Cosas Bonaerenses Mas Notables

Most Notable Things About Buenos Aires

3.  Extreme Driving

People in foreign countries drive crazy, right?  And in Buenos Aires there is an overall

attitude that rules are merely suggestions and laws are meant to be broken.  I've crossed myself and held my hand over my eyes riding in a New York City cab, but never before had I ever been in a cab impatiently passing another car in the same lane.  ("Oh my God," I said out loud.)

2.  Parallel Monetary World

The ever-falling Argentine peso combined with rampant inflation has led to an alternate reality with a "blue market" exchange rate (no one calls it the "black market") that benefits those with American currency.  Paying at the official exchange rate of 5.6 pesos to the dollar in October 2013 meant that the sofa pillow I bought for $425 pesos appeared as $76 on my VISA statement.  If I hadn't been $10 short in cash that day, I could have bought it at the blue market rate of 8.8 pesos - or $48.

The guys I was traveling with bought some snazzy shoes at 28 Sport in Palermo Soho for about $1760 pesos.  If they'd paid with a credit card, the shoes would have set them back $314.  But since they had dollars and asked about the rate, they only paid about $200. 

Far from being clandestine, secret, or illegal, this is simply the way business is done in Buenos Aires; just about all stores and restaurants will readily tell you the blue market exchange rate  and re-figure your bill upon request.  Some will even post the day's rate on a sign.  It's so ordinary you don't even have to say "blue market" or otherwise qualify "exchange rate" in any way; everyone knows what you are asking.  No one wants pesos - they all prefer dollars - and Americans benefit dramatically by obliging them, so everyone wins.  There are all kinds of ways the Argentines use to shelter the value of their assets from the tattered economy, and they want all the dollars they can get.

In the weeks following my return to the States, I watched the peso continue to fall and eventually read that the $10 peso barrier had been broken - meaning you could get nearly twice the value using American cash at the blue market rate than at the official rate using pesos or a credit card.

1.  Not tu, Brute

Forget what you learned in school - the familiar "you" form of tu is not used in the Rioplatense Spanish spoken in Argentina.  Instead, they use vos, which has a verb conjugation I never learned in junior high (where we were taught Mexican Spanish) or high school (where we were taught Spain Spanish), since neither Mexico nor Spain uses vos.  In fact, I'd never even heard of it before my trip to Argentina.  We did touch on the plural familiar "you" form of vosotros in school but focused only on ustedes for the plural second person.  Fortunately, vos conjugates the same way as vosotros except that you just drop the vowel preceding the accented i, e.g., where "y'all talk" is hablaís, "you talk" is hablís.

Even more fortunately, you probably won't be there long enough to be on familiar terms with anyone, so you won't have to use vos anyway. 

Some countries use it sometimes, while other countries use it in speech but not in writing.  Argentina and neighboring Paraguay and Uruguay are the only Spanish-speaking countries in the world that use the vos form in both the spoken and written language.  And since the media uses it, it is widely seen on billboards, bus shelter signs, and handbills.

Photo credits: Pri.org, csmonitor.org, vamospanish.org