Gift Ideas for Friends in Europe

If you live in the US or Canada and have friends or family abroad who lead an active lifestyle, you may consider taking some of these items as gifts (conveniently available at the nearby Target):

• Gatorade powder
• CLIF bars (for example, in Germany, you can get only the much less tasty Power Bars for an even less tasty price)
• sweatproof sunblock (they only have the waterproof kind)
  

Restaurants in Buenos Aires

By now El Obrero in La Boca has gotten packedOriginally uploaded by laufer.

Guía Oleo is a very useful guide to restaurants in Buenos Aires based on user-submitted ratings. The guide ranks restaurants in several categories and has a powerful search function.

Foreign exchange in Argentina and Chile

Street corner in Purmamarca, Jujuy Province,
NW Argentina
Originally uploaded by laufer.

Cash can be king: the cash market is so efficient that the buy-sell spread is minimal. For example, in Salta in Argentina's Northwest, street vendors would buy one USD at ARS 3.05 and sell one USD at ARS 3.09, amounting to only a 1.3% spread. In Arica, Chile, the spread on the street was slightly larger, buy at CLP 535 and sell at 547, amounting to 2.2%.

By contrast, the effective exchange rate for withdrawing ARS 1500 using an ATM card comes out to 2.96. How did that happen? Well, the base rate for transfers was good, ARS 3.0595 per USD. Add to that a 3% charge for foreign exchange transactions plus a non-network ATM withdrawal fee of USD 3, and instead of USD 492, your ARS 1500 end up costing you USD 509. I guess the way to look at it is that you are paying almost 4% for the convenience and security of not carrying thousands of dollars in cash.

Credit cards can be much kinder. The effective exchange rate for purchases with Citibank Dividend Mastercard came out to CLP 527 and with American Express to 531, only 1.5% or 0.75% on top of the street rate, respectively. In comparison, the effective exchange rate for ATM withdrawals was 513 CLP.