Adventure Bloog: Time and Money

Now we're gettin' down to the nitty-gritty, folks. This is the stuff all y'all want to know. I'm sure you have many questions, like:

1~ Why is the United States the only country that obstinately refuses to switch over to metric, which is 100 times easier?
2~ How many feet are in a mile again? Like five-thousand-something, right?
3~ Do toilets really flush the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere?
4~ Why would anyone ever use a bidet?

(Answer key:)
1~ We are stubborn slash proud.
2~ I don't know. I think there's a 5 and a 3 and a 2 in there in some order, though.
3~ Once I tried this while Skyping my family, and it's real. It's amazing.
4~ If I am out of toilet paper, I would end up water-wet than pee-wet.

That was a warm-up for today's cultural lesson, which has to do with United-Statesians' two favorite things: Time and Monayyyyy.

TIME

Perhaps upon reading the word "time" you suddenly fell into a web of self-doubt. "What significant cultural differences relating to time could there be in Argentina?" you think to yourself. "Ohhhh, is this because they don't have a time change? Or maybe they do. I don't remember. Shouldn't I know these kinds of things? Am I ignorant? And insensitive? I can't even name all 50 states, let alone their capitals, let alone other countries' capitals.

I'm a horrible person."

Hey, stop being so down on yourself! Yeesh, if I had known you were gonna go and get all pensive and weird on me, I would have been more specific in the first place:

MILITARY TIME

There, feel better?

For the most part, military time is used here in Buenos Aires. As in, I have class at 13:30 hours (rather than 1:30 pm) and dinner is served at 19:00 (not 7). This is tough for me, since I have it ingrained in my wee l'il brain that the clock only goes up to 12. So, to make it a bit easier on myself, I have made the following set of flashcards:

Hopefully this will make it so that I don't have to consistently subtract 12 from every hour after noon.

(Note: military time is used more often when writing times than when saying them out loud.When speaking, it's about as common to use 'Murrcan numbers as it is to use military time.This eases the blow a little bit.)

WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN

AND WHY, AFTER SOME THOUGHT, IS IT ACTUALLY WAY MORE CONVENIENT?

MONEY

Now, you may remember when I posted a picture of a burger combo that appeared to have cost $26 at the good ole Golden Arches.

It took me several days to become somewhat accustomed to the exchange rate, which is officially around 8 pesos to the dollar. So in reality, this burger meal is actually about 3 and a half bucks.

Approximately.

8 is not a nice number to divide by, so I tend to follow this method:

# of pesos + throw like a buck on there or sumthin

Remember, division first.

One interesting thing about the monetary system here is that the largest paper bill has a value of about 12 American dollars.

There are five different bills:

These bills total about 21 dollars.

The two-peso note, which is the smallest paper bill (there are some coins too), comes to about 25 cents.

As I mentioned previously, there is no bill larger than the 100-peso note, which is just greater than ten dollars.

This means that if you want to pay cash for, like, a mattress or something, you've gotta be packin' a fat stack.

Rachel and I wondered why there were no larger bills; it seemed really inconvenient to us. Then my dear friend struck upon a brilliant idea: in around 2000, the exchange rate of the peso to the dollar was 1-to-1 (this means that 100 pesos were worth 100 dollars). Due to a rapid and dramatic economic downturn, Argentine money has devalued to almost 1/10 of its former worth.

Fifteen years ago, Argentina didn't really need anything bigger than 100 pesos. And-- maybe this is completely me projecting my ideas onto another culture-- to develop a larger bill might be to admit defeat; to say, "We never expect our economy to return to its pre-inflation state. "

I guess somebody decided they needed to de-manlify money or something, because there is a new 100-peso note around town:

It features Evita, whom I wrote a bit about in my post about the cemetery.

And it is, like, WAY COOLER than the old bill.

The color scheme is purple, as well as bright orange and bright blue. This is the bill I would make if I were ever allowed to do such a thing. Except I would hide a butt on it somewhere.