Even Money – Everything here costs an even number of pesos. Imagine how much time this saves when multiplied by millions of people making 100’s of millions of cash transactions per year. Compare this to the US where your coffee costs you $3.21 and the vendor stands there and counts out a handful of pennies. Most everything here costs less than at home. The exchange rate is about 4 pesos to a US dollar and they also use the $ symbol. So its sometimes shocking to look at a price… $12 for a beer?? oh yeah that’s really only $3 US.
Daring playgrounds – They have stuff here on the playgrounds that would have the city in civil court for years in the US. Ava stood in line with a bunch of Porteño kids and then rode solo down a 100 ft zip line in a public park. That same park had trampolines! No idea why I didn’t get a picture of all this, but it also had a castle shaped structure made of rope. It was about 20 feet tall at highest point and the kids were climbing (and occasionally getting stuck) Ava was even scared of this one.
The locals (Porteños) are kind – Speaking of the zip line above. There were about 10 kids on the top deck waiting, but no real line. Ava was in the back and not ever moving forward. I was busy working out how to talk to them in Castellan about getting my kid a turn on the zip line, when all of the sudden, they decided as a group that she had waited to long and they all stopped and helped her get on the zip line. Outside the occasional surely waiter at some busy restaurants, we have found most everyone we meet is nice to deal with and happy to slow down and listen to us talk like Tarzan.
Late Nights – We all three immediately embraced the late night culture. The two hour forward time change helps, But we all stay up past midnight every night. And we all sleep well into the 8:00 hour and sometimes later even thought its getting light here at 5:30am. The sound of delivery trucks rumbling up our cobblestone street in the morning was shocking at first, but is now the lullaby of our morning rest and doesn’t even phase us.
Heat Wave? – The locals here, even the newspapers, believe they are mired in a terrible heat wave. “ugh hace calor” (its hot), is a standard greeting. But really its pretty comfortable. It gets up to 90 occasionally, but never above 50% humidity, so it feels nice. And there is often a nice breeze. We always open the windows at night and let the breeze blow through. The other nice feature of heat/wind/low humidity AND not having a dryer, is you can throw a wet towel over the porch railing and its dry in a couple of hours.