South America – Ten Small Thoughts & Things – Part 4

Toronto rapper Snow’s 1990’s hit “Informer” is alive and well in South America. I don’t think I’ve heard it in Canada in 15 years but I could not go a single day anywhere in South America without hearing “alickybooboomdown” at least once.
Even further to the points about customer service I also found people are generally more formal and there is an etiquette to public interactions. The response I would get from walking into a store ask asking “do you have glue?” was stunningly different from, in my broken Spanish: “Hello, good afternoon, how are you doing, I am looking for glue, do you sell it?”. Along the same lines people absolutely say hello, goodbye, how are you, etc much more often in public. Was fun, I enjoyed that.
At 46 years old I have finally learned the lesson of humidity. This trip was the first time I’ve ever experienced real humidity. I have learned that I do better with 45c and dry in Egypt than 28c and 95% humidity in Central America.
Fresh milk pretty much does not exist in Latin American stores. In 99% of stores all milk with be shelf stable UHT milk in tetra-packs. I believe fresh milk is available but you normally have to setup delivery on your own from a dairy.
There are no scams, as far as I can tell. After 5+ months in Latin America people tried to scam me exactly zero times. Unless you include having to pay soldiers to return my passport, which is more armed robbery than a “scam”, it’s not like I was tricked into paying to get my passport returned.
I pack extremely light, it’s taken a life to learn the lessons and by this point in my life I pack EXTREMELY lightly. I get that different people pack differently but the number of people, especially young people, lugging around absolutely INSANELY huge and overstuffed packs, OMG WHY?!
Packing so lightly did have some negative effects though. Lots of border and customs officials got suspicious of the length of my travel vs the size of my pack. I think I got secondary searched at least 4-5 times.
There seems to be a real respect for older people, I mentioned earlier the amount of time people spend in line, I noticed that older people are usually moved to the front of those lines or there is a separate line just for them.
While in some ways I felt a more conservative aspect to social/public life I also noticed the opposite when it comes to public affection. Heavy duty makeouts on the subway or even a full force restaurant make out approaching actual intercourse in public seemed totally acceptable.
Proof of Forward Travel is still a thing in South America. More than once an airline crew attempted to refuse my boarding because I didn’t have upcoming tickets exiting the next country. The idea that a country won’t let you in unless you have tickets out is not super common anymore in most developed countries, was interesting to have to sweet talk my way onto flights. At one point I had to frantically go online on my phone while the flight was boarding and buy a $10 bus ticket out of Paraguay a month down the road, that I would never use, just to prove I had plans to leave Paraguay eventually.

South America – Ten Small Thoughts & Things – Part 3

Cocktail bars are somewhat common but cocktails follow a different philosophy of flavour in South America compared to North America/Europe. For example, what I’m used to is that if you like an Old Fashioned and you see a menu offering a Vanilla Old Fashioned what you’ll get is a traditional Old Fashioned with just the lightest hint of vanilla. I found, very consistently, that in Latin America if a cocktail bar features a Vanilla Old Fashioned you will get an Old Fashioned with an endless and often overpowering vanilla syrup kick in the mouth. Whatever the feature flavour of a cocktail is, it will be a HUGE PUNCH IN THE FACE amount of that flavour.
Most bars will not have bar seating. It’s just not a thing. The concept that the bartender is part of your outing, that you chat with them, include them, etc, does not exist. Likely again related to the concept of customer service not existing.
Street food is safer than you think, if you have a brain. I travel with penicillin and I wouldn’t call my guts particularly tough at all but after 5+ months of eating from every kind of street food vendor all over South America I only got slightly sick one time (you were right Candise, it was totally that soup you skipped). I use common sense, go to places that are busy and are cooking things to order, and am rarely concerned.
Rough areas are safer than you think, if you have a brain. Every single city I spent time in is considerable more dangerous than any city in Canada yet I never felt unsafe a single time, not once. There were times of being more aware of my surroundings, there was a night when I had to walk home through a rough part of Rio around 2am and kept my head on a swivel, etc. But really, use your brain and you’ll be fine almost every time. You’re safer in the worst part of the city at 2pm in a market with 1000 people around than you are in the nicest part of the city at midnight with empty streets all around.
Time I: Time works very differently. I knew this going in but it’s different to be immersed in it day after day, restaurants and businesses are just kind of open whenever, they all post hours but there appears to be little connection between posted hours and if they will or will not be open. I did my best to adjust to this, with limited success. One night I walked to a bar that claimed to open at 6pm, it was 6:40pm and they were shut tight, a guy was setting up chairs inside up so I asked him when they open…. “6pm”…. cool cool.
Time II: Subway time…. in more than one city the train platform signs counting down the time until the next train turned out to be completely random. They just say a number of minutes and count them down until the next train until the train actually comes, then they jump to “1 min”, lol.
Both Ecuador and Panama use only the US Dollar. However they each issue very different $1 coins, I arrived in Panama City with a lot of Ecuadorian $1 coins and every single time I used them people had a reaction and I had to demonstrate that it was real American money.
Latin America is obsessed with “Viking Bars” and I cannot fathom why. Every city will have at least one, usually many more. A “Viking Bar” is an extremely vaguely Norse-themed burger and beer place. Basically it’s a bar with a Viking helmet hung up somewhere.
You MUST tip your grocery bagger. In most of Latin America the bagger is not a store employee, the only pay they get is tips.
Further to my earlier point about awful customer service I also noticed that a second visit changes everything. No matter how I was treated in a business the first time I would invariable get a warm welcome the second time. The places I ate at for a week or more started to feel incredibly welcoming.

South America – Ten Small Thoughts & Things – Part 2

In Latin America, lemons and limes are usually considered the same thing: “limon”. Buenos Aires was the first time all trip I saw actual yellow lemons. In most of Mexico, Central and South America lemons just do not exist. If you do find them they will still be called “limon” or occasionally yellow limes “limon amarillo”. They will also usually be expensive as they are imported from the US. So “limonade” is a super popular drink everywhere but it’s lime and sugar and water, never lemon. Also, the quality of the limes is stunning, and the amount of juice is nuts, squeezing a lime results in just acres of brilliant tasting juice.
ATMs globally seem to have gotten much worse in the past 20 years, there’s more of them but interoperability is worse. I travel with two Visa, one Mastercard and two bank cards and I still had trouble with lots of machines in lots of places. 15 years ago every ATM in Mexico worked with every card I had, not so anymore. In Ecuador I never got a single ATM to work with ANY card.
In place of ATMs I started relying much more on Western Union, they are on every street corner across Latin America. Put the app on your phone, transfer money from your bank to your Western Union account, withdraw it in local currency wherever you are 5 minutes later.
South American Money Exchanges have little interest in South American currency. If you want to exchange US or Canadian or Australian dollars or Euro or Yen or French Francs or Swiss Francs or British Pounds for local currency NO PROBLEM, but if you want to exchange cash from most South American countries in most other South American countries that don’t share a border…. NOPE, never gonna happen. For example, multiple attempts to exchange Uruguayan Pesos for Peruvian Sols got me nothing but head shakes and blank stares.
Beef will be overcooked, potatoes will be undercooked. Chicken will be the best you’ve had.
It’s not so much that customer service is bad in Latin America, it’s more that the entire concept of customer service just does not exist. I could write pages on this one but I fear it would sound a bit negative. Eventually I learned to treat each such encounter as a game, trying to win them over.
Get an e-sim, seriously. The days of hunting around each new country for a physical sim and constantly opening your phone to swap them are over. Switching to an e-sim made a huge, gigantic impact on my travel. Also, I used a bunch of e-sim apps and settled on Airalo as the best one, by far.
I know 100% that catcalling women exists in Vancouver but I’ve never seen or heard it. Throughout South America, especially Peru, it appears to be an almost constant thing.
Airport lounges are usually worth the cost. My credit card gets me six free airport lounge visits a year, after that it’s about $30us per visit. That might sound pricey but when you factor in that you get a buffet, coffee, drinks, alcohol, comfy seating, high speed internet, plus occasionally sleeping couches and showers it is easily worth it.
In my opinion, throughout most of South America, the quality of your major local standard beers is better than in Canada. Also in most of South America there is an almost obsession with serving beer cold. You’ll receive a nearly frozen bottle, in a frozen sleeve, with a small chilled glass, etc. It’s lovely and incredibly refreshing. Having said that, I still prefer cider but it doesn’t seem to exist in South America for the most part.