Our Fair Lady of Consumption
My new room at Tim’s where I’ll stay the bulk of this month is sans furnishing and while I don’t need much I do need at least a bed. I guess I had to come all the way to Argentina to go to my first Wal-Mart. It is located about 10 Kilometers form downtown on Calle Colon, which becomes a long strip mall as it leaves town.
En route I had my first dose of futball mania. Pick-up trucks loaded with fans in que for the police check before entering the stadium parking lot. The fans all wore uniforms of their team, waved their club flag and roared at the road their accolades of superiority. All just words to be proved valid or not on the grass this afternoon. We decided then and there to buy tickets for the game next Sunday.
“Wal-Mart is the only place in town you can buy a can of beans and everyone says they have the best meat in town, but I don’t know about that one,” Tim notes excitedly at the prospect of making some tacos at home this evening.
When I came to South America ten years ago my mom had a big send off dinner that was a Mexican feast. Little did I know that it would be my last Mexican feast for the next six months. The cuisine has grown here, but for now a taco is a luxury food served at a small handful of restaurants at very high prices and not resembling anything really authentic. More regularly people eat pizzas, empenadas (a sort of savory turn-over that comes with a variety of fillings), lomos (a grinder), steak and potatoes.
Wal-Mart is a testament to the tenacious hold the global market has in this country that the those same international bureaucrats of finance all but sank five years ago with the economic collapse. The collapse was, at least in part, caused by the financing requirements imposed on the domestic economy by foreign investors. Eventually, those requirements led to a false currency value that when it fell destroyed individual savings by greater than 50% to the typical Argentine. The result for the foreign traveler today is that Argentina is a very high culture low cost destination in Latin America.
Shoppers mill about and one woman stops to ask where I found the inflatable mattress and how much it was. There is that certain frenzy I always feel when I am in a big and full box store. It is the frenzy of consumption. “Did I find the best deal? Did I get all I want? Could I buy more? – and the big one – Will I be satisfied?”
Still fresh in my trip I can’t help but note that I am not somewhere so different from home here. The sidewalks are often broken and development is rampant. So many things are reversed but the same as home; there are big mountains to the east and an ocean to the west, it gets hotter as one travels north and colder to the south, you can’t buy beer after 10pm but the bars stay open all night. Amongst these flip-flopped but practically same realities the favorite food is pizza and the place to get a cheap bed is Wal-Mart.
I decided after getting our beans and a few other supplies to buy my bed from one of the small retailers downtown.
