Change comes and goes down here in Patagonia. Literally.

One moment you have a wallet chock-a-block with monedas (coins). Maybe you’ve got a couple of coveted one-peso coins (perhaps more valuable then the dime-a-dozen P$2 bills), some 25-centavo’ers and 50-ers, and you may even be fortunate enough to have a teeny weeny five-centavo’er. Worthless, you ask? Hell no, every penny counts here!
So you head into the verduleria to pick up some raspberries, peaches and cherry tomatos, say, and your bill comes to P$7.65.

“A few more tomatoes,” suggests the verdulero, encouraging you push your bill up to a easier-to-round total.

But smile and look into your purse. Carefully, languidly, you count out the precise 65 centavos. You hand them to the friendly guy who can’t believe his luck. You’ve lightened your load and put them coins back where they belong - into circulation. The cycle continues.

Later, you’ve got to fill up your gas tank and shoot, you’re short of change. The register says “Se abona solamente con cambio” or ‘if you haven’t got the correct change, we won’t give you anything’. And so then you’re stuck again, cursing the compassion that produced the veggie store pass-off.

A fine Argentine moment comes on the lucky end of the change-cycle, when, say, the supermercado can let you pay for a $37.40 total tab with a P$100 bill, or when you’re P$0.25 short of the icecream total and the scooper says ‘no hay problema’. It’s a heart-stoppingly joyful moment.
While the small change is treacherously rare, those violet-shaded P$100 bills are ubiquitous. The ATM delves them out by the half-dozen, leading all tourists out of the bank and into the sea of ‘where can I break this bill?’

It’s not often you spend P$100 here (that’s about US$35). So you force yourself to buy a coffee and sandwich for say P$20 just so you can change the P$100 into bills you can actually use to buy things.

This is what Slate Magazine called “the world’s most annoying economic crisis” - the general shortage of coinage across Argentina. It’s a classic case of the absurdity of finances here.

And so buying, selling, purchasing, charging — it all has become a sort of game around here. The smarter, the quicker, the wittier you are, the more chances you’ll end up with a better end of the bargain.

And of coure the winner takes it all.