Ciao Aug and Tom, hola Punta del Este
Trip Start
Mar 09, 2007
1
159
169
Trip End
??? ??, 2008
Punta del Este,
Uruguay
Monday, March 17, 2008
We had a pretty good last night. We decided to do an Asado on the roof top of a friend of Augs, Emily. I headed up the cooking with Tom and Balci as assistant chefs. It took way longer than expected due to having coal issues, but in the end the food came out delicious. By the way, I have officially decided that when doing an asado in the future here in Argentina, I'm just gonna buy a whole filet mignon tenderloin and cook it whole. Its so damn cheap (1kg which is about 2.2lbs costs 21 pesos or 7 dollars) and it always turns out the best.
Everyone proceeded to get hammered before we went out to Las Caņitas. Some of us had to switch over to water at one point.
Tom, Aug and Balci were nice enough to invite me out to lunch at La Cabrera for showing them around (I told them it wasn't necessary, they insisted). Aug knows the legend behind La Cabrera, but I think Tom and Balci thought we were exaggerating. You should have seen their faces when the steaks 'as big as your face' came out. They are also now in the know as to where you can find a steak 'as big as your face.'
I find it semi-sinful that I have gone this far traveling in Central and South America without having gone to a single soccer game. Thats pretty sad. Balci also wanted to witness this Latin institution, so we bound to resolve that. We rolled up to the River Plate stadium, I argued with the scalpers for a bit and got us some seats. We weren't entirely sure where we were sitting but when we got there we couldn't believe the sweet ass seats we got. It was a hot day and we had landed seats on the shady side of the stadium at about the 40yd line in about the 10th row up. They were dope seats. So we nursed the hangover away that afternoon while watching the madness erupt on the upper decks. The upper decks are the cheap seats and this is where all the craziness happens. Those fans were on their feet the entire time, dancing, chanting, singing and causing general chaos. I would love to experience being in that madness someday, that day was not today. We were glad to watch the madness from afar. The game was decent, no goals though, 0-0.
The funny thing is after the game is over, they lock the home team spectators in the stadium and all the visiting team spectators are allowed to leave the stadium, giving them about a half an hour to clear out of the streets before they let the home team fans out. They do this to prevent fights, riots, and general chaos. So yea we sat in the stadium for a while afterwords just hanging out. It was pretty funny actually seeing it, because the stadium went from chaos during the game to chilling out and chatting after the game. It was like someone just turn the 'go crazy and riot' switch off.
With Tom and Aug gone and Balci having another couple of days of vacation, Balci decided he wanted to go check out Punta del Este, Uruguay. So we are off tomorrow to Punta del Este.
I needed a break from going out, so I stayed in while Balci went out with Pete (travel buddy from Christmas, he is living in BA) to check out the Salsa dancing scene here in BA. Balci is an extremely good salsa dancer as is Pete. Balci's report on the Salsa scene was that it was extremely go get people to dance with him. He was one limited due to his Spanish but he said he thought the main problem is that they were in some form discriminating him. Not sure on this one. Pete has expressed similar problems.
