Health care, hip hop, and house parties

I'm on fire here - three posts in a week could very well be my record while I'm here - but I thought I'd post briefly about how the week ended up.

My presentation on health care reform in the U.S. turned out really well. It was great to present on something so interesting and so historic for the U.S. As I told the classes I presented to, I tried hard to be as unbiased and factual as possible; but it's hard not to emotionalize an issue like health care when there are 45,000 people dying every year in the U.S. solely because of a lack of coverage. One of the things I mentioned is that the U.S., which has a gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.5 trillion, ranks 37th in the world in health care, according to the World Health Organization. Costa Rica, with a GDP of $48.5 billion - or less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the U.S. economy - has free universal health care and ranks just ahead of the U.S. at 36th. One of the things that really hit home for my students here is that there are currently 45 million people in the U.S. with no health insurance (and thus virtually no health care) - and that's more than the entire population of Argentina (40 million).

In any case, the students seemed really interested and engaged in the presentation, and they even asked some really intelligent questions afterward that I struggled to answer fully. (One student asked roughly what percentage of a person's income goes toward health insurance when they have health benefits, or "employer-sponsored" insurance. I was stumped.)

Besides a great week of work, I had quite a few adventures along the way as well. On Monday night I went to see a Brazilian drumming show with my roommates. The same drum corps, la Bomba del Tiempo, plays at this club every week, and it's an absolute blast. Thursday night we went to a really cool bar close to our apartment in Palermo, and then took a taxi to a hip hop club on the other side of Palermo. The club was amazing - there was a massive break-dancing circle when we got there, and it lasted over an hour. I'm pretty sure it was mostly semi-professionals trying to make it big in Buenos Aires, so it was pretty incredible. After a while the club's professional group took over and danced for about 15 minutes. Then at 3:00 a.m., when most clubs in the U.S. would either be closing or have already closed, the break-dancing ended, the DJ took over, and the dance floor opened up to the rest of the club.

Friday night I tagged along with my roommate Mads to a house party a few of his Argentinean friends were having in the southern part of the city. Conforming to the local culture of very late nights, we arrived at the party around midnight (after a 40-minute bus ride from Palermo), ate grilled meat and vegetables, had some Mendozan wine (Mendoza, in the west of Argentina close to Chile, is world-renowned for its wine country, which rivals the vineyards of Spain and France), and hung out in the hosts' patio until we were too droopy-eyed to stay any longer. There were about twenty Argentines there, all around our age, and they were a lot of fun to hang out with. Another great night in BA.

I'm about to go check out the famous weekly Sunday flea market in San Telmo, near the center of the city. It's supposed to be really cool - I'll post pictures of it when I can.