring to hear peoples’ stories whether they originate from expats or locals.  People seem passionate, warm, open to new ideas, and eager to explore.
4. Nightlife.  We’ve only started dipping our toes here, so not sure I can count it as a discovery (other than a few nights out), but we can hear it through our windows at 4:00am when drunk people walk by – so it must be good, right?  Our neighborhood is full of bars, cafes, and night-clubs and we can’t wait to take advantage of these on regular basis (or more like Ania can’t wait to start going) and update on this next month.
5. Pizza and food in general.  We’ve been on the mission to find the best pizza in the city using this list.    Pizza is eaten with a fork and a knife here and often tastes very different than the one we have at home, but it’s delicious regardless.  We have also discovered some amazing markets to shop at every week for produce, meat, and fish which has many benefits including learning vocabulary.  And then there is the beef.  So much beef.
6. Tango. OK – so we’ve been to the Tango festival and walked the streets of Boca and San Telmo where where we’ve seen many mini ‘performances’ usually put on for the tourists.  The kids even took mini Tango lessons which was cute to watch.  But we’ve not actually seen Tango in a club, late at night, the way you imagine sultry dancers looking at each other while moving their bodies to a this majestic beat.  It’s coming though!  We’ve got friends and their mom who’s over 70 and apparently dances several nights per week.  We’re desperately trying to get ourselves invited to watch.
7. Ice Cream.  There is no description needed, except that is is everywhere and since we’re walking all the time, we eat it all the time.  Best. Ice Cream. In. The. World.
8. No one speaks English.  This is fantastic.  Although challenging and frustrating day-to-day, it works amazingly well as a forcing function to learn how to say ‘carrots’ and ‘I will pick up my kids early from school today’ etc.  We are taking Spanish lessons four times per week although with our old brains, not sure how much we’ll retain.  Still, we are trying since we have no choice.
9. Exchange rate.  Selfishly this is fun for us – we got incredibly lucky.  In April (post us making the decision to move here) the exchange rate suddenly moved to our benefit:  $1USD was 16 pesos in March, but today $1USD is 30+pesos.  While prices have increased somewhat in the last few months, they’ve not doubled – so essentially Argentina became considerably more affordable for those with US Dollars.   In the bigger picture, this is not great for the local economy and people here and eventually will catch up with us as well.  But for now, it allows us to be able to live here (not sure what we would have done before April?  certainly our savings wouldn’t have stretched as far).  
10. The magic of the city.  The energy, the food, the dancing, and the people coupled with the museums, festivals, and parks altogether form a web of magic that is hard to describe.  And it feels like we’ve experienced a tenth of it at most – the best is yet to come.

Top (10) Buenos Aires NOT so fun discoveries, Month One:

1. Pigeons.  They are everywhere – especially outside our window very early in the morning.  The sound is obnoxious although we seem to have partly escaped it since moving to our new place.  I don’t want to fully cross it off the list just yet though.
2. Poop on the street.  It’s gross and overwhelming on every sidewalk.  It appears that no one picks after their dogs and everyone in the city has a dog.  We have to play games of ‘who can avoid poop best’ and constantly be looking out for it.
3. Rain and cold – although it’s not been that cold, once in a while when the temperature gets down to below 50 and we’re outside for hours, it chills us to the bone.  We’ve had multiple warm sunshine days too; they serve as a cruel temptation of how amazing life will be once it will get a few degrees warmer.  For now the sunshine-filled days flirt with us, but always seem to disappear before we have a chance to get used to them.  Still, Rob and I have had a chance to sneak in a few lunches in outdoor cafes which has been lovely.
4. Walking everywhere with the kids – it’s a bliss for us.  Not so much of our kids.  Nothing more to say here.
5. Argentinian bureaucracy – we’ve been able to avoid it for the most part, but it creeps up here and there like an unexpected awful smell.  Often it makes little sense (to us).  Why would we have to wait in line just to get a stamp to exchange money? Nothing compares to wasting an entire day to retrieve a package we sent to ourselves with kids’ books.  Literally an entire day dedicated to waiting in lines.  Government work at its best.
6. The flow and speed of the language – could people just speak slower????!!!
7. Prices.  Although we benefit from the exchange rate, we still find many things to be quite expensive, particularly relative to the wages here.  Meat is cheap, but avocados not so much.  We find that some stuff costs a quarter of what it does in the States while other things are on par with US prices.  Prices in most restaurants are cheaper, but in some restaurants the the menu may as well be from San Francisco.  And imports, especially those from the US, are astronomical.  For example, some traditions are hard to kill, like pancake breakfasts, which meant that we needed to find maple syrup – not common here (in fact, non-existent).  We did finally locate a bottle – for $45!!! And then we bought it. 
8. Sugar.  Yes, we do love it.  But there are clear limits which our kids don’t seem to understand.  While their entire lives they’ve eaten carrots and other veggies and fruits for snacks – these have started coming back in their backpacks from school.  Why?  Because it’s ’embarrassing’ to eat carrots when all the other kids get Oreos.  Ella explained that people think she’s very weird to eat seaweed.  I understand.  It must be weird – except in Marin.  But to replace with Oreos?  Perhaps we should go with the flow as some of our local Argentinian friends have suggested and call it a day.
9. ATMs.  It feels like a lottery system – will it work?  Will I actually leave with cash?  Maybe if this one is too angry to hand over cash, the one across the street will feel more giving? I am certain that there is some hidden secret to all of the madness and I’m just not part of the ‘in the know’ crowd – but we have about 25% chance that the ATM we’re using will work with one of our cards.  Besides being incredibly expensive (it costs 10% to withdraw cash – thankfully our banks in the US reverse these fees), it’s also extremely frustrating to leave empty-handed so often.  And, we can only take out approximately $120 at a time – which goes by fast since credit cards are often not accepted.
10. No dishwasher.  No dryer.  This is a disaster in our kids’ point of view.  As mom and dad we think it’s fantastic.   Since we no longer have these luxuries, kids now have to do dishes after every meal and hang up their laundry, take it down, fold it and put it away.  For some weird reason they don’t see this as something exciting.

Last month in pictures:

Street Tango

Urban soccer

Notice the tango dancers in the background

La Boca

La Boca

Favorite activity

So many museum visits

San Telmo street market

Festivals

Getting settled in our new apartment

Our first cheese store discovery

Market restaurants

Weekly egg purchase

The Planetarium

Kirchner Cultural Center

Kids’ park

Finally got the package of books!

The cemetery