Football and Friends

Our first Sunday was football (in the rest-of-the-world-sense) day. And not just any football day, but River Plate vs. Boca Juniors day. The match was expensive, but when in Rome/Buenos Aires... and River and Boca have one of the most storied rivalries in the world of organized sports. The game did not disappoint. Well, more specifically, the crowd did not disappoint. It was a home game for River and we sat in their section, but the opposition fans (Boca) were segregated in one corner of the stadium and surrounded by guards and barbed wire fences to prevent any mid-game scuffles. And though they made up only a tiny fraction of the 65,000 fans in attendance, they were loud. But River was louder. Organized chanting and feet stamping and paper throwing and flare burning... the stadium literally reverberated with the noise. Most of which was slurs against the opposition. For the neutral fan, the spectacle was all in the stands, as you can see in this video, which was taken BEFORE THE GAME EVEN STARTED.

As for the game itself, Boca started off much better, but quickly fell off when River scored, then went on to notch another goal via PK, and go a man up as Boca had a player sent off. And all this before half-time. The second half was less interesting with neither side really pushing as much, but the crowd just got rowdier, culminating in the Boca fans literally starting to dissemble the stadium so they could throw their seats out of their section and onto the River fans below. Plastic seat bottoms were just raining down on the River fans, who cleared out of that section and started up their chants again. When the game ended, Boca supporters were escorted out first with the River fans penned up in their seats for about an hour (to protect against fights outside) but we finally got to leave and headed back to the (relative) warmth of our hostel.

But no sooner had we allowed our tired heads to drop onto those ever-so-lumpy pillows than noises sounded outside our door and we made our first friends of the trip: Wayne the South African living in London, Sarah the Australian heading to Bariloche, and Oscar the Swiss German who claims Italy as his country. For these three had begun a traditional Argentine asado on the misty rooftop grill. Wayne demonstrated a brilliant technique for starting a fire (twist up newspaper into tubes which you wrap around the base of of a liter beer bottle, then remove the bottle and surround the hollow tube of paper with coals/wood and just light the paper) and proceeded to grill up some sausage, slabs of bacon, and marinated chicken. Add some salad, some garlic bread, and a few bottles of wine (which is what we did) and you've got a great meal (which is what we had). Sile (pronounced "Sheila," the Irish do-gooder working in London) joined us after the meal as we set down the international standard rules of the ubiquitous traveler's card game known as "Shithead." I tapped out around 2AM, but Kate was going strong for another couple hours and learned something called "Double Solitaire" from Wayne, which I have yet to be privy to.

We finally forced ourselves to check out our language school on Monday, where we thought we'd be able to sign up for 2-6PM lessons only to find out that they only offered intensive lessons from 9:30AM - 1:30PM. Ugh. So early. But we got a great deal ($330USD for 2 weeks of class for 2 people total), so we signed up, explored the area of the school (Congreso) a bit, but soon returned home/to the hostel to continue what had by this time become a tireless search for our apartment. We really wanted a room in a shared apartment and had no idea it would be this hard to get that, given the overabundance of them on the Buenos Aires craigslist. But trouble we had as most rooms were unavailable unto November, or only for one person, or not actually in the barrio listed...

Wednesday, we started our language school. Kate, being a newcomer to the lengua, was placed in the most basic class, while I started a rung up. Her class was made up exclusively of people in the same general age range (with the exception of one middle-aged lady), while mine was a mix with me being the youngest. Also, I was surprised to find that I was one of only four students in the class, for better and for worse. But the teachers are all really great and really nice and we're both learning a lot.