OK, this is a slight diversion from the usual technical rubbish I spit out. I’m actually in Buenos Aires, Argentina at the moment. I usually reside in Auckland, New Zealand so I’m a long way from home. The reason I’m here is part work, part experiment and part adventure. I’ve been working for some time doing remote Unix support over the internet for a company in Australia, and I’ve often thought “I could do this job from just about anywhere”.
Of course, it’s taken me a few years to actually get my act together and do something about it. I arrived in Buenos Aires a few weeks ago and it’s going well. I’d been to Argentina before so I knew a bit about what to expect. It’s definately very different to New Zealand. If you come here expecting all the comforts and efficiencies of the western world, you’re going to be disappointed. The latin world runs to its own beat, and if you’re open minded enough you’ll enjoy it.
Of course it can be very frustrating too.
So why did I come here, and not somewhere else? There are a few reasons; 1) I’d been here before and liked it, 2) it’s cheap and 3) i wanted to learn Spanish … properly. The 2nd point is really a biggie. I wanted to settle somewhere for more time than your average holiday … and yet make it affordable. Argentina is very affordable at the moment. Sadly their economy pretty much collapsed back in 2001, and their currency ended up being about a 3rd of what it was worth previously. Last time I was here the Argentinian Peso was 1:1 with the American dollar. Now it is about 3 pesos to the US dollar. Thats a huge and painful drop for Argentinians.
So that means accomodation is reasonably inexpensive. Just google for ‘apartments buenos aires’ and you’ll find heaps of places offering short-term rentals in good areas for very affordable prices. Food is also cheap here. We’ve been mostly self catering, but dinner at a nice restaurant in a nice suburb here has only been costing us around US$10 each. And most apartments here come with broadband access.
Prior to coming, I was quite concerned about the quality of broadband here. For the work I do, I need a reasonably low latency connection for all the interactive work I do, plus I wanted to use a SIP phone … which also needs a low latency connection. Trying to ask a real estate agency in a foreign country about low latency broadband is virtually impossible. In the end I took a risk and found an apartment rental company that advertised that they could offer the apartment with an IP phone (I assumed this meant SIP phone).
The apartment here has a Fibertel cable modem connection. It works OK most of the time. I am guessing it is their 3 Megas plan, but the speed varies enormously. It does have 256kbps upstream though which is probably more important for me. The internet connection has seemingly stopped completely for periods of 30 seconds or so, but fortunately it doesn’t happen too often. The SPA 3102 I brought with me works pretty well most of the time. And most of the calls I’ve made back to Australia have barely noticeable latency (though a few have been pretty bad).
I’m taking spanish lessons during the day at The Spanish Way. I’d done some lessons before coming to BsAs but basically I was starting from scratch again. The teachers at the school are great, and even though I find it quite hard at times, I quite enjoy ‘going to school’. BsAs is very walkable. I am yet to see a hill here, and the whole city is built on a classical grid system, so it’s easy to get around. The school is in Palermo and I’m in Recoleta. I thought I’d have to take public transport to get there, but its an easy 30 minute walk.
So, so far the idea of idea of working from a different country for a while is working out well. The only real problem here is the time zone (its almost 12hrs difference to Australia). The 5 weeks I’m here for is not enough to get a good grounding in Spanish (I’m not entirely sure what my expectations were), so there is a big temptation to come back here.
Hi, I’m a part-time software engineer from the US expatriating to Buenos Aires for about 6 months starting in September. I am trying to understand and minimize the risks to my productivity in making the move.
First of all, thanks for the information you’ve written which has been very helpful.
From your writing, it seems like securing reliable, low-latency internet connection may be an issue. I’ve been thinking of one solution but I wanted your opinion on it. Based on your experience there, do you think it would be an option to pay a company there a nominal fee to secure usage of both a cubicle and their corporate (ergo probably stable) internet connection for 20hrs a week or so?
I’m very interested in your response, having lived there for some time doing similar work.
Thanks,
Amendmen7
I intended to go to coworkcentral.com in Buenos Aires to check them out, but never ended up going (I had odd working hours due to the time zone differences back to NZ). They might be worth looking into. The other contingency is that a lot of restaurant/cafe’s in the Recoleta/Palerma area have wifi (as a last resort).
Haha well from what you wrote about the shoddy wifi in most cafes, I hope coworkcentral.com has sufficient facilities for me. I’m concerned that their internet connection may be poor (low bandwidth, high latency to California) as well, but on your suggestion I’ve pinged them on it and hopefully they’ll get back.
I guess most importantly, do you have any suggestions on where to start my search for a nice pre-furnished apartment that won’t levy differential pricing on me for coming from a more affluent country?
Thanks again for all the helpful input.
I didn’t mean to imply that the wifi service in cafe’s in BA is shoddy. I never actually tried my laptop from any cafe’s there. I just always have a personal preference for wired connections. Fortunately my fibertel connection worked well enough while I was there that I didn’t have to try wifi from a cafe.
I ended up renting through apartmentsba.com on the premise that if I had any problems with my internet connection that I could talk to someone in English to try and get it sorted out. Apartments BA charge quite a fair bit more, but they do provide a high level of ‘service’ for that. My rationale was 1) They’re cheaper than a hotel 2) they all speak English 3) They’re a full service agency so you talk to them about any problems rather than the landlord. A lot of the other apartment rental places are purely listing agencies for the landlord. I think bytargentina is like that (apologies if I am wrong). So even though you rent through bytargentina, if you have a problem with your stove or toilet or internet you need to call the landlord of the apartment.
If I was going over for six months I would probably look at other options. Have a look at the Buenos Aires part of craigslist. There are apartment rental places that list on there as well as expats looking for flatmates from time to time. These are still probably not as cheap as what a local pays. To understand you really need to read up about the whole issue with guarantia’s and the lack of a credit reporting system, and laws to favour the tennant (your best bet is google if you want to understand half of it).
Of course, with these cheaper options it makes it harder to ‘guess’ how good the internet connection will be. I’d just make sure I was close to some wifi’d cafe’s (hint: if you’re trying to work out distances in BA, the whole city is dead flat and I think its a 100metre grid system).
You do have to remember that you’re in ‘Argentina’ and you need to have low expectations of service to enjoy the place. To me that just makes it different rather than backward, and I’d happily go back in an instant.