Icebergs and Llamas

I started writing this in El Calafate, Argentina, but I was taking too long and had to finish in Bariloche, 30 hours north of there. So this is a new intro, which I am writing from Bariloche, the biggest city in the lakes region of Argentina. I just arrived in Bariloche at noon today and I don´t want to do anything here except catch a trout, clean it, and eat it. It is brown trout season and I intend to catch a huge one. If you´ve ever been to Lake Tahoe, then you have a pretty good idea of what Bariloche is like. The only thing is, except being surrounded by desert, Bariloche is surrounded by hundreds of other amazingly beautiful lakes with NO development on any of them. Its a good thing to still be able to see in 2009. I hope very few entreprenouial Americans come here to see this and ruin it. On the other hand, I think Calafate is pretty much made to cater to older American tourists. I think it is for this reason that I enjoyed taking some time off to regenerate here before going up to the 3rd world madness of the Peruvian Andes. The prices here for everything suck, and every tourist activity is owned by one company that charges retarded prices, compared to EVERYTHING else in South America, and a lot of North America.

Since the last entry I went to Puerto Natales, Chile, on a bus, across the Patagonian plains. This is probably the most desolate area I have ever seen. It is worse than driving across Kansas 3 times with a Fran Drescher recording stuck on repeat. We made the best of it by making fun of the tourists that actually thought it was worth taking 500 pictures of. One girl literally took pictures for the whole 6 hour ride. There were maybe three things worth taking pictures of, and those were the llamas, sheep, and mini ostriches. So we finally get to Puerto Natales after 2 more stamps in the passport, and our hostel is overbooked. Great. We get put in the¨annex¨ which is really just the hostel accountants house. She later robbed me, but we will get to that later. You may think that wouldn´t be a bad thing but this place didn´t have the heat on or any furniture other than our beds. The beds were wood frames with a 5 inch thick piece of that shitty old yellow foam that is available in sheets from a hardware store. I was so tired that I just crawled into the crap bed under 5 blankets to keep the Patagonian cold off of me.

The next day we went to the hostels lecture on doing the W. The W is the trail that weaves throughout Torres Del Paine National Park in the shape of an upside down M. We were pretty excited after the talk, other than the guy giving the lecture trying to be too cool for school. Some high points from the talk to focus on were:

• "You should be wearing running shoes, not waterproof shoes.....oh me?....I wear boots because I´m stubborn"


• "Don´t step over rocks, walk through the creeks"


• "If you´re not miserable then you´re not having fun."


• "You could die"


• "I don´t wanna ruin anyones extreme vacation, but Patagonia is NOT extreme"

All quotes from Extreme Trekker Guy giving the lecture. (I had a blast not doing any of these retarded things)

So pretty much the guy thought he was a badass. I didn´t think patagonia was supposed to be extreme anyway. I just came to see some icebergs, penguins, and to take some good pictures. This guy just wanted you to think he was more extreme than anything ever. So after the talk we go and rent a tent, some trekking poles, a cooking kit (consisted of a bunsen burner from someones chemistry class and a pot), some sleeping bags and some mats. My poles didn´t match and it was difficult to get them the same length the entire hike. No big deal. We figured out how to do the tent on the second try without any instructions. Then came shopping for food. We made some pretty rookie mistakes here and paid for them later. Oh well, shit happens. We went back and got our packs packed up with the camping shit and food for 5 days and one change of clothes. I guess the packs were about 12-14 kg each, which is pretty heavy. All of the other clothing and stuff from our packs got stuffed into a huge sack that was left at the hostel while we were in the park. I finished packing 2 hours before Lauren and crawled back into my ice bunk for an attempt at sleeping one last night in a bed.

Day 1.
The hike (or trek if you are "extreme"). We arrived at the park on a bus with a bunch of other unexpecting tourists and took a catamaran across a glacial lake to the place where we would start the hike. We get the bags situated with some nuts and dried fruit accessable so we could get on the trail for the opening leg, up to the gray glacier. This was uphill halfway and STEEP downhill the other half. It was a nice hike through a small canyon to start and then ended up at a beautiful lake that looked like an infinity pool with edges that seemed to drop off the mountain. A few more steps and we see a giant, electric blue iceberg sitting in a cove of the lake. This is the kind of scenery I came to see. We gawk and then hike on. After what seemed like forever, we got to the viewpoint of the gray glacier and the access point to the Patagonian Ice Field. This was such an amazing view that I forgot about the bruises that were starting to form on my hips from the pack and tossed my backpack down and started snapping pics at 100 pics per second. Lauren was pretty miserable at this point from the heavy pack, so according to the lecture guy, we were doing just fine! We started heading down the downhill part to where we would camp at the foot of the glacier on the shore of the lake. The campsite never seemed to come with all the breaks we were taking so Lauren could rest her back! We finally arrived and the site was worth every step. Little mini icebergs kept floating by and we could see the glacier extending up into the patagonian ice field. We pitched the tent, made dinner and headed to bed at the earliest hour since we got to South America. The beautiful weather on day 1 was enough to spoil us because it rained like crazy all night.

Day 2.
We wake up to the worst rainstorm we would see the whole hike and decide to stay in the tent till it subsided enough to take the tent down and re-pack. That happened really late in the morning so we had to burn it up on the trail, in horrible weather. When you are snuggled up next to a block of ice the size of nebraska, it tends to affect the weather in mostly shitty ways. We started back the way we had come the day before which was the \ part of the W. Some of the wind at the viewpoint for the glacier was knocking people down. It took me by the pack and spun me around once or twice and threw me into some bushes. No big deal. We made it back to the place we took the catamaran to the day before and saw the most amazing rainbow sprawled across the lake immediately in front of us. Snapped a few hundred more pictures. We then continued down the trail to the bottom of the middle part of the W. This was only 2 more hours and 11km more. Due to the rain it was super muddy. Lauren slipped off a rock and got her shoes soaked so she took to walking through the ankle deep mud and streams. She was now miserable again, so we were doing it right according to the guy at the hostel. Because of our late start we made it to the campamento really late and were lucky to find a spot next to some of the israelis. It was FREEZING cold so Lauren curled up in her sleeping bag and I sat out in the dark making dinner on the bunsen burner. I was glad to end day 2.

Day 3.

Pretty easy day, we just went up the middle of the W and back down. It was called Valle Frances and had some really nice views. It was straight up the whole way but the weather was sunny again. Luckily we didn´t have to bring our packs with us for the view since we would be going back to the campsite before moving on to the other side of the W. We got our packs and tent and headed on to the next campsite. Along this path were some of the best views I saw. There were huge granite towers shooting up above us and bright turquoise lakes below us. The wind was actually so strong that it was blowing the water out of the lake in huge sheets. We watched for a while but couldn´t get any good pictures. The waterfall above the campsite was really tall, but the wind would blow hard up the mountain and completely stop the water from falling for a few seconds. That need we had planned on eating at the refugio and we did and drank some much needed beers and met a Dutch kid that is my age, 23. He was doing the 9 day circuit but was about as unprepared for it at we were. He´s a pilot for KLM Airlines and flies 747s. He´s still traveling with us until tomorrow and then we´re gonna meet up in two weeks in Valparaiso, Chile, to hang out at the beach before Lauren and I do Macchu Picchu. Anyways we headed to bed after a little walk through pitch black wilderness to find our tent. I happened to look up and see the most impressive night sky I may ever see with my own eyes. Patagonia has to be one of the least light polluted places in the world and it just happened to be clear for one night on the trail. We all stared in amazement for quite a while. The stars seemed huge and you could actually see the wavy white blurs behind the stars that I guess make up the galaxy.

Day 4.

Thank god, more good weather. This day was the longest part of the hike and took us to within 45 minutes of the end of the trail. 1 hour into our 21km hike, I slid off a rock and completely soaked my shoes. since I had no blisters so far, I decided to do the rest in my flip flops. It was´nt as bad as you may think since I have some of the Chaco flip flops with quite a bit of arch support and vibram soles. Either way, the extreme trekkers on the trail and at the campsite were pretty impressed. We hiked this part with Florentyn, the Dutch one, and an Austrian girl and another guy from Belgium. We were a pretty ragtag group but we were all sick of the hiking part and ended being the first ones at the camp! The only casualty that day, other than the temporary demise of my shoes, was my Appalachian hat. A sudden glacial wind hit me like a wall at the top of the canyon and ripped my hood off my head and my hat out from under it. It flew forever and is now a part of the Patagonian scenery. Luckily I lost my hat near the end of the trek and wouldn´t need it much more anyway. I was upset for the rest of the day because its the hat that I bought to wear to the Michigan game two years ago. At least I still had my App sweatpants to wear around the camp at night. After losing the hat, I had another hour and a half left so we kicked it into high gear in order to be the first at camp. While taking a break during this leg, a couple passed us and Lauren thought she had taken a spanish class with the girl. We all didn´t believe it and wrote off the idea as crazy. Well we got to camp and set up tent and while sitting around with the crew we had met on the trail, this couple walked up. To everyones dismay, Lauren and the girl did have spanish together in the fall. This is pretty amazing considering we´re within spitting distance of Antarctica and we haven´t met any other Americans in this part of chile, not to mention, we´re five days deep into the woods. So they recognize eachother and out of complete coincidence the four americans in the group of 50 people at camp, all graduated from ASU in December 2009. Hows that for crazy? This night we decided to eat our last pasta dinner. We had saved macaroni for last and we were both looking forward to it. I cooked it up on the bunson burner and as soon as I opened the cheese packet, I knew something was horribly wrong. The smell was beyond toxic. I threw it in anyway and thought maybe there would be some sort of chemical reaction with the noodles that would make it smell and taste amazing. Wrong again. I ate one noodle and gave the rest away. Everyone wanted to try a bite and after tasting it only one person was brave enough to eat the whole pot. The morrocan uber hippy killed it in a few heaping bites. Time for bed.

Last Day.

We slept like shit all night because it got really cold and rained really hard. Around 3 or 4 AM I noticed the rain had quit so I poked my head out of the tent and noticed that it hadn´t really quit but actually had turned to a full on patagonian blizzard. I had nearly been sunburned and walked in flip flops and shorts the day before, now my -17º sleeping bag was leaving me with frozen toes. I decided not to worry about it and went on with the plan to wake up at 5 am and hike up to the top of the mountain, where the view of the towers were best at sunrise. A 1 hr vertical hike in the dark through new snow was quite the experience. Us, Florentyn, and some old guys were the first to arrive. It was clear for around 3 minutes before the sun came and then it turned to clouds and more blizzard. After everyone else from camp arrived we had fun talking shit about the weather and admiring the experience and then we all descended very quickly. After gathering everything from camp and eating a little more oatmeal, we hauled ass down the mountain for 3 hours to end at the last stop, where the bus would pick us up. The motivation to leave was uncontrollable. We arrived at Hosteria Las Torres, the last stop, laid the tent out to dry, and went inside to eat meat and drink beer while we waited for the bus. Another amazing experience had come to an end and we were headed back to civilization for the first time in a week.

In all, Torres Del Paine was an impressive place. I liked the blue glaciers and the icebergs in the lake the best. Next time I come back I will either have a porter to carry my bag or I´ll rent a tent each night at the refugios to cut down on carry weight.

After the trek we had already booked a room back in El Calafate to chill out and recover. We ended up having a few too many celebratory beers with Kristoff, Florentyn, an English guy, and the Austrian girl that night and Florentyn convinced us to stay in Puerto Natales for another day and then go to Calafate the next day with him. We didn´t need our arms twisted too hard but we had already asked for the bus tickets for the day before. Well the accountant/bus booker/ thief never confirmed our bus purchase with us and it was now like 1Am. No note on the door or anything and we had wanted to leave at 7Am so we figured we didn´t have tickets. We sleep in and wake up to the accountant bitch screaming about how she couldn´t find us the night before with our bus tickets and how we had to pay for them even though we missed the bus. I argued pretty heavily in spanish and cussed in English and eventually got Lauren to go to the bus station to see if we could switch our tickets for the next day. Nope. I gave Accountant Thief the money to get her to shut up and go back to her freezing ass cold cave of a house. The guy that ran the hostel was on our side but said he was a separate entity from the old hag so he gave us a fifty percent discount on our rooms and let us stay an extra night to recoup our losses from the hag womans theivery. Glad to leave the town of Puerto Natales.

Before Torres del Paine, we went to the Perito Moreno glacier in Glacier National Park, Argentina. This place was so amazing that I literally sat in the rain, watching it for 4 hours. It is one of the only advancing glaciers in the world. Its a huge mass of blue ice that ends at a turquise lake full of icebergs. Every twnenty minutes or so, the front of the 200 ft wall of ice will send out a barrage of cracks louder than a machine gun, and the face will fall into the water, sending a title wave through the lake and giving birth to another iceberg to float around in the turquoise lagoon. This was blowing my mind every few minutes so I took about 400 pictures while walking around the viewing area with my jaw completely dropped. I can´t explain it any ther way than that so you´ll just have to wait for the pictures, which should be up by the time I leave Bariloche.

Until then, I hope the tar heels lose tonight, like my blue devils, so I don´t have to hear from the fans for another year about how great they are. Go to hell Carolina, RIP Duke 2008/9 Season.

Buenos Aires and Ushuaia

Since I las wrote, a lot has happened. Most of the time was spent in Buenos Aires, with exeption to three days in Ushuaia. I just got to El Calafate, Argentina last night.



Buenos Aires ended the way it began, rather eventless and relaxing. We were supposed to fly to Ushuaia on March 4, but we missed our flight with a priceless bonehead move. I thought the flight was 7 at night and it was really at 7AM. Oh well. I ended up convincing the owner of our apartment to give us the monthly rate since we had to stay there an extra week. This made a big difference because now we didn´t have to pay for the extra 6 days. It must have smooth talking because I would have never let anyone do that.

Anyways, we ended up hanging out with Ilona and Cornelis, the Dutch couple quite a bit for the next couple of days. We found a take-out parilla, that was insanely cheap, so we ate dinner there almost every night. At the parilla, for Lauren and I, we would get 2 HUGE prime steaks, a huge order of potatoes prepared any way you like, and some other kind of protein, desert (we normally got the amazing flan), and a 2.5 litre soda. All of this cost a whopping 12 American Dollars. The soda was good. We need something like it in the USA. Its generic name is pomelo, which means grapefruit. All it is, is grapefruit juice and a little carbonated water with a little extra sugar. It was like 96% grapefruit juice so I felt alright drinking it! The two nights we didn´t eat at the parilla were the nights we decided to set out to find chinese food. Cornelis and I decided this at about 4 AM one morning before bed. We were pretty burnt out on steak. Also, argentines don´t use any spice other than salt when they cook so we were really looking forward to some curry or something exotic like PEPPER! We looked up ¨best chinese food in Buenos Aires¨ and chose a place called Buddha Garden or some crap. After recruiting the new English guy, Glen, and rounding up Lauren and Ilona, we went for our food. It was in China town and we were all salivating on the walk there because we could smell the egg rolls cooking in all that tasty grease. After walking past all of the ¨ghetto¨ chinese places that were all packed, we arrived at the Buddha Garden, which was chic decor, PF Changs type of chinese place. It wasnt really what we had expected but we decided to trust the reviews we found on google. It turned out that it wasn´t even chinese. It was that fusion type of asian food, which I could care less about. We all pretty much felt that way. It ended up being too expensive and we decided that we would do the ghetto chinese food the next day. Ghetto chinese food was one of the best things we decided to do in Buenos Aires. It ended the longest streak of no chinese food ever experienced in my life!

We did a few things other than eat and go to soccer games in Buenos Aires. We explored the different neighborhoods and saw the tourist sights. I really enjoyed the parks in Palermo. Other cities could really take some notes from the expansive parks down there. They stretch for miles and miles. I also liked the Puerto Madero area, which is main port.

Ushuaia is badass. After our extra week in BsAs we got our flight to Ushuaia. It was really cool because its about like Alaska. The southern most town in the world (all the way at the bottom of South America, on the island of Tierra del Fuego) was exciting from the get go. Flying in, it was super cloudy, like you´d expect, and we came out of the clouds and were practically on the ground. That was a little nerve racking, with all the recent plane crashes and all. We stayed at a beautiful hostel overlooking the Beagle channel. There was a pool table and leather couches and a nice sound system on the top floor lounge, with panoramic windows around the whole room, for views of the channel. We spent quite a bit of time up there planning our attack of the pacific coast of South America. We hiked up the Marital Glacier while we were here, which gave great views of the town and the Ushuaia bay. We were going to go to the National park but it was insanely expensive, so we saved our money and ate a ton of the local king crab that night!

For the trip, we decided to head up the atlantic coast, on the paved road, then over to El Calafate to do some hiking and see some ENORMOUS glaciers. I´m in El Calafate now, getting ready to sit down with someone to plan my treks through Torres del Paine and my trip up to the Perito Moreno Glacier. It is one of the few advancing glaciers in the world. It moves toward the lake every day and huge, 60 meter tall, walls of ice fall into the lake when it reaches. I wish I had about $5000 more to do everything I wanna do down here in Patagonia! Unfortunately we´re gonna have to make it back to North Carolina within budget, so that means bussing it up to Peru ASAP after Patagonia. Hopefully we´ll be able to spend a week in Mendoza, to try some wines and tour a couple vineyards.

After my expeditions through Parque Nacional Los Glaciares and Torres del Paine, I´ll update again! See you guys soon. We´re on the home stretch!

Club Atletico Boca Junior

Well holy shit. Today I woke up the earliest I have been up yet in Buenos Aires in an attempt to get tickets to the famous Boca Juniors soccer game. This proved semi-successful, since we got tickets, but less successful in the fact that we got Populare seats. Porteños don´t wake up before noon unless they actually have a job, which some do, I think. We were up at 9 am catching the deserted subway up to the bus station where we take an airbrush painted and chrome rimmed bus up to the barrio de La Boca. The working class neighborhood isn´t as bad as everyone says it is, but I think that is just because I´ve been to La Paz before. We found the line to get tickets after a few minutes of gazing at the stadium. It only wrapped around 2 and half city blocks. We waited in the 90 degree heat for what seemed like an eternity to get to the boleteria, where you buy your billetes. I asked for Platea seats, which are where the rich people sit and they pay about $20 for this privelage. The very direct ticket seller only said NO. I explained in my amazing spanish that we would sit anywhere as long as it was safe. He said ok and that would be 9 dollars. We got our tickets and realized they were in the INfamous seccion populare. At first we were thinking it would be ok and that we could handle a rowdy crowd but then we got home and did a google search for some advice and found this epic piece of blog literature on an American experience in the populare

Part I
Going to a Boca Jrs. futbol game for the first time is a lot like going to Buenos Aires for the first time: you wanna find out what it's like, what's gonna happen. If you get out of there alive, you're going to do it with new memories and a new you. That's the hope.On the day of the Big Game, my internet was still down. I don't know my home phone number so hadn't given it to anyone else. I was basically unreachable. I had Cory's number but our landline here won't dial out to cells. The local locutorios (phone and internet joints) around here were all closed because it was a Sunday and this is a God-fearing (the Judeo one more than the Christo one) barrio, god damn it!So during one of those moments when I could cop some free wireless from the farmacia down the road I dropped him a line saying I would meet him and Chris at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Boca, which is 1/2 a mile or so from the stadium, around 2:30PM.Fortunately my roomie The Kellness showed up with her cell phone and I was able to reach Cory, because he had emailed me that he and Chris had different plans: we'd hook up at the Catedral subte (subway) station at 3 and taxi from there. I wouldn't have got (received) that email, so all praise be to The Kell and her magic phone

We did meet at Catedral, got a taxi at Plaza de Mayo and descended into Boca. If you've been to Boca, and I don't mean the little painted houses caminito part of Boca but more that bad-ass Tony Bourdaine smirking and chowing on a choripan (chorizo on bread) kind of Boca, then you know that Bronx-like (lots of cool restos, lots of shirtless guys who've got those major working-class [stoner] eyes) feeling (I've never been to the Bronx but I've seen it from a bridge and it looked pretty urban; so having La Bombonera in the middle of this scene feels a bit Yankee-esque or I guess Fabulous Forum-esque for all my homies out in Inglewood).So the stadium seems to have several mini-barrios to itself, and there are huge fields near it where one can score some grilled meats, weed, and scalped tickets. And it was this tickets aspect more than the meat or weed aspect, that took up the first 1.5 hours. We did not buy weed and later this proved sentient: the herb-to-air ratio in our section was far higher than that, of, say, a reggae concert in San Francisco.There were three of us with somewhat differing ideas about what constituted a successful ticket score. The variables were price and location, and the location variable ran from the popular to the platea alta (high plateau areas are places where people with more dough and whiter skin can sit on actual seats and rarely if ever be showered in the urine of the opposing team's fans) . We couldn't always tell from the tickets what we were looking at. But we knew one good thing, strong and true: DO NOT END UP IN THE POPULAR SECTION!I won't even play. We know, y'all know, we totally ended up in the mas popular section possible.We talked to maybe 20 different "scalping crews," over an area of several square miles of field and barrio, trying to hustle--under a scalding sun and in a thick smog of BBQ--in our case, the worst possible tickets for the highest price. We are bad-ass gringo sports fans, scalper bitches. Step off.So now that we had our awesome billetas (b-jettas) it was time to find our way into the forbidden section popular. We had to move through several mini barrios, street by street, crowd by crowd of horse-mounted and boot-mounted 45mm-packin' police, horde by horde of roving hoodlum-esque groups of scary (locally colorful) chanting stoner hooligans, talking to cop after cop to find out which street to go down to access puerta 6 and the mysteries that lay behind it.There were multiple security barricades in the streets that we had to pass through, being checked for guns, bombs, that kind of deal. Too bad those guys didn't do a slightly better job.

Eventually, four barricade-levels in, we found our entrance gate where we would soon learn whether our totally fake-looking scalped tickets would get us through the turnstiles or not. Fake-looking in that the dot-matrix print job of the ticket info was totally crappily printed and smearing off. Happily, our scalper guy had not been bullshitting us when he said that smeared ink and crappy printing was proof these tickets were legit. We were permitted to enter the Amazing Stairwell of Urinating Hombres.

Part II
The stairwell up to the popular bleachers is a fifteen-foot-square four-story gray brick rectangle. When we enter it, there are three or four men on each level, urinating either towards the wall, or in the more classic Latin American style, facing away from the wall and pissing into the middle of the walking area.People had been entering La Bombadera for a couple hours before this time, so the floors of the stairwell landings were nicely humidified with their first coats of fresh piss. The smell was not yet overwhelming.We came to the first door out into the bleachers, and I had a sense we should keep ascending in the stairwell to a higher level, but my companions pushed on through this first door and into the already totally jammed bleachers. This may have been a mistake. If we had gone higher up, we could have ended up in the shade under the upper deck, with a better view, and out of the throw/spit/urinate line of the enemies in the opposing-team's-fans section above us. As it was we were in direct sunlight, watching through a barbed-wire fence, and in danger.Next time you are heading into La Bombadera's popular section, keep going as high as you possibly can.The popular bleachers are made of cement, nine ten inches front to back, eighteen inches from butt level to foot level. When we first got in about an hour before kick-off, though we stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other fans--actually there was shoulder overlap--you had a place for your feet and a place for your butt. But by the time the game started, you only had one place: you could either stand there, or sit there and pull your knees up to your stomach with your feet on the same level as your butt, in a roughly 9-inch-square area.

Each team is sponsored by a company and the company name is the dominant thing on their jerseys--the pro ones and the fan ones. On the Boca Juniors jerseys the word MEGATONE blazes across the front and back in blue on yellow. Independiente's colors are red and white, and these are also the colors of their sponsor's logo. I will not mention who their sponsor is because for some months I am a Porteno, not some sub-human Independiente-loving scumball who throws wet and or burning things onto my body while I try to watch fut.The opening proceedings have a lot to do with promoting the sponsors' stuff, plus some sports-for-kids stuff, then some cheer leading stuff. Our cheerleaders were lead by Batwoman, as you can see in in this video.

All of this involves yellow-and-blue related things around the periphery of the field, but the whole time a big red and white logo for the opposing team sponsor is spread out dead-center in the field and beautiful young (but probably subhuman) women stand around the logo holding red and white flags unmoving for the full hour-plus.When the match finally starts, it takes a minute or two for the popular section to get into full roar, but by the time they do the volume is unbelievable

They sang and chanted at least thirty different songs in perfect unison and it was like having icepicks reamed into my ears it was so freaking loud. They must be half deaf after a few games of that and are now insensate to the ridiculous decibels.Immediately I could see this was a higher level of soccer than I am used to seeing on TV in the States where I am watching American, Mexican, some European, and some international matches. I was dazzled by the skills, and it looked like Boca was going to dominate, they were so creative, precise, and fast. Yet I know it can be very hard to get a small ball through eleven guys and into a small net, and one bad moment on your end, and you're screwed.I learned at that match that soccer is not as boring as it seems. Being in a psychotic horde of deranged maniacs who have nothing to live for but the game, you start getting a feeling for what it's all about: appreciation for skills, bravery, and heroism. Every time something skillful happens, the crowd flips out with applause and songs and hoots in appreciation, even if it ends up in "failure." One guy taking on six defenders and getting THAT CLOSE! got nearly as much applause as if he had scored a goal. A player stealing the ball from another who had just beat three other guys: roaring cheers! An unbelievable spin move followed by a precision-lofted ball to a downfield attacker, pandemonium of chanting and screaming and clapping and cursing and taunting at the enemy above us. Even if we had not put a number on the scoreboard, we had just smote the enemy to our own everlasting (one or two seconds) glory.On TV you don't get that. You don't hear it or feel the continually changing pulse of the crowd as it reacts constantly to what is happening on the field, second by second.

And then BOOM. Boca own-goaled themselves, right in front of us, right in the goal not forty feet down to our left. I saw it in my mind over and over: our defender sliding in on his knees trying to block the ball in the frenzy of action at the net, and the ball clearly coming off his grass-sliding knees and into our own goal. You see this in the first part of the video linked to below, from television broadcast of the match.But there was no sense of fan anger against this poor sap. Everyone in the stadium knows the sports gods are unfathomable. Some pats on the back, the ball was taken to the center line, kicked and the game continued.And the first half-stick of dynamite came down from the upper deck, landed five feet from me, and blew about twenty of us off our feet. I could feel my rib cage bend inward with the blast, I was momentarily deaf and all I could see was white.I had to clear up a bit before I could determine if I was injured. I wasn't, really. Sort of an unusual blast-radius sensation in my chest and legs, but that's all. Others around me were checking themselves, laughing nervously, and trying to continue watching the game, but with frequent furtive glances to the upper deck that would continue until they let us out of there.The bombs seemed to be a ploy to get us into a situation where we were continually looking back into the upper deck, from which the spitting and tossing of cups of scary substances then commenced. This was responded to by our section with explosive torrent of abusive screaming, the most common and recognizable word of which was PUTA!!! whatever that means.During the rest of the match, only one more bomb came down. Our senses were so heightened by this time that we could almost hear the thing flying down at us and so we covered our ears, spun away from the likely explosion point and curled away from the explosion.The spit, though, and cups filled with scary unknown liquids mixed with cigarette ash, continued to rain down the whole time. Huge viscous spit wads hit our backs, heads, shoulders, chests, faces, depending on which direction we were facing. We were constantly glancing up and behind for fear of more bombs coming down, and then we'd see a rain of phlegm descending from the sky and there was really no way to avoid it if it was coming down at you, because there was no space to move. You could see these guys were used to it: a huge wad would hit their shoulders, and they'd just reach back with their shirt and scrape it off, often without taking their eyes off the game if something exciting was happening.Earlier I had noticed that most of the shirtless guys around me had pretty large bruises on their legs and arms and torsos and massive scaps on their elbows and knees. I have to reckon these guys were season pass holders, because those bruises could easily have come from both being bombed and from being knocked down on these sharp-edged cement bleachers.

At 1:46 in that video, upper left, is the moment where I first got bowled over by a tidal wave of humanity and and injured my pelvis pretty decently. At least I seem bruise- and scab-free even if I can barely walk more than a week later and my back is killing me. On the plus side, the powder burns on the right side of my neck from that first bomb seem to be healing really well.So the game ended a 1-1 tie (both goals unfortunately scored by our team) and there was a lot of scary threatening going on between guys in our area and guys above. I decided, after several hours of putting aside my intuition to get the hell out of there, to get the hell out of there now and I got about thirty feet closer to the exit when I realized we weren't going nowhere. The doors were locked.They kept us locked in the popular area for more than an hour while the entire rest of the stadium completely cleared out. So we sat on beer- and Coke-soaked cement, staring through barbed wire, in 100F heat, for an hour while the animals above us threw cups of wet grossness down upon us and the "security" dudes stood around and didn't do squat. You couldn't move from your position if you were in a particularly rich line of fire because we were all just crushed in there like 12 people in a 5-man elevator. We just simmered, stewed, and got abused, while maybe a hundred of us hung on the barbed-wire cursing and gesturing at the people above.Once they got all the rich white folks out out of the rest of the joint, they finally opened our doors and the mob flood started. I was hot to get out of there so I sort of aggressively pushed my way into the stairwell.Guess what! It was not TWO FREAKING INCHES DEEP IN PISS! It was an un-partable Sea of Urine that soaked through our tennis shoes as we slowly herded ourselves, inch by inch, through the airless tunnel.But not just airless. There was actually an honest-to-god piss fog in there. The heat and the moisture and the vast quantities of urine had turned the stairwell into a full-on toxic urine gas chamber. I held one hand over my nose and mouth and tried not to breath too much; meanwhile the sticky cloud stuck to my flesh and burned. Eventually I got out and stood on the sidewalk waiting for Chris and Cory. When they came out they both had their shirts wrapped around their faces. They pulled them away and gasped for air. Their shoes were soaked to the ankle.When I got home after 2 hours of trying to catch a taxi later--we finally snagged the 29 bus back to Plaza de Mayo--I got on the internet and bought a ticket to another match. I will be returning to the section popular.Surely the fans of Colón de Santa Fe cannot be as debased as those of Independiente.

Written by some other guy on google blogs

This was hilarious to me. We decided to go ahead with the popular section for some reason. We made it to the stadium and after trying to trade for better tickets we decided to just bribe the cop into letting us in to the more "tranquilo" popular section. It worked and we didn´t have to bribe. We made it up to our concrete ledge and sat under the roof provided by the visitors section above us. This was a good call because we didn´t get spit on like the guy in the previous story. We did see all of that stuff happen though. about 20 rows below us, people were getting hit with all kinds of stuff from the angry opposing fans from above. We enjoyed it as part of the show since we knew what to expect. We never really felt in danger, except for the 2 inch piss pool that was the baño. I did think my ears were going to explode in the second half when Boca started scoring a lot. The popular on the other end of the stadium was so loud that I was literally looking around for a fighter jet that I thought was circling the stadium. It was sustained noise that was so loud my ears hurt. Simply Amazing. The first half was a 0-0 tie and I almost fell asleep. The noise was so loud in the second half that I missed the fact that the opposing team scored a goal. I found that out a few minutes ago when I got home.

I wish I were going to be in BA another week so I could go to another soccer game. I can´t even go to a movie for what I paid for that game in the US.


Link to original story I found!