Comments on: Gold Rush Fever

By: mkobrak

mkobrak — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 01:22:55 +0000

There was once a bagel shop on the corner of PeÃ±a and Pueyrredon, and although I hadn’t tried the real thing for years, I thought they were more than half decent, but after less than a year they folded… Maybe someone should try again, not a get rich quick scheme, just to try something new. As to teaching English to the natives, as a native who teaches English, the competition is considerable, and I have heard of 15 pesos an hour English teachers, not enough even for most of us natives…

By: dan

dan — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:22:02 +0000

Well, I’ll still reserve judgment until you open your bakery and I taste one of your bagels. By the way, your note, while in the same tenor as many that I receive, at least proposes to do something unique, even if the outcome is uncertain. If I received one like that, I’d probably be at least a bit more encouraging - the “I’m want to sell real estate to rich Americans” or “I’m going to teach English to the little brown people” are just pretty much guarantees of failure. At least a bagel bakery, if one actually had the talent to bake good bagels, would be something that didn’t have a legion of businesses competing in the same field. And who knows? I know I’m not the only expat who misses good NY-style bagels!

By: ksternberg

ksternberg — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:59:16 +0000

I retain my New York sensibilities, even though it’s painful at times. As luck has it, my town has an acceptable enough wholesale bagel bakery that passes as adequate to fair. Toasting helps.

By: dan

dan — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:53:25 +0000

Given that what you think of as a bagel up there in Middle-of-Nowhere, Massachusetts, is about as close as what locals think one is here, you’d probably be a success!

By: ksternberg

ksternberg — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:30:21 +0000

Dear Dan,

I am a complete idiot here in my hometown of [fill in the blank] U.S., but do you think if I sold everything I owned and moved to Argentina everything would change? My passion is to open a bagel bakery. Would the natives there like bagels? Oh, and I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Would that be a problem?

Thank you.

By: dan

dan — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:18:17 +0000

Well there’s definitely the pay issue, I remember one young lady telling me she planned to charge US$50 an hour for her teaching services, since that’s what it cost for language lessons in Los Angeles where she lived. I pointed out that most teachers here operate on somewhere between 20 and 30 pesos an hour for private lessons, and that the average wage is about 40 pesos a day. On top of that, she kept looking around for “the natives” and couldn’t understand why there weren’t lots of little brown people running around, which was her view of what she thought she’d find here - I mentioned that the Spanish and British had kind of wiped them off the face of the map in the 19th Century, which seemed to shock her that such a thing could have happened. She didn’t stay.

By: Saratica

Saratica — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 14:20:35 +0000

Ditto Costa Rica. We did move here without ever having been here and have thrived. Our situation was quite different than most, however. We had a “commitment” to the idea that was born of need rather than choice. My income at home ended abruptly (selling real estate to Americans as a matter of fact) and we were literally running away from the devastation of Wilma. This “commitment” has served us well in overcoming the hurdles you mention, all of which we’ve encountered here. And, of course, the list doesn’t end here.

I guess people don’t know when you teach English to the natives you are paid like a native…

By: dan

dan — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:42:12 +0000

I received this by e-mail, and thought I’d add it in - oddly, I was just sort of feeling cranky yesterday and wrote the piece as a bit of a rant!

“I just finished reading your latest. It is very well written, thoughtful, brilliant really. I am often asked about living in Argentina. Today I was asked if one could live well in Argentina without speaking Spanish! And it occurred to me that you are the only one I know of in Buenos Aires that speaks English. I had cancer surgery some months ago and even my doctor,speaks only a few words. Do people really attempt to make a new life in South America,without at least a semblance of fluency?On account of supposedly cheap real estate!? Amazing! It is my humble observation that Argentinian “girls” are as complicated as anyone anywhere. Pero que se yo!”

Now, I have to go stand in line at migraciones for the rest of the day hoping to get a longer term visa….