Purple Buses and Riot Cops

Good morning, my friends! It´s actually 2 PM here, but I just stumbled out of the bed. I have had quite an adventurous 24 hours, prior to crashing into bed at 9 AM this morning.

The short version of the story is that I woke at 5 AM yesterday to board a bus that would take 6 hours to take me and 100 other folks to Mar del Plata, Argentina, to beach for a few hours, then take in a futbol game, then bring me back this morning, arriving about 8 AM.

Let me start the long version of the story by saying that I had stayed out a bit too late on Friday night, having a farewell dinner for Kate and Nicole with a few other people. (They are heading to Bariloche, Argentina, to do two more weeks of study, then they are taking off to Patagonia for a month of travel. I think I may do a few more weeks of school in Bariloche after my 4 weeks here. The Spanish learning is extremely addictive, and Bariloche is supposed to be amazing - in the middle of the Lake District. More on that later.) The dinner´s just run so long and so late here! So I got about 4 hours of sleep, then blearily wandered down the the city center to get on this bus.

The bus was this double-decker looking beast of a bus. It was purple and yellow and had a non-funcionado coffee maker. I think it was supposed to be top of the line, when it was new. I think that was about 20 hours ago. The bus said "super confort" on the front, but it was quite the opposite. To begin, we didn´t depart at 6 AM as planned because three hooligans were 1.5 hours late, and we actually waited on them! The bus was hot, the seats were unbelievably hard, and well...it was basially just sort of six hours of misery. And, of course, once I´d gotten halfway through the ride there, I was already dreading the ride back.

Halfway through the journey, we stopped at a classic Argentian truck stop. Such a comfort to know that wherever you go, you will find a truck stop. I must give credit to my southern home, which easily boasts the best truck stops in the country. However, this truck stop DID have extremely high ceilings filled with chirping birds, a random kitten wandering around, a huge fire-grill-pit thing cooking some (what else?) steak, and a large pond filled with cod, I think.

We finally arrived at Mar del Plata around 1:30 PM, grabbed some food, and then headed down to the beach for a few hours of laying around. The beach was not the most beautiful beach I have ever seen, but it sure was nice to see a beach. It´s peak beach season here, though, so it was packed! They have these little tents set up all over the beach that I guess you can rent by the day. It´s seems like a good idea, to have a little shady spot to yourself with a table and chairs, but it makes the beach as a whole look very organized and commercialized, which I don´t like so much.

It was perfect beach weather. Lots of sun and lots of wind to prevent you from getting hot and sweaty. The water was definitely warm enough for swimming, but it was kind of a funny brown color that I was only comfortable putting my legs into. (There´s something going on with the water down here. I need to do some research.) The wind was great for keeping me cooled off, but it was also really great at blowing sand all over my body, which was, of course, covered with sunscreen. After dozing for about thirty minutes, I picked my head up to find that the sand had just stuck to me, all over. Just what you want when you have a six hour bus ride ahead of you and no shower, right?

There was this little boy, maybe 4 or 5, sitting next to me on the beach, and I watched him for a while. He was completely lost in make-believe land. He was plunging his hands deep into the sand and then looking seriously down into it, as if to see the future. I started feeling very jealous of him, so easily entertained with himself, his mind consumed by another world. I was excellent at make-believe when I was little. I could spend hours sitting under a tree in my backyard, lost in a secret world I´d created in my head. I guess I´m still pretty good at sending my mind elsewhere when it needs to be (like for six hours on a bus, for example), but it´s sad that we have to grow up and that the make-believe worlds we created and loved have to vanish. I had some good ones.

Anyway, we had been told to be back at the bus at 6 PM, to head to the 10 PM futbol game. Seems like a ton of time to get to a stadium and get to your seat, right? I didn´t really understand it either, considering the stadium couldn´t have been more than a mile or two from the beach, but once we got to the game, it made a bit more sense.

I´m sure you´ve all heard that futbol down here is CRAZY, as I had, but it took going to a game for me to really get it. We got out of the bus and walked down this road 1/2 mile or so to the stadium, and as we approached the stadium, we were told we needed to get into a single file line and STAY TOGETHER. I was slightly terrified. There were cops EVERYWHERE. On horses, on foot - and they were like riot cops. They had these enormous guns on them and were wearing big helmets and carrying those plastic shield things. Once we got up to the stadium gates, we were checked for (weapons, drugs, alcohol?) and then let into the stadium.

The stadium is smaller than an American football stadium but still pretty sizeable. I think there were about 31,000 people at last night´s game, and it was sold out, so maybe that will help for comparison. We got to our seats around 7:30 PM, and there weren´t actual seats, just sort of cement steps. The seating is all general admission, which I thought was really interesting compared to our assigned seating policy in the US. First come, first serve. We got really good seats, since we got there at 7:30 PM, just behind the goal, about ten rows up. The ends of the stadium behind the goals are, I discovered, the place for all of the really rowdy fans.

By 8 PM, the place was beginning to fill up, and the cheering started. Futbol down here, by the way, is really all about the cheering and the rivalry. We were on the "River" side (the team our chaperones were backing), but across the field, you could see and hear the "Boca" side. So for the next four hours, it was just back and forth, cheering, each side determined to outdo the other. I wish I could get a translation of all of the songs/cheers that I heard last night. There were probably at least 10 different ones, and everyone knew the words. And I´m pretty sure they were NOT nice words because I got bits and pieces of them (my teacher taught us a few swear words on Friday). Imagine being at a football game, and half of the stadium is jumping up and down and screaming all - together, "your mother´s a whore," over and over again. It was sort of like that, just in Spanish.

The actual game was great. I like soccer/futbol, I have decided. It´s exciting and very fast paced. Not all of the stop and start of American football. And the players are very dramatic, just like in American football, just a different sort of dramatic.

But the game really is all about the fans and the cheering sections. I felt like I spent half of the game watching the actual game and the other half watching the crazies next to me. At one point, about 25 minutes before the end of the game, everyone in our section just started moving, quickly in one direction, which unfortunately was the direction of our seats. We were right next to the very far aisle, so there was nowhere for all of these people to go, but they kept coming. I was REALLY freaked out for a few minutes because there were just people pushing and shoving, and I got swept away down the aisle. Our chaperones decided then that maybe we should go ahead and try to get out of there, since things were starting to get rough, and we had about 100 people we were trying to get out of there alive.

I was told later that some rowdy fans had gotten into a fight, right in the middle of our section, and so everyone was trying to get away from it, which is where the sudden charge of people came from. I guess they call the extremely rowdy fans "hooligans," and they basically just come to the game to scream swear words and generally get everyone riled up. It was quite an experience. I have a bunch of pictures and I also took some video footage with my camera, so maybe I´ll be able to send that out tomorrow. Oh, and I should also mention that there´s zero alcohol served at these games. Thank goodness...I would not want to see what these folks are capable of drunk.

After that, it was back to the bus, for 1.5 hours of waiting to leave, and then about 6 hours or so of travel. I slept a bit more on the way back, but I was surely relieved when I finally arrived at Rosa´s this morning, showered (and finally got all of that sand off of me), ate, and got in the bed.

Whew!

I am planning to be very lazy today. My new class (yes, I advanced - 91 on my test!) starts tomorrow, and it´s actually all of the same people, just with a different teacher. Should be good...

Til tomorrow, my dears. Much love.