Going to the gym is hard enough...

I've taken to going to the gym. Months ago I was running, but then I developed those shin splints I couldn't shake, so then I sat about lazily for a few months, and in August I re-motivated and re-started the tedious process of finding a gym in San Telmo.

Oh, there are gyms in San Telmo, but they ain't pretty. It's hard enough to go to the gym when it's clean, modern, and offers plasma TV screens on every treadmill (man, I miss Healthworks). But motivating to exercises in a dirty environment? on 80s equipment? to walk on a MANUALLY-OPERATED treadmill?! Simply not happening. And yes, people, they still exits!

San Telmo gyms are where all used First World gym equipment goes to die.

The process of choosing a gym was simply ridiculous. Unlike other parts of the city that are a bit more upscale (Palermo, Recoleta, or even the downtown/Microcentro area, for example), San Telmo doesn't have any "nicer" options, so us gym rats are left with hole-in-the-wall gyms. The fancy gym chain Megatlon, for example, doesn't have a location anywhere near me. Not that I could afford it anyway.

I spent weeks going in and out of the gyms in the area trying to decide who would get my $90 pesos/ month. Most are small, dusty, and have limited equipment. One, for example, only had one treadmill and one stationary bike and weights. Another one only had treadmills that were non-electric... I don't even know how those things operate, but I'm SURE they haven't been manufactured for at least 20 years! And one of the nicest options, a big place with a pool and yoga classes, required me to get a physical examination with one of their doctors before joining, and not only did I have to pay extra for that, but the waiting list to see the doctor was over a month long. Bureaucracy!!!

I finally settled on City Gym, a short 4 block walk from my house. I like it enough and the people are friendly, but I've really had to lower the bar. The machines are often broken, and no one wipes them down (how very fancy of me to expect my machines NOT to be slimed over with someone else's sweat). There are spinning classes, and I LOVE spinning classes, but the bikes are atrocious. The bikes I'm used to in the US have knobs that you can give a couple full turns to in order to achieve a variety of different levels, but on these bikes you just barely touch the knob and the level changes from easy to impossible. It's a bit of a mess. On the upside, one of my spinning teachers plays cumbia and reggaeton music and gets up and dances in the middle of the class, which is always hilarious.

I'm sure I've developed a reputation as that red-faced red-headed foreign girl, but I think I've gone enough now that people are used to seeing me around and don't gawk quite as much. Now I do the gawking. I can't believe the boys who work out in Chucks, or worse, alpargatas. Nuts.

Felíz Día de la Primavera

Happy First Day of Spring!! To me! And to those back home, happy first day of fall! Which is fine I guess, but spring is way better. :-)

Today was gorgeous. It was really a great day, considering it's Monday. I worked all morning teaching in an office, then hit the gym, and then wandered outside with some friends to drink mate, attempt to fly Diana's homemade kite, and sit outside in the grass in Puerto Madero... the sun was bright and gorgeous, the sky a perfect blue. To top it off, I then taught my afternoon class outside at a café over a café con leche. Couldn't have asked for more.



It's also Día del Estudiante (Student Day) today, so all the kids didn't have school, and were out in full force drinking beer in the streets. There must have been thousands of teenagers wandering around drunk and happy in the sun, and I marveled at their life, and contemplated how I might have turned out had I been permitted to do such a thing at age 13. (Kids here ages 12-17 can go to certain nightclubs... they just have to leave at the reasonable hour of.. ahem... 3:00am, when the adults arrive... it's so crazy to think about, so different from my childhood!!!) However, there were also a lot of police out monitoring things, so nothing too crazy happened.

From here it will just get hotter and hotter until the sweltering heat and oppressive humidity finally take over Buenos Aires this summer... around that time, I will be off on my next travel adventure, hopefully to places equally warm and yet significantly less humid. I'll keep you posted.

La Tormenta de Santa Rosa

The weather in Argentina is a bit crazy. Right now, for example, it's winter, headed toward spring, and yet all weekend it was simply gorgeous, perfect summery weather. Blue skies, sun, and hot hot hot-- in fact, I spent all afternoon yesterday in the park in a sun dress trying to take my extreme whiteness to a healthy shade of pink. (I failed-- still white.)

The summer-in-winter weather has been a popular topic of discussion in my classes, and so this week several of my students have told me the story of La Tormenta de Santa Rosa -aka- the Santa Rosa Storm. This is a storm that every year inevitably hits the week of August 30th, either a few days before or after.

Apparently, every year around this time, it oddly gets very hot and nice, like a flash forward to summer. Then suddenly, within a couple days of August 30th, Santa Rosa blows through the city, usually with heavy rains and strong winds, and takes the warm weather away when it goes.

Anyway, it was impossible for me to believe yesterday, looking up at the perfect blue, cloudless sky that there could be a storm today, but the weathermen insisted. And lo and behold, today, right on schedule, I woke up to a grey sky, torrential rain and heavy winds. SANTA ROSA!

In all honestly, it wasn't bad. Granted, it's still mid-day and maybe it will get bad again, but it seems to be clearing up a bit, albeit a very ugly, grey day. But once again the legend was right... Santa Rosa really does strike, without fail, right at this time. This naysayer has been humbled.

Here's one article about today's mini-Santa Rosa Storm. And here's some more information on Santa Rosa, which talks a bit about its history.

Día del Amigo

Today is Friend Day in Argentina... so Happy Friend Day, friends! I adore the idea of a Friend Day, and apparently so do the Argentines. It's a very popular holiday here, so popular, in fact, that supposedly the restaurants and bars all fill up, you can't get a reservation anywhere, and the cell phone companies become so overburdened that it can take hours to get a message through. Now that's what I call a holiday!

Also, according to the locals, Friend Day was chosen to be celebrated on July 20th because it is also the day we crazy humans first landed on the moon back in '69. The ironic thing about this for me, of course, is that it was an American who first made it to the moon, and yet it is the Argentines who appear to be celebrating it. Huh.

I vote that we start a Friend Day in the United States, only it seems fitting that we should celebrate it on one of Argentina's obscure holidays... personally I vote for December 8th, aka Immaculate Conception Day (Día de la Inmaculada Concepción). Yes, Immaculate Conception Day, indeed. Because nothing says "friends" like unwanted pregnancy.

It's not snowing

Greetings! Today is not only a day off of work for Argentina's Independence Day (for which our famous world's widest road "Avenida 9 de Julio"--12 lanes in all-- was named), but it is also my first official day off the cleanse! Woo hoo!! I made it 30 whole days, and i feel excellent. I'll be celebrating with some yummy Korean food at my new Korean friend Jessica's house, and maybe a little bit of wine. :-) But yes, I need to be careful not to fall back into old bad habits...

Today also marks the 2nd anniversary of the first snow in Buenos Aires since 1918. Yes, 2 years ago today, the city received a white dusting of snow.. the kids went nuts and all ran outside to play, and some people touched snow for the very first time. Today, it's certainly not snowing (it's quite nice out, actually) but it is a cool little anecdote, I think.

This year, we don't have snow, all we have is.... swine flu. Blahhhhh.

Transience, abandonment, and the flakiest people in the world

Most people can't relate to me. My friends and supporters seem to find me interesting, intriguing, filled with stories, ballsy and independent, experienced as hell, well-traveled, free-thinking and adventurous (not to mention slightly insane), but can they actually relate to me? In many ways, yes, but in my transience, almost never.

It's a lonely life, being the one who's always saying good bye. Your skin just kind of thickens after a while, I guess. I keep pushing on. I can't really explain it, but there is something inside of me that keeps me moving, and it hasn't yet found its final resting place. I am (and people like me are) happier traveling, experiencing new people, places and things, and constantly living life in a challenging and slightly uncomfortable way, than I am living a comfortable life in the same place with the same people, doing stuff that makes me, well, "normal."

I sound like such an alterna-hipster, but I assure you, my soul is speaking quite directly right now, regardless of the current trendiness of transience. And the consequence of all of this, the dirty truth of the wandering soul, is that I live my life saying good bye to people I love. I grow attached, and then people disappear, or I do. I hate good-byes.

I'm really, really struggling with this right now. More than ever, my two selves are in conflict. One self wants to travel, see the world, keep moving, and continue to seek new adventures in new places for as long as the wind keeps blowing. It wants to be free, totally independent and guided by instinct. It doesn't want an office job, nor does it crave normality. My other self wants to create a lasting community, live my days with the ones I love most, grow old with those people, find lasting love, and umm.... be financially stable!!! Yes, this other self is quite sick of stressing about money.

They are in total conflict. For example, I simply cannot live in a different country every year while simultaneously creating a lasting community.

So last week, my close friend Megan left, and I was devastated. It was a little reminder that the friends one meets while traveling are a whole separate category. There's no promises made, no longevity expected. We'll always be friends, of course, but I most likely won't be seeing her for the next couple of years.

Then last night, at an amazing concert by a group called Onda Vaga (Highly recommended! Listen to them here.), my close, close, close friend Paul announced that he is leaving in 2 weeks to live in Brazil with his dad. Abandoning me!!! Then I lamented this fact later on with my friend Kieran, and that is when Kieran told me that he would also be leaving Buenos Aires in less than a month.

Anyone else want to kick me while I'm down???

This kind of thing is exactly what I should expect, but yet I can't get used to it! It is starting to feel like everyone I meet is going to leave me, and is making me feel like I need to conduct some sort of extensive interview with people when I meet them, to find out how long they plan to stay, then judge accordingly how worthwhile it is to get to know them. For example,

"Hi, Person X. How long do you plan on sticking around Buenos Aires?"

a) 1-3 months --> Sorry, let's not be friends. You'll only break my heart.
b) 3-6 months --> Cool, let's hang out, but I will try not to get too attached.
c) 6-12 months --> Alright awesome, let's be friends! I will deal with emotions later.
d) 1 year or more --> Let's be BFF!!! We can say good bye to everyone else together.

A big part of the problem, of course, is that all of my friends are also from other countries, who are traveling or living here for reasons similar to mine. So of course, there is an inherit level of transience that just comes with the territory. The solution, then, is to make local friends right??

Right???

This brings me to my next topic of discussion/ lamentation. "The flakiest people in the world." AKA Argentinians!!!!

Hey, Argentina-- you're flaky!!! And I'm SO NOT INTO IT!!!

Argentinians seem to operate on a "yes to all questions" principle, which basically means that nothing an Argentinian says ever means anything. Seriously. Ask anyone who's spent any significant time here, and I can almost guarantee they'll agree.

For example, you're at a bar, and you meet a group of Argentinians. You start to hang out, and the next thing you know, an hour as gone by, and you've been chatting it up and hitting it off. You're thinking, cool, new friends! They give you a hug good bye, maybe you even exchange numbers, and then they say, "let's go out sometime!" or "see you later!"

Uh oh. That's bad. "Let's go out sometime" = "See you never."

Seriously, unless you make a specific plan right there on the spot, you will most likely never see the person again. They just like being friendly, and for them saying something like, "let's go out sometime" is equal to saying "good bye." It's just something you say as you walk out a door, but it doesn't actually mean anything.

Another example: You invite an Argentinians out to a party. They respond and say yes, they'll be there. They never show up. TYPICAL! Why? Because there's no such thing as the word "no" in Argentina. So if they can come they say "yes," and if they can't come they say "yes." Seriously. So yes means both yes and no, which means it basically means nothing at all.

The reason that most people seem to cite for this is that people here have generally had the same group of friends their entire life, literally since they were kids, and it's near impossible to find people who are willing to go through the trouble of opening up their posse to a new person. The task of initiation is just too much, I suppose.

Anyway, this makes making friends super difficult, because I keep meeting these awesome people (ahem, "awesome" being a purely subjective term in this case) and thinking we'll hang out, and I never hear from them again. There was a group of girls a while back, for example, who I met through a friend. They were all gung-ho about hanging out and insisted on exchanging email addresses, and then I sent them all an invite to go out last weekend, and not one single one responded! When I mentioned this to my friend who'd introduced us, she was like, "ummmm, Erica, are you surprised?! Don't be! That's just Argentina."

"That's Just Argentina." The slogan of my life. Where no rules apply.

Yes means no.

Already a crazy day!

Wow it is 1:30 in the afternoon, and it's already been nuts!!! Because...

1) I MET VIVIAN!!! Yes, THE VIVIAN!!! Vivian the enigma. Vivian who does not exist. I met her. And I'm shocked and delighted to report that she was quite friendly in person and I actually really liked her. She apologized for the craziness of the past (perhaps she's just bad on the phone??) and arranged to get me my money in a more timely fashion in the future. So, yay. :-)

2) There is a crazy strike going on all over Buenos Aires today, and my entire neighborhood is a nuthouse! There are cars and buses backed up for blocks and blocks and blocks honking and whatnot, as thousands of protesters take to the streets marching, banging drums, waving flags, and blowing horns. It's crazy! I taught this morning, and my students mentioned there was a strike going on today and that I should watch out, but I had no idea it would be this crazy. I'm literally sitting in my house right now listening to what sounds like a war going on-- gunshots and screaming and whatnot.

Actually, it's pretty cool. Argentines are well known protesters. They love a good strike. And it's inconvenient, but man, they are really inconveniencing the city a ton right now, which means someone is most likely listening. I respect that. I don't think Americans protest enough.

Just a thought.

Off to more class... assuming, of course, my bus is able to bust through this traffic.

I'm awesome

I just want the world to know that I am now up to running for 1 solid hour. That's 60 minutes of pain and gain!!! I run along the river (yes, the ugly brown river is turning out to serve some sort of purpose).

I'm so proud I could eat a slice of cheesecake!

PS. Can anyone tell me what to do about shin splints? Is there some way to stretch your shins?

A love/ hate relationship

Last week was undoubtedly one of the worst weeks I've ever had. It was up there anyway. Just about everything that could go wrong went wrong. My boss yelled at me, then made me trek across town for my paycheck, only to stiff me out of some money. My cell phone died, and when I went to buy more minutes, I was sold a fake card and got ripped off yet again. Then turned out the parts they sold me for the phone were broken too, and to fix the phone I needed to go to the store, but since it was Semana Santa the store was closed. General stress and all the "little things" started to pile up, and financial worries and work worries started to settle in. By Wednesday night, I had ended up in some sort of mental break down. No fun. My poor (wonderful) roommates bore the brunt of it. Much wine was consumed by all.

Then yesterday, I had one of those days that made me remember why I'm here. Just one of those great, lovely days. Sure, a lot of my problems still exist (work! broken phone! no money! ugh!) and I need to deal with that, but not yesterday. Easter Sunday was a great day, despite its total lack of anything remotely related to Easter.

My roommate Andrea has a friend in town, Yasmine, and the three of us started off our day by sitting at the café across the street drinking coffee on the street. Coffee and company were good, and things were looking up. Sundays in San Telmo are the best (as long as you can handle it), as it is the day of the feria when all the antiques dealers, artisans/ artists, and street musicians come out to play. We spent the afternoon walking up Defensa (the main drag, just a couple blocks from my house) and checking out all the interesting art and music, just having good clean fun.

Some of the highlights of the antiques market:



One of my favorite bands that plays on Sundays, a tango group featuring lots of hot accordion players: ;-)



In girly news, I also finally broke down and bought myself the bag I've been obsessing over for a week, as a little shopping therapy for myself. Oooh it's so cute! And as if that wasn't great enough, then my friend Charlotte met up with us, and we all went to enjoy a big fat choripan (chorizo sandwich with chimichurri and provenzal). YUM! [nom nom nom]

We spent a long time watching an amazing street artist paint live portraits of famous musicians (here with Amy Winehouse) to music, all with his hands and some splattering techniques. He's so entertaining to watch! I always see this guy around, and love his work.



As the day grew later, we ended up with some litros of cerveza on the sidewalk, planted in front of an amazing cumbia band playing their hearts out. We watched the dancers, wiggled a bit ourselves, enjoyed the cervezas and each other's company, and just appreciated the music, and being in a place where moments like that exist. Really, as I sat there am looked out into the crowd of happy people dancing, talking, and enjoying the music, I looked at the gorgeous cobble stoned street and the lovely colonial buildings around me surrounded by balconies covered in flowers, and I thought to myself, "this is why I came here." The stress of the week melted away right then, even if just for a moment.

On the way home, we walked by a man selling gorgeous Bugambilia flowers (called Santa Rita in Spanish) out of the back of his bicycle, and I had to have one. I ran after him, and Andrea and I both bought a couple for our balconies.



They make all the difference! Our balconies are now vibrant with lovely white, purple, and pink flowers. Plus, they look great alongside my other happy little plants, Flor and Máximo Junior.





Then to top off the whole evening, my other roommate Julie, who is French, and a friend of her's also from France, made us delicious crepes! We had some with ham and cheese, others with tuna, and then tons with nutella, dulce de leche, jams, and even one I insisted on making with peanut butter and chocolate. Oh man, what a dinner!

And now, I'm ready to begin a new week. I start a new job tomorrow, one I trained for last week, but officially begin tomorrow. I have a lot of work ahead of me and a lot of business to take care of. But... one step at a time.

Happy Birthday to Me! I need a job! ...and other random thoughts

Wow! I am the worst blogger ever! Sorry, everyone. Clearly my mind has been elsewhere. And you know how when things just pile up, and the thought of having to catch up on so much makes you want to do even less, not more? Yes, I am suffering from that phenomenon. The shear amount of things that have happened over the past few weeks have made me hide from my blog. I will take this one step (ahem, blog entry) at a time.

So alas, if you want to hear about my fabulous 3 day weekend in Mendoza (yes, it was fabulous!), you will have to wait for a future post, unfortunately! (sneak peak: it involved a bicycle tour, lots of amazing views, and of course a ton of delicious Malbec!)

Anyway! Last Thursday was my 21st- ahem, 28th-- birthday! Woopie! Yay, I'm old! No really, I'm starting to worry about wrinkles, my metabolism is slowing down, more and more people are asking why I'm not married with babies, and I'm only 2 short years away from 30! I even said the word "blouse" the other day! Who says that under the age of 50?! One foot in the grave! AWESOME!

Luckily, you amazing friends and family helped me keep it together. Throughout the week (and still trickling in this week) I have been inundated with snail mail. Thank you all so much! Especially you, Mom, who managed to send me I think 5 separate letters! No really, the door man thinks I'm crazy. When I finally introduced myself to him yesterday, he said, "Oh YOU'RE the girl who gets all the mail!" Yes, I'm famous, and I appreciate it! My room is filled with cards. :-)

I admit that I did spent the first several hours of my birthday being fairly miserable. I suffered through an extreme case of the "what-am-I-doing-with-my-life" syndrome, and worried about finding a job (ugh), feeling fat (anorexia, anyone? this country is so skinny and vain it could make a pig stop eating), making friends, having enough money, being a good teacher, and just generally wondering why exactly I decided at 27 years old to uproot myself again, change careers, change COUNTRIES, cultures, habits, lifestyles, diets, and environments, and go off on such an uncertain adventure.

Don't worry-- I know what I'm doing is awesome. I mean, I'm in Argentina. It's interesting and fun here, and I'm finding that teaching is rewarding, creative, and right up my alley. BUT!

Finding a job here has been a nightmare, I'm not gonna lie. I am currently working only 6 hours a week, for $28 pesos/ hour. By my calculations (do do do do doooo) I'm making approximately... NOTHING!!! Yes, I have financial woes, and I need another job. I've been looking diligently for jobs and networking like crazy, and there are definitely some leads and possibilities out there for me, but it's been a long and frustrating process.

Ooohh but the students I DO have are some real gems. You're gonna love this. Remember your friend Erica who doesn't know anything about kids? Yeah, I'm teaching them. A 5 year old boy and his 8 year old sister and her friend, no less! Yep! And the 8 year old girls only want to learn lyrics to High School Musical songs (I can now sing several of them, but we will never speak of this again), and the 5 year old boy only wants to jump on the bed, dump his toys on the floor, and throw his trucks around. OH MAN! Did I really sign up for this? But beggers can't be choosers (they're paying me, after all), and I'm actually surprising myself to find that even though the kids can be total nightmares, I actually don't want to dropkick them. I actually kind of like them. Wow, I really am getting old.

I have some adult students too, but they don't make for such fun stories. :-)

Oh yes, so back to my birthday! I bought myself a lovely plant, a jasmine that will supposedly bloom sometime in April. The jasmine's name is Flor. I saw a great aloe at a shop down the street that I plan to buy this week, too. The aloe's name will be Máximo.

Here is Flor, hamming it up for the camera on my balcony:



Anyway, Thursday night (birthday night), 4 of my wonderful lady friends took me out to a fabulous dinner at a pricey and fancy restaurant in Belgrano (one of the most upscale neighborhoods of BA) called Sucre. Known for its wine list, we enjoyed several glasses of the finest, and I also put away a plate of white salmon with shitake mushroom sauce and cauliflower mash that was to die for!

Before (Exhibit A):



After (Exhibit B):



We also had some chocolate lava cake smothered in the best thing on earth, dulce de leche, and of course, some champagne.

Here's the birthday girl:



We then headed back to my neighborhood of San Telmo to a fun ex-pat bar called the Red Door where a bunch of other friends met up with me for chili bombs (recommended- chili pepper vodka dropped into a Red Bull and then chugged), beers, and a few games of pool. Needless to say, I was out until about 5:00am. Oh, Argentina!

Here's me with 2 of my favorite BA boys:



And with most of my favorite BA women (with a few key omissions):



Anyway, don't ask me how, but I somehow managed to wake up the next day and plan a lesson for a new student studying for the TOEFL exam, and then execute said lesson for 2 hours in the afternoon. Go me! At which point, running on no sleep and completely dehydrated, I returned home and prepared for round 2 of the birthday festivities! A group dinner at Cheff Iusef, a Middle Eastern restaurant in Palermo, followed by general shenanigans.

Friday's dinner was superb! I had a reservation for 10, but more and more people kept showing up, and by the end of the meal I think there were 18 of us. They kept adding tables and chairs until the restaurant literally ran out! Anyway, we dined on hummus, falafel, chicken, and lamb (don't worry, Mom, I didn't eat any lamb), and plenty of Heinekens. It really was a phenomenal meal, and I'd recommend the restaurant. Here we all are (I'm way in the back of the picture!):



And here's me enjoying it all! (And no, that is not a bruise on my arm, it's a lipstick kiss from Victoria)



We then went on to drink litros of cerveza out of plastic bags in the middle of Plaza Serrano, headed out for a drink at some random overpriced bar in Palermo, and then headed to... a gay bar! It was called Sitges, and it was phenomenal. $25 pesos for all you can drink, and the company was lovely! The remaining group of us danced all night quite literally. As in, I got home after 7:30am! (There is nothing quite like passing by cafes serving coffee and medialunas to people for breakfast as you walk home from the nightclub...)

Needless to say, I was a total waste of space for the rest of the weekend, and did nothing but sleep. But it was worth it. I am now in full detox mode and have vowed not to drink for at least a week. Not a drop. My poor, elderly liver deserves it.

So that is the tale of my birthday shenanigans! It was a lot of fun, and I'm very appreciative of my friends here in Buenos Aires who helped make it special. Obviously, I missed my friends back home TREMENDOUSLY, and it would have been even better with you guys here. I got pretty homesick around my birthday, and really wanted a good old fashioned hug from my family members and my close friends. But I got through it, and I do feel lucky to have people in my life here who helped make it special.

More later. SO MUCH MORE. I have about 500 million other topics to cover, and I'm determined to get to them all eventually! But I am teaching tomorrow morning (my student and I are going to learn all about phrasal verbs!), so I need to get my beauty rest.

xoxoxo

PS. Side note: Mullets are considered cool here in Argentina. So if you have one, you should totally come here, because then you'll be cool. You should also dread your mullet, because apparently that is cool here too. Or just shave off all your hair except for one little rat tail, and you'll STILL be cool. You can even dread THAT and be cool. Basically, any haircut you can think of is cool here. Except for like, normal ones.

The end.

CHANGE: You don't you have anything smaller?

Change. It's a problem. And I'm not talking about American politics. In fact, one of Argentina's biggest problems is change... Coins, that is. Monedas.

Apparently there is some kind of coin shortage, which results in people being very protective over the coins they have. To make matters worse, the colectivos, the buses here, only accept exact change (no bills), and are by far the best way to get around the city (they literally go EVERYwhere, and run 24 hours), so not having any monedas can really limit your ability to get where you need to go. In fact, most porteños are totally dependent on them.

Let me Americanize this image: picture it as a country filled with people who need to do coin-op laundry, and no one will give you any quarters. Catch my drift?

So basically, you go to an ATM and take out money, which usually comes out in $100 peso bills, and then no one wants to accept your $100 peso bills! Sometimes they are so reluctant to make change that they will literally not make the sale, just to save their change. Seriously, this is no small inconvenience, but rather it is closer to a national crisis, a problem that is often cited as one of the factors in Argentina's economic decline. Not to mention, it is incredibly frustrating! I have literally yet to make a purchase when they have not asked me, "No tienes nada mas pequeña?" ("You don't have anything smaller?")

Grrrrr.... No! I do not have anything smaller! And even if I did, I am most likely hoarding them just like everyone else for the next time I need to take the bus! Sheesh! I don't know who to blame for this problem, but it needs a solution, and fast. I feel like I've really taken for granted the ease with which I collect nickels, dimes, and quarters in the States. I mean really, I should be able to buy something that costs $7 pesos with a $10 peso bill and not be treated like I am committing a sin.



For more information, check this out.