Buenos Aires - Food (Original title: Buenos Aires - pros and cons)

When I first arrived in Buenos Aires, I thought, "Wow, this looks exactly like Taipei!" And I have heard many other foreigners here compare it to other big cities they know. So first and foremost, Buenos Aires looks like a big city. I was having a discussion with some people, and we seemed to agree that when you go to a small city or town or village, you get much more of a distinct characteristic feel that belongs to the culture. However, when you get to big cities like NY or Paris or Buenos Aires or Taipei, most of them on the surface seem to belong to one culture: big city culture. Big buildings, crowded streets, tons of traffic and pollution, lots of public transportation, bright lights at night, billboards everywhere, etc. However, when you stay in the city for a period of time, you do start seeing the differences. I've outlined some of the pros and cons and added important cultural notes and vocab about them.

Empanadas

Pro: Food!!!

• Argentina is a carnivore's heaven. This country is well known for having some of the best meat in the world. According to Wikipedia (therefore it must be true), Argentina has the highest consumption of red meat in the world.
  
  Some of the most popular types of food here include:
  - Empanadas, which are like large dumplings with a tough pizza-crust type skin around it. There are also variations of it. I think a "canasta" (which literally means basket) is an open empanada. It has the contents and has the same pizza-crust skin around it, but it's made so that the top is open so that you can see the contents inside.
  - Milanesas, which are thin steaks of chicken. If you say "milanesa a la napolitana", they add cheese and tomato sauce on the steak, and it is soooo good.
  - Pizza, pronounced "pixa" so many Americans including myself have trouble identifying what it is until they see it, then they realize that they're talking about pizzas. The pizzas here are not at all like American pizzas. There's no tomato sauce, and it has an extremely thick layer of cheese. Personally, I prefer it with the tomato sauce, but that's probably because that's what I'm used to.
  - Chorizo, which is a really delicious sausage. Although it is not at all spicy to me, it's probably considered one of the spicier foods in Argentina.
  - Tartas are not tarts! They are like quiches, like a pie of cheese with vegetables and other ingredients in it.
  
  There are of course a lot of different types of food here, and I don't know the names to a lot of them. And of course they have food that is found everywhere in the world, like sandwiches and salads and soups.
  
• A funny thing that I noticed as a general pattern is that it seems like almost all of the breadstuff that have ingredients in them, such as empanadas, sandwiches, pizzas, canastas, etc., have their ingredients in pairs. Some common combinations are jamón y queso (ham and cheese), queso y cebolla [pronounced say-bo-sha] (cheese and onion), jamón y tomate (ham and tomato), queso y choclo (cheese and corn), cebolla y espinaca (onion and spinach), but there are also a lot of other pairings found (although with pizza, queso is always one of the ingredients). I haven't yet found any that have more than two ingredients, though. And if you order, let's say, a "sandwich con jamón y queso", be prepared to get a sandwich with nothing but ham and cheese between the bread. In the US, you would probably expect some lettuce or tomato, maybe a little mayonnaise or something. Here, don't expect it unless it specifically says "lechuga" or "tomate" or "mayonesa" [ma-sho-nay-sa]. And you'd probably be sacrificing either the ham or the cheese in order to have one of these, since ingredients are offered in pairs. Although usually, you can ask for mayonnaise or olive oil or ketchup, and they'll hand you a small packet of it.
• Argentines do not like spicy food. There are places where you can find spicy cuisines, but for the most part, there is nothing spicy that is native to Argentina. I love the food here, but I miss spicy food. My friend offered to make her host family tacos to give them a taste of the Mexican cuisine, and they asked her to put very little spice in it. So she put much less spice than she normally would and afterwards said she couldn't taste it at all, but the family wasn't able to finish their tacos because they thought it was way too spicy. My host family, too, cannot stand anything with the least bit of spice in it.
• At a cafe, if you ask for hot chocolate (the weather here is super hot because it's summer right now, but the air conditioning in my classroom makes it super cold), they give you two bars of solid dark chocolate and a cup of hot milk. I was dumbfounded when the cashier handed me two bars of chocolate. I looked confused, so he told me I had to go get in another line to get a cup of hot milk. You put the chocolate in the milk and stir it to melt it. It's called a "submarino", a submarine. It was delicious, but this was the first time I ever made hot chocolate in this manner, and I was really intrigued. But these kinds of surprises are what make different cultures worth experiencing!
• Many things in Argentina are much cheaper than in the US, like clothes or alcohol or transportation (taxi fares here are so cheap!). Unfortunately, food is not one of them. My roommate here and I were talking about how this makes it very difficult for people living here. They make much less money than they would doing the same job in the US, yet such a basic everyday necessity has such a relatively high cost. Argentina, especially Buenos Aires, has a pretty high cost of living relative to how much they make. In the US, most people are retired when they hit their early or mid sixties. It's very common for people here in their 70's or 80's to still be working and not planning on retiring soon, and many of them lead very difficult lives, with long working hours (much longer than the typical work day in the US), commute for hours every day if they live outside the city (because the living cost in the city is prohibitively high for them), and sleep very little. Sorry, that's off the topic of food, though.
  

  

  Milanesa a la Napolitana

So my original plan was for this one post to be all about the pros and cons of Buenos Aires, and now I realized how long just one of them is, and it's getting really late now. So I think I'm just going to present one or two each time I post, alternating back and forth between pros and cons.