Wandering Buenos Aires

The next morning we walk out of our hotel onto Lavalle Street in search of a place to clean our clothes. We roll around the corner and walk into Esmeralda Street where we pass one young man, then another, quite filthy, too thin, curled on cardboard sleeping soundly. Farther along in front of a bakery we pass a woman squatting and urinating. Later, after we find the laundry, another woman from the bakery is furiously but not angrily scrubbing the offending sidewalk with soap and hot water.

This area of Buenos Aires is in constant movement. Workers, shoppers, street performers and hawkers of all sorts fill the streets. As we walk the pedestrian alleyways I keep hearing the words “Cambio, Cambio, Cambio, Cambio.” By our hotel, a man there seems to be squawking like a duck. “Cambio, Cambio, Cambio Aquí. Aquí.” His eyes are leaden and his face expressionless, but the words keep tumbling out. He is offering money on the “blue” market, where he will exchange pesos for dollars at a vastly reduced rate. Sometimes you can get twice the number of pesos for US dollars than you would at a bank. Inflation is so high in Argentina, that even at this rate the exchangers are betting they will eventually make good money. And they do.

Peter, the man we spoke with the previous night, was a banker and he bemoans the sad state of Argentine economics and the politics that go with it. “In Argentina,” he says, “the people cheat the government and the government cheats the people.”