Starbucks, the Seattle-based bean grinder to the masses, opened its 23rd store Thursday, proving to critics that it’s successfully marching nonstop march to conquer the entire universe.

Starbucks opened its latest store at the Paseo Alcorta shopping center in Palermo, where upscale shoppers and attractive women often abound.

“It makes us very happy to open another hip store where hot, wealthy people gather to see and be seen,” Starbucks General Manager Diego Paolini said in a statement. “If you’re a hot person, there’s nothing better than looking at other hot people while drinking hot, ethically sourced coffee.”

OK, that’s not really what Paolini said.

The 245 square-meter store is located on the mall’s third floor and has room for 80 customers.

For a helpful Google map of Starbucks locations, click here.

For more info about Starbucks Argentina, click here. If you wanna “like” the Starbucks Argentina Facebook page, click here (120,000 already have). If you hate Starbucks, click here.

An astonishing 40% of all pregnancies in Argentina end in abortion.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a report published this week by Human Rights Watch.

If it’s accurate, it puts Argentina’s abortion rate at about double the global average of around 20%, according to UN data.

It also almost doubles the 22% rate in the U.S., where about half of all pregnancies are unintended (this figure differs sharply depending on ethnicity).

According to this 2003 study of global abortion rates by The Lancet, Europe has the world’s highest abortion rate.

The Lancet study had this to say:

“There were an estimated 205 million pregnancies (livebirths, spontaneous miscarriages, stillbirths, and induced abortions) worldwide in 2003, of which about 20% ended in induced abortion. In eastern Europe, almost half of all pregnancies ended in induced abortion, whereas in northern America, one in five pregnancies ended in abortion. Even in regions where small proportions of pregnancies end in induced abortion, such as middle and western Africa, about one in ten pregnancies were terminated.” (more…)

Some of those hot bodies you see on Argentina’s streets may not be completely natural.

Long known for its unusually attractive population, Argentina has more plastic surgeries and non-surgical procedures than all but 12 countries in the world.

That’s the conclusion of a new global survey carried out by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, or ISAPS.

According to the survey, which measures total and not per capita plastic surgeries, Argentina ranks 13th worldwide in terms of surgical and non-surgical aesthetic procedures. The U.S. leads the world in the rankings.

The top 20 rankings follow, in order from No. 1 to No. 20: (more…)

The California Burrito Company opened a new store Tuesday at the Unicenter shopping mall.

This is the seventh store for the makers of those delicious burritos and the American guys who started the company.

The CBC plans to open store No. 8 in Panama this week and No. 9 in Santiago, Chile next month.

For a look at how the company and a few other expat ventures got started, check out this feature I did for the AP in 2006.

By Drew Benson

You’re sitting there in a Café Notable, a 100-plus year old building with high ceilings, big windows, elaborate woodwork and a black-and-white checkerboard floor.

One of the white-haired waiters in a white tunic and bowtie spins by your table and lays down a cup of coffee, a small glass of seltzer, a small glass of orange juice and a small plate with some sort of cookies on it.

You only ordered a café cortado, but you get the works, and that’s what makes living in Buenos Aires so unique.

Then you try the coffee and it’s among the worst you’ve ever tasted, despite the $5,000 espresso machine that it came out of.

That’s because Argentines don’t have a coffee culture, but are instead merely accustomed to drinking joe, Argentine coffee expert, or “barista,” Analía Alvarez said this weekend in an interview with Clarín.

“What happens with coffee is what happened with wine years ago – we only knew the house wine, served in a Penguin carafe,” Alvarez told Clarín. The culprit, she says, is the cheaper robusta beans used to make most Argentine coffee. Better coffees come from arabica beans.

When asked if there are good places for coffee in Buenos Aires, Alvarez, an international coffee judge certified by the Specialty Coffee Association of America, said yes – “there are a few – four or five.”

Alvarez declined to identify her favorite coffee spots, but The Argentine Post has a recommendation -  Establecimiento General de Café, a local chain that has grown to five locations in Recoleta and Downtown.

Argentine Post-fixture Starbucks also has excellent quality coffee, but it serves up its java in paper cups, which is sort of like drinking fine wine out of wáter cooler cups – or maybe out of white ceramic penguin pitchers.

Argentines ate less beef during the first four months of the year than they did during the same period in 2009, the beef industry chamber, Ciccra, reported last week.

A smaller supply of beef combined with higher prices to push consumption down.

But at 56.3 kilograms a person (124 pounds) on average per year, Argentines still chewed up a massive amount of beef.

Last year locals ate 70.3 kilos (155 pounds) per person on average. That’s almost a half a pound of beef per day, every single day.

Almost half of the people living in Buenos Aires support gay marriage, according to a new survey.

The survey, published Wednesday by the polling firm Ibarómetro, indicates that 48.4% of Porteños support gay or lesbian marriages.

That number is up from 45.1% in 2007, indicating that opposition to gay marriage is declining.

The 2010 poll shows that 39.4% of the city’s residents oppose gay marriage, down from 41% in 2007.

About 12% of people polled said they “don’t know” what they think about the issue, down from almost 14% in 2007.

Fewer Porteños are in favor of gay adoption, however, with 37% approving it and 48.3% against.

In 2007 57.8% were against gay adoption while 31.1% favored it.

Pollsters also asked Porteños if gay parents would have a “harmful” or “similar” influence on children as would straight parents. About 44% said gay parents would have “a similar” affect on children while around 30% said their influence would be “harmful.”

The survey interviewed 600 people and was conducted on March 16. It has a margin of error of +/- 5%.

The best pizza place in Argentina, Pizza Piola, is opening a new branch in Palermo Hollywood.

The new store will open on Gorriti 5751.

Not sure what the opening date is but we’ll update this post with the details once we have ‘em.

The colorful pizza heaven has locations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Italy, Mexico, the U.S. and Turkey.

Oh, how lucky those countries are!

In Buenos Aires, Piola is located on Libertad 1078, just a few feet from Santa Fe.

*Special thanks to pizza lover “E Squared” for this slice of information.

The New York Times today published nice little overview of places to eat if you don’t dig on meat.

For those who are vegetarians or who have vegetarian friends or relatives, it might be a good idea to bookmark this list for future reference. If you know of other good options for vegetarians, please leave a note in the comments sections. We’ll compile a list of the best places and publish it later.

You can check out the Times story here.

The U.S. Embassy and the Centro Cultural Borgeswill open a photography exhibit Thursday highlighting the work of the great American photographer Steve McCurry.

McCurry is well-known, among other things, for taking the deservedly-famous photo of the green-eyed Afghan girl seen above. It was originally published on the cover of National Geographic magazine in 1985. Check out his blog here to see more of his stunningly good photos.

The exhibit will run February 25 through March 31.

Details follow:

What: Steve McCurry photography exhibit
Where: Centro Cultural Borges, San Martin & Viamonte, Room 21, downtown Buenos Aires
When: M-Saturday 10am-9pm, Sundays 12pm-9pm
Contact: 5555-5359

Argentina, like Winston Churchill once said of Russia, is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

The country is hard to understand, harder to explain and impossible to predict. Its bursts of economic growth and progress are consistently interrupted by fits of frustration every decade or so.

Over the past 50 years Argentina has seen 17 years of recession and another 17 of hyperinflation, according to a recent Deutsche Bank report.

In 1913 Argentina was the world’s 10th richest nation. In the U.S. in the 1930s people used to describe an exceptionally wealthy person as “rich like an Argentine.” But since then Argentina has stumbled in and out of trouble, failing to capitalize on its vast natural resources and educated population.

Between 1950 and 2003, Argentina’s per capita gross domestic product actually shrank 19% to US $3,760 from US $4,656. In the same period, Chile’s per capita GDP rose 173%, Mexico’s jumped 201% and Brazil’s soared 269%. Though these three nations’ growth started from a much lower base, they all made consistent progress while Argentina declined. Clearly, something went wrong.

What? (more…)

To the potential dismay of countless Latin Americans, regional etymologists and local language lovers, Argentine President Cristina Fernández referred Monday to U.S. citizens as “americanos” and not “estadounidenses,” or, more commonly, but less accurately, “norteamericanos.”

“When few or no Argentine tourists came here, this place filled up and continues to fill up with Spaniards, French, Germans, Americans, Englishmen who came to to visit…,” Fernández said in a speech at the Calafate glacier in Santa Cruz Province.

Here’s the text in Spanish:

“Cuando poquísimos o casi ningún turista argentino venía acá, esto se llenaba y se sigue llenando de españoles, franceses, alemanes, americanos, ingleses que vienen a conocer … aquí vienen de todo el mundo.”

As many native English speakers know from personal experience, some Argentines – and, of course, some Latin Americans – take offense at such use of the term “americano,” believing (correctly) that when formally used in Spanish it refers to all residents of the Americas, not just citizens of the United States.

Like it or not, however, many – perhaps most – Latin Americans, particularly those living closer to the U.S. in countries like Costa Rica, Colombia or Mexico, commonly refer to U.S. citizens as “americanos.” The vast bulk of Argentines I know use the term this way. I know very few Argentines who regularly use the term to refer to all residents of Latin America.

Regardless, usage of the term has generated fierce debate on the streets and in the online world, including on the pages of this blog.

I first learned about the distinction while sitting in the Plaza de Mayo in the summer of 1995. A young man approached me and asked where I was from. “I’m American,” I said, thinking very little of my use of the term. “You’re not the only American here,” the man responded, angrily. “You Americans think you rule the world. We’re all Americans. But you wouldn’t know that, would you, because you think you’re the center of the world.” (more…)