Futbol and more

It's been quite a while since I used this thing. Life is great, school is winding down, and it genuinely feels like the first couple days of Spring because, well, in the Southern Hemisphere it is.

A couple weeks ago some friends and I attended "la bizarren," which loosely translates to "bizarre party" in a big club. We all wore masks or some sort of disguise and got to ride a psychedelic train/bus there. I wish my internet connection allowed me to upload photos but it just takes too long. They're really necessary for this party. There was an overweight male stripper, enough said.

Yesterday we went to watch Club Atletico River Plate host Club Atletico Boca Juniors in the "superclasico," basically the biggest game you could ever want to see in the Argentine Football Association (AFA, could stand for something else?). It made the previous football game I'd attended look like a Lafayette Fall Fair. Over 50,000 people packed the stadium. We got there about 3 hours early (actually a good decision because I'm sure transportation/getting into the stadium gets out of control closer to gametime). Both clubs had their b-teams playing which proved to me, once and for all, that football (latinoamericano) isn't the most boring sport in the world. B-team football is.

Anyways, the story behind this game is intriguing. You have Club Atletico River Plate (River) whose stadium is in a very nice area of the city. They even call themselves "los millionarios." Boca Juniors come from "La Boca" (the mouth) at the mouth of the river here. The houses are made of various recycled, differently colored materials that give it a happier vibe on magazine covers than you'd probably encounter there at night. Tango originated there, making it a necessary stop on any city bus tour, but you wouldn't want to hang there the whole day.

Basically, the fan bases are exact opposites and seem to really hate eachother. In place of overly-commercial artificial sound and videos literally polluting American stadiums for any sport, football here is basically completely silent. A seriously outdated scoreboard with blurry writing would occasionally pimp some insurance company, but apart from that, the sound comes all from the fans. From an hour or earlier before the game started, the 50,000 River fans, proudly donning white and red jerseys and occasionally a cheap fedora with "Soy millionario" (I'm a millionaire) printed on them, would berate Boca's visiting fans (who happily occupied two massive sections in the upper deck, surrounded by as much barbed-wire as a jail yard and bordered on both sides by empty sections to prevent the fans from throwing shit at eachother) with chants ranging from (paraphrased) "I'm proud to be a River fan" to "You Boca fans are all dirty Paraguayans and Bolivians." Thousands of Boca fans would jump around, throw things on River fans below, and sing back in familiar melodies but lyrics I could never even try to understand given my distance from them.

After the game (a 1-1 snoozer, for what it's worth), things get a bit more complicated than both fan bases cheerfully serenading the other. They've devised a system here where all (and I mean all) home team fans in the entire stadium are prohibited from leaving while they evacuate the away fans onto buses to be zoomed back to their neighborhood. We saw no violence, but watched helplessly as the Boca fans took about an hour to file out (with the assistance of not-so-cheerful riot police). By the time they allowed us to leave, there were no blue and yellow jerseys in sight.

I asked my friend at work what happens after these football games that they're so damn scared of two groups of fans crossing each other.

He said if a group of the other team's fans cross you in the street, and there are more of them than you, they'll assault and rob you. Rob you of what? All your clothes. Apparently it's not too unheard of to find an unlucky "hincha" (fanatic) naked and lying in the street. Sad...