Boca Futbol

So, we finally made our way to a soccer (futbol) game and it was yet another interesting segment in the Don and Marie drama of living in Buenos Aires. This is a city where spontaneity does not breed success for us and everything must be carefully pre-planned with tons of questions. Well, we had let our soccer planning fall to the wayside so when a last minute opportunity arose to see Boca Juniors play in the last game of their season we jumped at it. Let's just say that everything we had planned to avoid about watching a live soccer game here in Argentina happened to us that day. Instead of the private car transportation we were expecting, we ended up on a school bus. No joke. And, when we were handed our tickets we realized that we had paid 10 times the face value for the "general admission" area. That means you are crowded in a bleacher-like section with no assigned seats with several hundred very passionate, screaming Argentinians clawing their way to see the action and push you out of the way. Oh, how we missed the Verizon Center at that moment. At least we won a raffle to get an authentic, Nike jersey of one of the most popular players.

We tried to make lemonade out of lemons and we held our ground in the crazy crowd. Did I mention that it's a dry stadium? We didn't even know those existed. It's not hard to imagine why when you see how crazy everyone is even without alcohol. The opposing team's fans have to sit in a special section and they enter and depart the stadium before the Boca fans. We ended up making it through the first half and we saw all 3 goals that Boca scored that day! Part of the fans' aggression was pretty contagious and we screamed and clapped with every goal. Even really old ladies, mothers, and little children squeeze into this suffocating madness and jump all over the place. We've never seen one crowd know so many different songs--and every single lyric--all devoted to one team. When four year old boys with their dads are screaming "putos" (bitches) at the other team, you know you're at a Boca game in the rowdy, low budget section. All in all, Boca beat Colon and we took great pleasure in that. I hope you don't think we got back on that school bus to go home. Fool us once...