Money Money Money

First, go to Los Alfajores' Myspace and listen to Money is Stupid while you're reading this.
Second, if you're reading this from Argentina, you already know all about it and probably don't want to be reminded.*

For everyone else - all of a sudden it seems like all I talk/think/worry about is money. It's really damn expensive to live in Buenos Aires, especially when you are paying rent prices designed (with love from our landlords) especially for us foreigners. Who in theory have loads of dollars/euros/pounds in the bank. Well, not those of us who teach English. Anyway...

The point is, I'm so sick of talking and thinking about money all the time, but it keeps coming up. Today I had a break between classes and went to go lie on the grass in lovely Plaza San Martín in Retiro. I decided to buy a magazine on the way. Well, I ended up buying Vogue Latinoamérica, but not because I was being good and trying to practice my Spanish reading skills. I bought it because English Vogue was... drumroll please... 69 pesos (over $20 USD.) (The Vogue I bought was 10 pesos.) Well, some economists may measure how the economy is going based on staples like milk, bread, and eggs, but I'm judging based on Vogue. When I was here in March of last year, I bought Vogue in English for 15 pesos. Which brings us to...

Inflation.
The government says the inflation rate is something like 8 to 10%. My highly scientific research that is based on actually living in Buenos Aires and functioning as a person here, buying groceries, etc., tells me that this official inflation rate is total bullshit. The actual inflation rate is supposedly closer to 20%.

In certain parts of Buenos Aires, the parts that are all most tourists ever see, it's easy to forget where you are. With the stylish, cultured, well-educated people, European architecture and avenues, overt leisure (people sitting in cafes all day, rush hour around 10 am in the morning), etc., etc., you forget about the recent and not-so-recent history of instability and lack of stable economic infrastructure, the sense that crises are always just around the corner. But as my students remind me all the time, this is Argentina. There's still a lot of fallout from the 2001 crash and the horrible damage that Menem did to the country.

I don't know that much about it so I'll shut up at this point, but it's enough to say that I am having a hard time keeping my head above water financially. It's not like my life is about to turn into a Dorothea Lange photo shoot, but it's not easy. And if it's hard for me, with this being my cute little 'escaping the USA idealistic twenty-something expat' social experiment, having lived here for all of 5 months, what must it be like for the real residents of the city?

*The picture on the left was not taken by me - I don't have that much money! It also isn't the current Argentine currency.