Why I'm compatriot weary

I went out last night for my Dutch friend's birthday at a Dutch bar called Cafe van Koning in the Las Canitas neighborhood (an up and coming part of town with lots of trendy restaurants and bars). This is perhaps the only Dutch bar in all of Buenos Aires, a Disney-esque replication of an Amsterdam tavern with faux-wood cavernous walls made from plaster decorated with Rembrandt posters and a life-sized seated Van Gogh, propped up to paint. I felt a bit like I was back in Rippongi Tokyo, where themed bars and restaurants abound, and where I once had dinner in a jail cell at the prison-themed "Alcatraz" (a meal which was often interrupted with frequent "jail breaks" and arrests).

Around 11pm, the normal time things get started here, people began to arrive at the bar: a couple of French girls (one with her tango dancer boyfriend hanging off her torso), a handful of very friendly and normal Argentine men . . . and then came an American guy I had invited who a few of us had previously met at a superbowl party; he was on vacation in BA for the year after making a crapload of money on movie script rewrites and apparently has hung out with Francis Ford Coppola on numerous occasions (and perhaps his "hanging out" with said celeb could be comparable to my time spent with Philip Seymour Hoffman, when I saw him on Broadway, just rows from the stage, where we shared an annoyance with the same buzzing insects). Anyway, I thought he'd be interesting to get to know and add to the international mix of the group.

It turned out that this guy and his friends were exactly the kind of people I have made an effort to avoid socializing with and in between conversations about how much superbowl friend loves the drugs in BA, refilling my wine glass with wine he'd brought from home, his strange Canadian friend telling me he was a stripper, me believing him, followed by chuckles, "it's only a joke!" (funny Canadians are apparently freak accidents) and then superbowl friend going on and on to the Argentines about how cheap everything here is (he can't believe it!), I just kept thinking: leave! Please. And when I said that everything is actually quite expensive when you are making pesos (hint, hint: shut up!) his response was, but I'm spending US dollars, it's great! This is all true of course, it is much cheaper, but to go on and on about it? well? god help these idiots.