Free WiFi? An Update on Buenos Aires and Airports North

It doesn’t seem all that long ago – and it wasn’t, really – that Internet access in the Southern Cone countries was hard to come by. I can recall, in the mid-1990s, having to seek out an Internet gatekeeper at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) to send some electronic files to my then-publisher in Australia. Fortunately, it’s gotten far easier there and en route, as my recent trip to the Argentine capital and back showed.

It’s not glitch-free, though. At present, in Buenos Aires, there are signs all over town celebrating free municipal WiFi but, whenever I tried to access it, the network never showed up on my phone. Personally, that’s not a big issue because we have fairly reliable Internet access in our apartment – at least as reliable as anything in Argentina can be - and when I’m out around town, plenty of hotels, cafés and restaurants have good connections. Still, it would be refreshing to see services as advertised – for once, at least.

By contrast, in a most welcome surprise, the city’s Aeropuerto Internacional Ministro Pistarini (EZE), better known as Ezeiza, now has very good free WiFi service thanks to the cell phone operator Personal, with no strings attached. It remains to be seen how consistently reliable it will be, but now you needn’t even sit down and order coffee or a drink (as pictured above) to get connected.

Though I travel to South America at least once every year, I don’t fly all that frequently because I’m usually gone several months at a time. This time, I made my connections to and from Buenos Aires via Lima’s Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez (pictured above) which had the look of a grimy bus station until its expansion and modernization in 2005; it’s since become an important hub for air traffic throughout the continent.

That said, Lima’s WiFi feels like something from the dial-up Stone Age – you can get a free 15 minutes, but logging on is a slow process that eats up some of that time, after which you gotta pay. None of the airport’s cafes or restaurants to my knowledge, offers its own WiFi access – they all referred me to the 15-minute service. At least, if you’re stuck without a connection here, you can at least find a bottle of pisco in the shop (pictured above) or a really good pisco sour at one of the bars.

My other main South American airport, Santiago’s Aeropuerto Internacional Arturo Merino Benítez (SCL, pictured above) doesn’t really have free WiFi either, except in the VIP lounges, but several cafés and restaurants have their own networks. I personally don’t object to paying if I get something for it, so that works for me.

It’s hard to find anything free in the US but, at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), there is now free WiFi service if you’re willing to endure a brief advertisement and, after a while, it times out. You can easily log on again, though. At Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), which is my preferred departure airport from the US, there is similar service, though it’s not so fast as a paid connection.

ADDENDUM
My friend Dan Perlman of Casa Saltshaker dissents from my experience with Buenos Aires's free WiFi, so I'll insert his comment here: "Not sure why you had trouble getting WiFi access around the city - I get it all over when I'm out in the streets - there are two services, neither of which requires a password - one is labeled BAGOWEXWiFi, and the other is FibertelZone. Pretty much every major plaza and municipal building has a hotspot, so I pick up one or the other regularly."

Croissant v. Medialuna: A Franco-Argentine Faceoff?

More than once, I’ve expressed my distaste for the cliché that Buenos Aires is the “Paris of the South,” when it’s really a New World immigrant city that’s more closely analogous to New York. Admittedly, I’m no Francophile – on three quick trips through France, I’ve managed to avoid Paris every time – but I can still point out the superficiality of such comparisons.

Today I’ll do so with my own comparison – or rather contrast – between two typical food items, the French-style croissant (pictured above) and the Argentina medialuna (pictured below). The Spanish word medialuna literally means “half-moon,” but I’ve always thought that a misnomer – it looks more like crescent moon to me.

I’ve always liked croissants, with their light flaky dough; the ones at top come from the Compañía de Chocolates in our Palermo neighborhood, which produces the closest thing I’ve seen to its authentic French counterpart here. There are several other branches around town.

The smaller medialunas, by contrast, consist of heavier and breadier dough. There are two styles: I prefer de manteca (buttery and sweeter) to de grasa or salada (savory), but both are available at almost every bakery in Buenos Aires and the provinces, and form part of the buffet breakfast at almost every Argentine hotel. I would normally leave the house early every day to get the freshest possible (I try to limit myself to two with my morning tea).

While French-style croissants may be available in Buenos Aires, they’re not quite authentic – I like them buttery, but I could do without the sugary glaze that these come with. They’re also considerably more expensive than medialunas – my morning fix of the latter (also glazed) costs me nine pesos (US$1 at the official exchange rate, US$0.69 with the “blue market” advantage). The croissant and a pan de chocolate (pain au chocolat), meanwhile, cost me 44 pesos (US$5.15 at the official rate, US$3.38 with “blue pesos). That’s not a budget-buster but, on most mornings, I opt for medialunas. It’s fair to add that, back home in California, I can get better croissants (for a slightly lower price than the official rate), without the glaze.

Saved from Soccer? My Argentine Nephew Pitches and Hits

Baseball has always been my favorite spectator sport and, as an adult, my main recreational sports passion has been slow-pitch softball, though I’ve only played sporadically the past couple years. Even in Buenos Aires, I’ve played a bit of baseball and softball, though they are clearly niche sports here.

At present, a perplexing leg injury keeps me from swinging the bat, running the bases and chasing down fly balls even if the opportunity presented itself. This weekend, though, I experienced a pleasurable respite from the endless 24/7 of scoreless soccer games that’s Argentina’s usual sporting fare - on a visit to my wife’s hometown of Olavarría, in Buenos Aires province, I got my first opportunity to see my nephew Mariano Peruilh play fastpitch softball in a tournament that has drawn half a dozen teams from quite a distance away. It was rather like finding an Olympic-size swimming pool in the Atacama, as the photograph above suggests.

The six teams in the tournament include Mariano’s own Estudiantes Black Jack and their co-hosts the Koalas Racing (one of five teams in Olavarría’s local league; the next nearest teams are in the port city of Bahía Blanca, 302 km to the southwest). One of the tournament teams is the Indios de Bahía Blanca (which is also the hometown of NBA star Manu Ginóbili), but there are also Mayú of La Pampa province (431 km west of Olavarría), the Tigres of Pilar (368 km northeast) and Don Bosco of Paraná, Entre Ríos (723 km north). Surprisingly, there was no entrant from the Argentine capital.

Paraná is the traditional hotbed of Argentine softball, a city of 200,000 people that has at least eight fields, three of them lighted (in the photo above, a local player crosses the plaza in front of the city's cathedral). Mariano once moved there to finish high school in hopes of honing his softball skills to make the national team as a pitcher. That’s not yet happened, but he’s young enough (19) that it's still a possibility.

Olavarría’s Club de Estudiantes has two well-kept fields, one complete with a press box and concessions (with choripán instead of hot dogs). With temperatures above 90° F (about 34° C), we spectators were fortunate that dark netting shaded the stands. In these conditions, the catchers had it particularly tough but, in general, the quality of play was good to excellent.

On this particular day, Mariano (pictured above and below) started strong on the mound and at bat, establishing an early 3-0 lead with a pair of crisp run-scoring singles off a hard-throwing Tigres pitcher. At the same time, though, he cost his own team a potentially big inning with a base-running gaffe and then made a fielding error that led to a two-run double; an inning later, he surrendered a prodigious home run that tied the score. At that point, unfortunately, I had to leave because of another family commitment, but Estudiantes got him a couple runs to win by a 5-3 score. In the next game, against their local rivals the Koalas, he got the save in a 2-0 shutout.

I had to take the bus back to Buenos Aires very early Sunday morning, so I missed the second day (which included a home run derby). Mariano's team didn't fare so well on Sunday, and will have to beat Bahía Blanca early this morning in order to face the Paraná powerhouse in the afternoon semi-finals.

Dynamic Update, Tuesday, December 9: I read in this morning's El Popular, Olavarría's hometown paper, that Estudiantes lost their semi-final game to Mayú of La Pampa and then lost to Bahía Blanca in the third-place consolation game (in which Mariano hit a three-run homer). Mayú beat Don Bosco of Paraná for the championship.

Inside the Buenos Aires Bureaucracy

Last month, I posted a photograph on my Facebook page of homeless people sleeping in the alcove behind the Ministerio de Economía (Economy Ministry) in downtown Buenos Aires. I regret having to admit that I misidentified the building in question, as this alcove on the block of Moreno Street between Defensa and Balcarce is really part of the Administration Federal de Ingresos Públicos (AFIP, pictured below), Argentina’s counterpart to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

In fact, I was not completely wrong, as AFIP operates under the economy ministry, whose headquarters is one block east, across Balcarce. And I still won’t retract my criticism of the government’s economic hypocrisy - it has not made nearly the progress it claims in reducing poverty, and large numbers of individuals and families still survive outside any social safety net.

I’ve passed the Economía building countless times. It’s been the site of many historic events, most notably when military opponents of President Juan Domingo Perón (himself a general) bombarded the Plaza de Mayo in mid-1955; shrapnel marks remain on the building’s granite exterior (pictured above). I never considered, though, that I might some day take a tour of this bureaucratic monolith until last Tuesday, when my nephew Juan – who works there – invited his father Carlos, my wife María Laura (Carlos’s sister) and me to have lunch on the building’s 12th floor terrace.

The cafeteria food, apparently, is nothing to write home about, so we went to the nearby vegan café Vita, to get some takeaway. I wasn’t particularly hungry, so I only ordered a fresh-squeezed orange juice before we returned and, after passing through security, took the elevator to the 11th floor and walked the stairs to the 12th. En route, I photographed the poster below of one of Economy Minister Axel Kicillof’s proudest achievements: the “Precios Cuidados” program that relies on government intervention to subdue inflation on certain supermarket products . This "Price Watch" program has resulted in shortages of the products in question, though blaming the shortages on high demand sounds disingenuous.

On the inside, the building is unimpressive, but views from the terrace are interesting if not necessarily impressive – Buenos Aires has an unprepossessing skyline, though there are many individual buildings of architectural interest, especially the domes and mansards of early 20th-century buildings on and around the Plaza de Mayo.

From this vantage point, one particularly unimpressive structure is the Casa Rosada executive mansion (pictured below), which looks far less distinguished than it does from the Plaza itself.