Futbol

Buenos Aires has a ton of professional soccer teams.  The most famous two teams are Boca Juniors and River Plate, and when they play each other -- the "Superclasico" -- as they did this past Sunday, the whole city shuts down.  The most recent iteration of the game took place at Boca's stadium, La Bombonera.  While the available tickets for this game were a bit outside our price range, we did find a fun bar to watch Boca win 1-0.  However, we did catch a game at La Bombonera a few weeks back, and here's an idea of what it was like:

The game we went to was against Newell's Old Boys, whose name goes back to the early 1900's when a group of students named their group after their British teacher.  We went with a group of friends and by the time we all got there, the box office only had tickets for the "popular" section - basically where all the crazies are.  The band (which means dudes with drums) were blocking the center so we were forced to go a little to the side - this turned out to be a good thing since the center of the popular section is almost too ridiculous. And, Kat was definitely one of the only girls in the area. We pretty much parked ourselves and tried not to look too foreign as we'd heard some stories of what to expect in those sections.  The game was amazing - the singing and the drums didn't stop once during the 2 hours (incredible...seriously).  The fans also really like to climb on the fence around the field and wave their hands in a way that I can't really describe (see video).  The above video is the best we could do while trying not to broadcast the fact that we had a digital camera, but youtube has some others that might give you an idea of what a boca game is like.   Luckily, Boca beat Newell's 2-1 with great goals from Rodrigo Palacios and Martin Palermo, and the mood on the way out was festive.  We'll try to catch some more games in the next month.