Special Delivery

For the past month or so, most days have been sunny and in the 70's. Today was the first cold, rainy day of autumn. Holly and I were in a cafe studying when a waiter walked by outside the window carrying a tray. He needed a plastic lid to cover his tray because it was drizzling and windy. Seeing him walk by the window with one small coffee reminded us how ridiculous Buenos Aires' open delivery policy sometimes seems.

For our New York City readers, it probably wouldn't seem strange to see a McDonald's or Burger King delivery guy walking down the street in his uniform. Buenos Aires has plenty of those, along with an army of pizza delivery guys on bikes and mopeds. However, one of the stranger delivery sights is the morning or afternoon coffee delivery. Apparently, it is not uncommon here to call down to your local cafe and order one small, espresso-sized coffee for delivery to your home or office. Maybe there is a dearth of coffeemakers here, but we still can't understand the idea of a waiter taking the time out of his busy day to leave his restaurant and walk all the way to someone's office with one small ceramic cup of coffee on a tray. To me, it would make more sense if they were carrying cardboard trays with styrofoam cups, but these waiters just look out of place walking down the street. We also considered today for the first time the question of whether the waiter then has to return to the house or office to pick up the empty cup he just dropped off.

Other deliveries don't seem to make much sense either. We were thinking of renting a movie the other night, so we asked our roommate if he went to a particular movie store in the neighborhood. He told us which one he goes to, but told us just to call them and they would bring the movie to us. We asked him how we would know what movies they had, and he just said that we could ask them. We are always indecisive when it comes down to picking a movie to rent, so we could only imagine the clerk listing out all the new releases over the phone.

All the supermarkets are also heavy on home delivery. In our neighborhood in particular, there are always kids from the Disco or Coto supermarkets whizzing around with their wheelie bins full of grocery bags. People go to the grocery and buy carts full of food, pay for it, and leave it all there to be delivered. Our roommate routinely has two bottles of beer delivered to the apartment from the deli down the street. Its almost like a modern-day milkman, where you leave your empty bottles of Stella Artois on the doorstep, and the beerman comes around and takes your empty bottles, and leaves you two full ones.

We haven't come up with anything yet, but would would invite reader's suggestions for small, inexpensive items that we could try to get delivered to our apartment before we leave.