Have an opportunity to go to Montevideo in December.
please report back, i've had a uruguay thing for a while now. also, i'm going to argentina in october.
Both of you report back. I am particularly interested in how well gringo's of the gringo looking and American speaking variety can exist in these places.
I need a central or south american place that is safe, super cheap, very good and accessible medical, AND (here is the kicker) let's my dogs both into that country AND back into the US without issue.
i liked argentina. a lot. but not sure i'd have it super high on my list of places to expat. somewhere on the list, but maybe not super high.
food was predictably good. but even though the 4 basic argentinian food groups are basically my own list of favorites (meat, pizza, pasta and breadstuffs) i found it a little monotonous. also their version of pizza is, to my palate, pretty bad (but i had an awesome neapolitan version in b.a.). they have some additional variety (argentinian regionals and non argentinian restos) but it's not of a par to north american expectations.
i went to b.a. and bariloche.
buenos aires was not entirely what i expected, but i liked it. forget all that paris of south america crap, it's fairly run down and while there are lots of nice french, colonial and art deco buildings around there's also crap tons of disgusting architecture and it's all mixed together. but it had a really nice, relaxed ambiance. it reminded me of barcelona in that respect, although if i had traveled more to secondary spanish cities, it might remind me of a different city instead. definitely felt a little provincial, but not at all self-conscious or giving a crap about other cities that some dumbass tourist might like better. also, dunno if americans are aware, but mexicans, and maybe northern latin americans in general, think of argentinians as stuck up and unfriendly. which i found to be completely off base. super friendly in a non-invasive or pushy way. climate was too warm considering it's mid-spring. summers, i expect, would be unpleasant. very crowded and high human density with all the good and bad that that entails.
bariloche is a ski town in northern patagonia. it's ridiculously beautiful. air so clean you could taste it. rivers and lakes of water so clean you wanted to drown yourself trying to drink them. weird ass trees and plants you haven't seen before. hardly any animals. vegetation grows thickly, you can't really walk off trail until you get above or at least near the tree-line. the weather was perfect. low 40s nights, mid 60s days. obnoxious amounts of tourists (mostly domestic), and supposedly this is the low season. no visible nazis. going out from bariloche, we hit mountain towns that looked and felt pretty third-worldy not too far away. reminded me a lot of any mexican mountain town, just with pizza and empanadas instead of of tacos and tortas. and i like places where poor people drink wine.
it felt safe. was cheaper than the u.s., but not super cheap. dinner for two w. wine at a medium fancy restaurant = $50. their currency is always in flux, so i think cheap v the dollar comes and goes, but i think it is not usually a particularly cheap country. no idea about their health care. people looked healthy, i guess. and young. lots of children around. if you learned to dress and walk like a non-american, no one would be able to pick you out on the street. you could live in either of the places i went without speaking spanish, if you wanted. can't imagine if anyone would give a crap if you brought dogs in or not. b.a. had lots of people walking dogs on leashes, and dog crap everywhere on the sidewalks, which come to think of it, would make it like the paris of south america, if they meant paris 30 years ago. bariloche and adjacent towns had loose dogs all over the place, some probably unowned, but most, i would guess, had owners, but were allowed to roam as they liked.