Hot Wheels~

I recently befriended this Argentine who has become my urban sherpa so I keep him around. His name is Nicanor "El Lagarto" Fletas. Much like the Himalayan variety he's not a talker. This helps him exudes an aura of wisdom which is really no more than familiarity with the place in which he's been stranded for life.

Just as when I was trekking the Himalayas, sometimes keeping up with these folks in their natural habitat can be perilous. But here it is way more dangerous. There is no Base Camp to fuck around here, you'd get pick pocketed in a minute. Traversing this city should be illegal. Maybe that is why anything can be delivered: ice cream, booze, cigarettes, and the local favorites: strippers and pizza. Of course the army of delivery scooters is more hazardous than the Grand Duke of Baden's feldjägerkorps and equally mean spirited.

Jaywalking maneuvers that normally kill your average DCite are easily performed by Porteños. These people are like ninjas of pedestrian infraction. But Darwin said it, other lifeforms adapt as well or perish. In order to catch up with Porteño pedestrians, Porteño drivers have developed astounding assasination skills, sometimes a driver will divert three or four blocks from destiny to take down one of these street lynxes.

This in in part why Argentines never really converted to automatic transmission. You gotta have that quick acceleration to run over grandma trying to cross on yellow. But grandma is not that easily caught. These people are like Emperor Penguins, the ones that made it past 18 are probably gonna push it to 90. Imagine if Oprah Winfrey's Katie Holmes debacle Tom Cruise had played Maverick in TopGun. Now add more hand gestures and a burgee of their soccer team, voila, your average Porteño driver.

A serious problem compounds on this: the car park is what some might call full of "classics." Between the Ford Falcons, Renault 12, Fiat 600 and IES (which is a ripoff of the shittiest Citroen) one really comes to understand what it is to be among people of faith. Faith makes your 1940's-60's piece of shit car perform like a Ferrari Enzo (in your mind, of course). The 1960's Fiat 600 outperforms every Ferrari in the local form of abstract pavement anyways. I keep telling them to no avail that the similarities between the Enzo and the 600 really end at four wheels and Italian. Their ego is writing checks their car body shop can't cash.

But one might ask, how does grandma survive thus far when her speed is severely diminished by arthritis, high cholesterol and 50 years of psychoanalysis? Well, abuela is no longer an ordinary human.
When you're crossing an avenue there is no calculation, cars are coming too fast, their course is too erratic (they side swipe to maximize contact), too many new objects are popping into the picture. You just got to do, and she does. That is how one learns to let an out of control bus flash inches front of one's face at 60 mph. It's all about reacting to the environment, it doesn't matter if it's one inch or ten meters. Apparently the more you do it the better you get at it.

A major cause of death is "loss of conentration due to Porteñas wearing a jean miniskirt and high heels at a busy intersection." I've been told it's an actual line in the statistics ministry's records. The same ministry which claims claims inflation is 0.7%.
But these Porteñas are just one more trap this city lays for you.