Why am I here?

This seems to be the question that I have received most frequently from people I have met... It's a pretty natural lead in to a conversation, considering the next answer to the following question is, "I plan on staying for at least a few years"... This response seems to shock the porteños WAY more than it shocks the ex-pats...

So, to save you all from a long-winded, detail-oriented story that I am typically very good at giving (sometimes to the bore of others), I visited a buddy (Sasha Willimann) who was studying here for one semester during law school - to this day, I still don't know how he convinced the curriculum people at Harvard Law School to let him study at a public university in a 2nd world country, but, it's Sasha, so we don't typically ask questions... ha! So, when I was here, I had a job lined up back in Chicago (which obviously didn't pan out - thank you Jesus!), but had finally felt like I had been to a foreign country/city where I felt comfortable. When the job didn't pan out while I was in NYC (details about that job aside, just go with it), I took the opportunity to pursue a dream of mine that I've had since I was much younger - seriously! To live abroad and learn a language... So as I went thru the rigors of deciding where to land, BA ended up being the easy final answer... I had a few friends here (both Sasha had introduced me to, and those who I had on my own), and with the various business contacts made over the years, realized that I would have access to a much broader social and business network of people... Done and done - the rest was history... Sorta...

I still had to deal with studying/taking the GMAT (what a pain!), finding a place to live, signing up for classes, etcetera, etcetera... Having followed the hotel business for some years now, and citing the brief experience I had while visiting Sasha, i realized there was certainly an opportunity to enter the market as a young, American ex-pat, with only the sky as a limitation. I obviously didn't understand the nuances of the market, the language, and/or the culture (the jury will be out for a while on these points), but it was a very easy decision to make the jump to the Southern Hemisphere. It would be up to me to develop my own social and business networks upon arriving, understanding that money doesn't grow on trees, and I'm not a trust fund baby (sometimes, however, I do wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing), so I'd need a way to sustain my living expenses while being here...

Once I arrived, I had a few meetings (see earlier posts), was introduced to a few individuals, and learned some basics about how business is done... Since then, I've actually met 'real' people with 'actual' projects in the pipeline, which has been great (not only did I find some of these people on my own, but some have found me!), and I've been able to get myself tied in to the network pretty easily. Specifically, the whole, 'A Small World' thing has been quite interesting (I was actually granted access by a friend/colleague, so I'm now part of that crowd, ha), as it seems to me that the entire community is linked by only 3 degrees of separation, at most!

That all said, the market here is pretty interesting... Setting aside the financing parameters that have been placed on transactional opportunities as a result of negligent economic, monetary, and fiscal policies, the service industry is totally fractured... This could be a huge cultural component, but as service-oriented as people are down here, I have found it to be as a matter of convenience. Employment laws differ drastically from the USA, where almost all issues favor workers (part of the Peronist strangle-hold on power), so there are not built-in incentives for the workers of the service industry to actually provide a 'high' (relatively speaking) level of service. This, however, does not suggest that places with exceptional service do not exist, but on the whole, even 'nice' restaurants that appear to be of a distinct level are usually not all that great... I probably share a similar vision as my ex-pat counterparts on this front, as we all seem to have shared opinions regarding the opportunity to provide much better service to travelers (corporate, leisure, local, etc).

So with that, I'm here looking for ways to provide a better, more high quality experience than currently exists, in a manner that is both fundamentally more astute, and practically delivered, with the hope of becoming a liaison between the 'money' from the North (and/or elsewhere) and the execution of hospitality in the South...

So, who's in?