So much has happened since the last post...it's hard to know where to begin. ...On sunday I walked a really long way to the rendezvous for the futbol match. It was immediately a comedy because it was quite an operation getting us all to the concha (stadium) and back. There ended up being a big group from my school and then I think from another school too, cause there were a ton of us. There we were, a big posse of whities speaking all manner of english, in Junin Street waiting for something to happen, we knew not what. Then emerging from a black puff of exhaust not at all uncommon on the streets of Buenos Aires, came a big orange bus that was about as rickety as they come. It reminded me of the kind of buses that crash on the highways of South Africa and kill everyone on board. Our leader, a River Plate-flag clad little woman from the city, herded us on the bus and by the time we were all packed on there I thought we may share the fate of those lost lives in South Africa!! Early on I named our bus Rocinante and no one got it. (It was Don Quixote's trusty but ragged steed.) They drove us through Barrio Norte and let us all off to gorge ourselves on pizza and Brahma beer. It was in a hall that had a table set for all of us and a peanut gallery that was getting it's money's worth of sunday afternoon people watching. This feast was included in the price we all paid. My crew consisted of the hilarious Tay-Hota...(that is TJ in english, but phonetically, here, it is just what I wrote and it is freaking hilarious cause since he is an american too we both say his name like that of a thug-rapper and no one gets it. They can't understand what he is saying at all, "Tay-Hota es mi nombre". And they look confused and then he'll write it and they go "¡Ahhh!", and then they get it, sort of.) Sabrina from Switzerland, Nicole from Germany and two people from Holland, Alex and Inez. We pounded as much beer as we could and mowed down a bunch of mozzarella pizzas with green olives and then we were herded back onto our somehow even more full bus. When we got to the match we were ready for anything. There were police in riot gear and firefighters with hoses ready to disperse the hooligans. As I explained a little bit last time, each team has a group of hardcore followers called a Barrabraba. They are known to drink copious amounts of alcohol and intake equally as impressive amounts of cocaine and Mary J. So, you add in the unquantifiable passion for futbol and you've got quite something in front of you. We made it through all the security pat-downs and other formalities and filed in towards our seats. I am sure that we looked like a kindergarten field trip to the zoo. All of us gawking around and taking fotos of shit and oohing and ahhing. The seats weren't built to seat americans or europeans. At least not full grown ones. It was an uncomfortable couple hours in those metal little holders. I think they planned it for people to be standing up all the time. I was happy each time something exciting happened and we all stood up. So, I think I mentioned last time that there were Braveheart style battles going on during play. That is wrong. There was no battling going on during our game, or after it. I should say that there is the possibility of Braveheart style violence at certain games. The River vs Boca matches are the ones that are really nuts. That isn't to say though that the barrabrabas weren't really cool to watch. It is really something to watch thousands and thousands of people all jumping in unison and singing and chanting songs as though thier lives depended on it. They throw confetti and drape flags all across the stands and it is as though the whole place is moving like the big body of a serpent. 70,000 people in there, singing and clapping all in unison. It was intense. The game ended in a tie, 1-1, which we americans wished would have gone into extra innings or found some sort of winning and losing outcome. I think that is one of the reasons why soccer isn't that popular in the US. Not enough scoring. Even though it is basically non stop action, a 1-1 tie is a little bit of a letdown for our culture of gratification. (Yeah, those of you citing golf and baseball as slow boring sports, we can spar on this one later, cause I do have a position on that.) Anyway, after piling back into the appropriatley named Rocinante, (I thought so anyway.) we lurched through traffic back to Recoleta and me and the gang had a terrific dinner at some famous old BsAs restaurant.
That ended up being a late night so the next day I was pretty chill up to the time of my departure from Buenos Aires to Montevideo. I met this cat from Ireland reading Moby Dick in the chair next to me in the terminal. After years of doing this backpacking gig, I, and most others, have a certain radar for what you might call compañeros. I saw this guy from a far and knew that he was probably from the UK, that he was a thinker, and that he had been out on the trail for quite sometime. My radar turned out to be on the money (yay me) and we ended up talking for the whole journey across the Rio Plata. He was a really interesting guy. Living now in Sydney, or had been until he left a little over a year ago to seek whatever we all seek in the world. He has been travelling for thirteen months and he looked a little bit worn. He is a philosophe, just the kind of person I really like to talk to, and his ideas were really interesting. He had sort of broken his existence down into a set of guidelines and tendencies that pointed in a general direction. He didn't know what was in that direction, but it was obviously the right way to be going, and so he was going. It is hard to sum up what three and a half hours of conversation yielded, but I came away feeling as though the things that I think and feel everyday had been underlined and identified with. He had studied politics and our world views on these things were almost identical. He had lived in Boston for two years and understood well the american system of politics. We agreed that it was a shame that the ignorant masses of the empire could more or less blindly elect a leader whose actions would affect the lives of those same voters less than they would the lives of a large portion of the world's population. His idea was that the americans could vote on domestic issues and then there would be a global election to decide which american candidate would dictate our foreign policy. You can bet the results of that election wouldn't yield another George W.! Too bad it will never happen. Anyway the guy had a great way of looking at being a part of the solution and about taking the little time that we have and using to do something good. Plus he had a cool accent. Ha ha.
When we arrived in Montevideo and went through customs I realized that the only ATM on the pier did not accept visa, which is an odd and frustrating thing. Thus began my education as to the differences between BsAs and Montevideo. This guy with a genuine smile on his face and mug of mate in his hand pulled over his cab and seemed to know just what was up. He took me to my destination with out any trace of money to pay him, dropped me off with my bag and then took me to get some dough, all without ever setting the mate mug down for a second. This isn't anything spectacular, you just get used to people saying "it ain't my bitch." It was a cool thing. Another thing here is that when you ride in a cab, they open the front door for you and you sit in the little front seat right next to the driver. This makes for certain conversation. The guy last night grew up in the countryside outside the city and knew a lot about the wine scene in the country. The guy I rode with this morning told me straight out that Uruguay was basically just another star on the american flag. In my head I said "Uh oh, here we go..." but he was thrilled about it. He explained that Argentina and Brasil were bullies and this way if anything went down with either of those guys the Uruguayans could just call up Jorge Bush and tell him to send down 'three missiles', and voila! no more Argentina!! I laughed nervously and moved to towards the door handle...I was ready to bail out at 35 mph, but he turned out to be a good guy too. He was a fan of the states and he was really proud of his country. I wondered where his mate was.
I checked into a little place with an old man at the front desk that I swear moves in slow motion. Nothing wrong with this, seeing as he is ancient. But I asked to see the room and immediatley felt terrible and was prepared to be the witness of his last movements and subsequent coronary arrest...he made it...though not without a lot of heavy breathing, and I liked the place so that is where I live now. I had a great meal of raviolis and beef last night and read Stienbeck and watched things happen on the nighttime streets of Montevideo.
This morning I got out and about and walked all over the place. I arranged to go to some wineries and then ordered 'pieces' of pizza that were about four times the size of a normal piece of pizza, then I went to this trippy mausoleum underneath this giant statue of a guy on a horse. There where two gaurds standing on either side of a big black urn and they just stand rigidly at attention while you look at it. There is no fee so there is no one there to monitor or guide you and I have no real idea what it was all about. I just stood there trying to decifer the writing and looking at the guards. What a day they must have. Standing at attention in a candlelit hall beneath the city for eight hours. I walked into the Ciudad Vieja and checked out the National History Museum which was really rad. Full of old oil paintings and swords and treaties and stuff. Then I went to the oceanside and watched an old guy fish. I watched as he slowly walked across the big stones and collected one as big as he could carry and then walk back, cast his line, and then use the rock to prop the pole standing up against the bigger rocks. After a time there was a pull and instead of walking to the line, he walked back to the tide pools and collected yet another stone. Then he walked back and began to reel in the line. On it was a modest looking fish. When he got it up on the rocks he slowly took his rock into his hand and with one confident stroke, he killed the fish and then put it into his pouch. I could tell he had probably done this his whole life. His old, wrinkled, shirtless torso was darkly bronzed and it looked like old saddle leather. He moved slowly, but with a familiarity that I admired. I walked back to my habitacion, tired from the many kilometers I had walked.
A couple things about Montevideo that interest me. 1.) Montevideo is on a peninsula and so from certain spots you can look down streets in three different directions and see the sea at the end of them. 2.) One of the first things I noticed were horse drawn wagons mixed in with the cars and trucks on the city streets. These are without fail, manned by people with dark, sunburned skin and soiled hands and dirty clothes. At first I wasn't sure what they were about, but soon it became clear. They are the garbage people. They climb inside the big dumpsters on the street and take out what might be usable. They load it onto thier flatbeds and then crack the reigns on the horses backs and move on to the next street. The horses are not pretty creatures. They are scrawny and have strange patches of hair here and there. They are blinded by black patches of cloth so that they don't spook. I can't bring myself to take a picture of these folks, despite being very interested in them. Poverty sucks. As Guillermo from Cuba says, "Poverty is a life that is hard. It is partly hard because there is no comfort, and mostly different forms of pain. But the source of most of the difficulty is that it is a life without dignity." Think about that. Rough stuff. 3.) Montevideo is a strange contrast of nice things that look fairly new, and old things that look very tired and rundown. For example, there are nice minivans in the streets. The women are dressed with style and a lot of the restaurants have real tableclothes and nice wineglasses in the windows. There are beautiful fountains in the parks that are surrounded by lawns and palm trees. But at the same time, there are whole buildings that have collapsed onto the sidewalks. There are segments of sidewalk that have been mud patches for years. The colonial buildings are beautiful, but mostly they are falling apart. The old stone balconies are coming down peice by peice and the streets, for the most part, are not labelled. It is the rugged little brother to Buenos Aires and most of the young people from here escape across the water to be cool and hip. Maybe it is my dislike of hipness that makes me tend to like Montevideo better. The people here are more open and relaxed. They smile when they look at you and will happily give you the time or recount a story in the street. Many people walk the streets with thier wooden mate mugs in one hand and thier thermoses of hot water in the other. In some places mate is a ritual, but here it is just what they do. I walked to fetch my laundry a little while ago and had to fight my welling glee as I looked down the slow, wide, leafy, car and horse filled streets and watched the slanted golden rays of the sun as they fought through the late afternoon woodsmoke haze. It really is a beautiful place. A place that is real and would be a great place to call home. The cooler little brother, despite the hand-me-down clothes and the bruises from scrapping in the yard. Yet another good place.
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