NIMBY-free: What our cities can learn from this South American capital

The Age

2 days ago

You often see Argentinians reading books at solo tables in coffee shops; Aussies, it seems, are mostly on their phones.
And those coffee shops, by custom, mostly stay open all the way till 8pm, making the 3pm closing times common even in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne look ridiculously sleepy. Argentinians will pack them out between 6pm and 8pm for meriendas – a croissant, cake, empanada or scrambled egg snack, along with a café con leche, to tide them over till dinner time – commonly between 10pm and 11pm.
They also do coffee shops really well. Whilst our coffee will often taste better, they nail the cafe culture. Buenos Aires has two major LGBTQI cafes – Pride and Maricafe – so the queer community can socialise in spaces not fuelled by alcohol. Both stay open late. No Australian city I know has this.
Being more relaxed about late-night culture is one of the lessons I can share from our southern hemisphere counterpart when I return – happily – to Australia later this year.
I've missed Australia sorely. Recently, on a day when the 'feels like' temperature hit an unbearable 44 degrees and my aircon conked out from a power surge, the inner-city's only major public pool – Parque Norte – a sprawling shallow paddling pool, had already closed for the season. It's, bewilderingly, only open for three months a year. It faces a Holy Land theme park, Tierra Santa, so a giant animatronic Jesus rises from the dead every hour, slowly spins around to judge us all in our skimpy swimmers, then descends back into his tomb. Quirky as this is, I long for the secular lap-pools of big Aussie cities like Sydney, where I lived. Glaring into the murky brown, unsuitable-for-swimming Rio de la Plata River, I also long for its beaches.
There are many reasons not to take lessons from the Argentinians on certain subjects – economic management being one. While we panic if our inflation hits 4 per cent, Argentina last year had the world's highest, triple digit, inflation. The price of many things has doubled or tripled since I lived here – one of the reasons I'll soon leave. It has become expensive.
It's still worth the money for a visit though, and Australians can fly there via a stopover in Santiago de Chile.
When people ask why I chose here, I semi-joke it was the words to the song Buenos Aires in the film Evita as sung by Madonna:
'Fill me up with your heat, with your dirt, with your noise, overdo me. Let me dance to your beat, make it loud, let it hurt, run it through me.'
Semi-joking because the lyrics ring true – the city is hot, noisy, dirty (Buenos Aires translates as 'good air' which is ironic) – and teeming with life and energy in a way Australia's cities just aren't.
Much of that life happens at night. This is a truly nocturnal city. As one of my fellow digital nomads commented: 'not much happens before midday.'
But everything good happens after midnight. Kids here are often still awake here at 1am on a Tuesday – I see them in the city's ice cream parlours.
Somewhere you won't find kids is on the city's wildly hedonistic nightlife scene. No clubs open before midnight, and nobody even thinks about entering one before 2am. At 7am, they'll ask ' donde estan las afters?' Hardcore revellers will stay at one of the various afterparties on offer until midday; something that only happens sporadically in more conservative Australian cities.
Argentinians, for reasons unbeknown to me, adore hard, thumping, lyric-free (and melody-free) techno music. I despise it, but I adore watching them go off to it. It makes me feel very alive. And also gives me a migraine. It's a world away from belting John Farnham at karaoke at 10pm before calling it a night. Oftentimes I feel like I was in Berlin's notorious Beghain. Other times I dance merengue-style to my much-preferred reggaeton or cumbria, which has more of a tune to enliven the hips.
Everything is so insanely late, I adjust my schedule accordingly. In Australia I'd be up by 6am and in the gym by 6.20am. In Buenos Aires, some gyms and coffee shops don't open until 9am; shops at 10am. I moved from the world's most diurnal city to its most night-loving.
They're refreshingly creative when it comes to nightclubs. One – La Biblioteca – is set in an actual library. One night I attended, FuriaFest, which opened at 1am in a large warehouse with fairground rides (the waltzers; a bucking bronco), an inflatable bungee football pitch (I played two games at about 3am), and a tattoo artist (nearly got one after three drinks) – plus a DJ and huge, busy dancefloor. It feels like Australia's notoriously restrictive regulations would kill off such a reimagining of the nightclub experience before it got off the ground.
Another night, Durx, has a brickwork tunnel that runs underneath the length of the club where revellers, gay and straight, can be as sexually liberated as they feel, with no bouncers monitoring, judging or expelling, as happens in Australia.
Similarly, the city's underground train system, the Subte, is free of the Australian-esque regulations that'd prevent the busking you see on trains here. It's like an underground, underworld live theatre; the modern day unsanitised circus. I've seen breakdancers, religious preachers, full bands, electric guitar soloists, elderly tango music singers, stationery sellers and a rap duo who'd invite you to suggest a word which they'd immediately incorporate into their imaginative, improvised fast-paced Spanish verse.
The shabby-chic faded grandeur of a city that was, over a century ago, the capital of one of the world's richest countries owns its imperfections. It will, indeed, fill you up with its noise: the endless drilling; the defiant protests between the Plaza De Mayo and Congreso (as I write this, locals are bashing pots and pans together on balconies above me to protest alleged police brutality); the 10-lane mega-roads interrupting otherwise pleasant parkland.