I was out of cash in Buenos Aires and had to duck into this building to exchange some Peruvian soles for pesos.

When traveling I have a hard and fast rule: never pay in dollars and always have local currency at hand. Well after a month or so in Perú I had a couple of hundred soles (about $60 USD) left over that I wanted to exchange for Argentine pesos (about 3,900).

Want to do some illegal currency transactions in the foreign exchange grey market? Suipacha is the street to find a shill working for a cambista who deals in foreign currency. Actually, they’ll find you. Suipacha is also a good street for sex shops, cheap jewelry, vaping parlors, and other points of interest.

I snapped this on my way up to one of these offices (Agency 5 maybe) pictured on the directory to meet with a cambista, or money changer. The whole experience took me back to the days of changing money on the streets, a common practice in Latin America in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Sketchy shills on the street corners attracting customers (me) and escorting them into alleys or dilapidated buildings. In this case, the building was like a museum of 1960s architecture: long, dark, unlit halls. The smells were more recent, though.

I got a very fair rate for my excess soles, only 3% off the bank rates which I was happy to get. I also got into a great conversation with the cambista and his Venezuelan shill about Copa America, a soccer tournament planned for later in the year. This was pre-Covid.