A friend sent me a link to the blog, Water and Soul, where Jason Bliss has highlighted some of the differences between the US and Argentine cultures...here are some of my favorites*:
Going out
Only in Buenos Aires are there more people out in the streets at one o'clock in the morning than one o'clock in the afternoon.
Waiters in Argentina don't give me dirty look when I just order tea at the café.
Pedestrians never have the right of way. [Rights are determined by size. Whoever is biggest goes first.]
Stop signs don't mean anything, or if they do, they simply mean just go.
In the subways, people lay all kinds of trinkets on your lap hoping you'll buy it. And the crazy thing is, it works sometimes.
Sometimes, when you walk on the sidewalk, the sidewalk moves along with you. [Although this phenomenon occurs in the US, too, notably in NYC.]
People stare shamelessly and they don't feel bad about it when they do.
Doing Business
Everything is a negotiation: buying a cell phone, managing to buy note cards in a store after describing them in 3 different ways, ordering croissants at the café.
Shop owners are obsessed about washing the sidewalk.
There's a kiosco that sells teen porn right in front of the colegio nacional, the national high school.
Style
Even old women wear tight pants.
Here, a nice suit = sexy. In the US, suit = business type.
In America, men with long hair = surfer dude or rock star. Here it means soccer hero. Not only that, but I've seen men with long hear wearing head bands, which is culturally forbidden in the US.
Relating
In America you have to pay to get groped by a bunch of people at once but in Buenos Aires you just have to ride the Subte.
Instead of hanging out with friends or family for a few hours, people hang out for up to ten hours at a time, and even more miraculously, they don't get sick of each other.
Loneliness + boredom is far worse for Argentines than being overstimulated, claustrophobic and stressed out.
Americans like to give each other a notice of a few days when they go out together. Argentines call each other a couple hours before they go out.
Americans freak out when their personal space gets violated. Argentines pull out their cell phones.
Most Argentines that I've met up until now don't know how to tango but they can tell you about every individual part of a cow.
Cultural Miscellany:
Argentines know how to enjoy their life and also how to slow things down.
The TV plays a much smaller role in the daily lives of people.
Argentines don't treat their dogs like people
I've heard more 80's music since I've arrived than I did in all of my life as a 80's child.
Sometimes in the morning, we hear the sound of a horse trotting down our street. [This happens frequently in La Plata, at all hours.]
Argentina is a nightmare for control freaks, which is probably why I like it. Everything and everyone is late. But since you know that ahead of time, you're never super-upset or super-offended when the Subte stalls at Callao for ten minutes, or when you waitress ignores you at Baraka Café for 40 minutes. In America, entitlement turns us into monsters. We get mad when the subway is 8 minutes late, or when the waiter forgets our water. We get belligerent when we don't get what we think we deserve, which is pretty much everything.
*Note: these are all copied, my comments are added in brackets, the rest is written by Jason Bliss.
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