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 Peña 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.