Two Beers and a Pretzel

Last night I was invited to go out with multiple groups, but that soccer game drained all the energy from me.  I overheard a few guys talking about cocaine and figured “Aha!  That’s how they have the energy.”  I slept from about midnight until 1:30 pm this afternoon.  I feel much better.

Aside from blogging and recharging my computer, I’ll probably just catch up on some reading.  I bought Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy back in Copan, Honduras, and have been reading it on the long bus trips.  It’s pretty good, but I haven’t gotten to the part where he was actually active in government yet.  I’m up to the Suez crisis right now.

After my previous post about my steak experience, my Uncle scolded me that I did not go to a real Argentine Steakhouse.  So tonight I will try the “real” thing with a couple of Brits.

I did go out for a while looking for new, cheap headphones for my iPod.  No luck there, but I found a pretty cool mall that had an entire level dedicated to an art exhibit.  Some of the art was pretty cool.  A big theme was industrialization destroying the environment.

And, for everyone back at my old job, they have a GAP in Buenos Aires – just a perfume kiosk, but it’s there…

Then, on the way home I finally snapped a pic of the “Open 25 Hrs” shops that are on every block.  Essentially a convenience store that doesn’t really have anything convenient unless you want candy or soda pop.

Tomorrow I fly to Brazil to meet up with my Aunt, Uncle and cousin for the holidays.

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Camera News.

The Olympus 1030SW is holding up very well, minus the paint chipping off.  It’s a little limiting for the artsy photos I like to take, but it’s nearly indestructible and makes a decent weapon in a pinch.  That, and Ingrid & Erinn helped prove the value of a submersible camera to me at Tabacon!!  Those water-slide videos are priceless.

My Canon G9 made it to my Uncle without the $200 tariff I might have had to pay.  Tomorrow I’ll have a manually controllable camera (exposure, shutter speed, aperture, etc) that can capture RAW files, has optical image stabilization, 35-210mm equivalent zoom range (6x), wider aperture (f/2.8-4.8) but still highly portable.  It actually has auxiliary wide and telephoto lenses that you can add on, but I’ll try to resist temptation…  I will need to get a spare battery and a car charger – possibly a spare memory card, but that’s all minor stuff.

The best news is that my monster 15 pound bag of SLR gear made it home without incident.  It was all fully insured, but I  was still dreading the prospect of explaining the loss of $4000 of camera gear to my insurance agent.  I’m very glad that I did not opt for the latest and greatest of everything before I left (Canon 50D with L quality lenses).  It’s way too easy to get into the consumer mindset back home where you want the ‘best’ of everything.  Yes, the SLR takes much nicer photos, and I loved having it in Europe and California, but it’s a whole different atmosphere here in Central and South America.

Every time I see anyone toting all that camera gear, I think “boy am I glad I sent it all back home”.  Aside from looking like an obvious tourist and target, they also seem detached from the moment they’re living in.  Perhaps I’m just realizing that a snapshot and having fun with new friends is more important to me than spending 50% of my time trying to get the perfect photo.  Don’t get me wrong…  I’m not knocking anyone who really enjoys taking pro-quality photos.  It’s just not practical for me on an around the world trip.

I just need to see another active volcano with the G9 to get ‘that’ picture, then I will not regret any of this camera indecision.

I had a great night last night with the Brazilians.  We had to wait on the girls, but we still got to the club before 2 am.  Once there, it was a pretty typical euro-style disco playing mostly Argentinean & Latin dance music.  A beautiful Argentine girl started talking to me.  About a half hour later she told me how old she was….  20 years younger than me.  I’m not used to clubs where girls that young are allowed in.

I made it back to the pack of Brazilians for a while.  There was also a cute girl from North Carolina that somehow ended up partying with us all night.

We all danced for a while.  Then the club completely stopped around 4 am.  A curtain opened up, and there was a 1/2 hour runway modeling lingere show.  Since my grandpa is having heart trouble right now, he should not watch this video….

Directly opposing my mugging experience, almost every Argentinean in this club was interested in where I was from and how much I liked Buenos Aires.  I can’t even tell you how many people I met.

We left the club around 6:30 am during daybreak.  I hadn’t done that since Acapulco in 2000.

FUTBOL!!!

I slept until noon, then got up to get ready for the futbol game.  Boca (the team with the stadium I saw yesterday) and San Lorenzo.  Major crosstown rivals.  The hostel booked us on the Boca side of the stadium, which was a mixed blessing.  Boca won 3-1, but we got there 3 hours before the game and had to stand the whole time.  It was unpleasantly like being in a mosh pit tilted at 45 degrees for 6 straight hours.  I’m exhausted.

I thought it would be OK, but just before the game started, 20 shirtless guys showed up and pressed their way around me.  They all had tattoos of Jesus, and the Boca team logo.  I was not allowed to bring my sunscreen in with me (you get frisked 3 times before you can enter), but these guys collectively had about half a pound of weed.  You can see the Fidel Casto looking guy toking in this pic.

Don’t I look happy?!?!

I’m not sure what this says about this guy, but you have to really like a movie pretty badly to do this…

Other things they apparently did not check for at the gate were massive banners, fireworks and smoke bombs.  People were setting them off constantly.  In team colors, of course…

The oddest part for a North American at an event like this is getting used to the total lack of personal space.  I might as well have become best friends with the six people immediately surrounding me.  Their sweat is all over my shirt.  There are no seats or railings.  Each time Boca scored, the crowed pushed forward – forcing you to jump down 2-3 steps with everyone else.

They cheer and wave their arms all game.  I got nailed in the head with an elbow a few times by the guy behind me.  I decided to teach these guys the Canadian martial arts of shoulder checking and high sticking.  They still leaned on me after that, but no one elbowed me anymore.

The best part was just before the game started and at halftime when the fire department came in and hosed down the crowd for 10 minutes.

The fans here put American Football fans to shame.  They bring their own drums to play the whole time while everybody sings and yells for the entire pre-game, game, halftime, and post-game.  Six hours.   And that’s without serving alcohol in the stadium.  No seats (not even bleachers), no concessions – just a few vendors selling popsicle’s before the game started.  The fact that there seem to be no rules other than “don’t bring knives, guns, or sunscreen” may contribute to the madness.

As far as stadium experiences go, this makes my top 10 – just barely, but it’s in there…

#1 – being 20 ft from Sam Wyche at the Bengals-Seahawks game in the late 90′s when he grabbed the stadium mic and yelled “You’re not from Cleveland” to the unruly crowd.

#2 – Watching Kirk Gibson jack one out of old Tiger Stadium back in the 80′s.

#3 – Seeing “The Great One” in “The Joe” when he played for the Oilers (again, in the 80′s).

#4 – UC Beats a ranked Wisconsin team in Football.  We rushed the field and tore down the goal posts.

#5 – UC Bearcat Basketball season tickets during Kenyon Martin’s senior year.  Bummer about the broken leg in the post season – we could have won the NCAA championship that year.

#6 – Being the first to do the Icky Shuffle on the field at halftime the week after it was banned from the NFL.

#7 – Green Bay in sub-zero temps with girls in Bikinis and drunk, shirtless guys.

#8 – Yankees at Indians.  Some lady sitting in front of me was waving across the stadium and on her cell phone telling whomever it was “no, over here”.  I stood up behind here and did the “spank the booty” dance.  Whoever was on the phone laughed loud enough for us to hear it.  She turned around just after I sat back down.  Ask Steve – that’s true!!

#9 – Luxury suite at the Blue Jacket’s for Joe’s 30th birthday – then skating on the ice after the game.

#10 – The 6 hour mosh-pit of Boca vs San Lorenzo.  I wouldn’t do it again, but it was worth doing once.

After falling asleep at 6 am, I somehow woke up ready to go at 10:30 am.  I changed my room from a single to a dorm with the Brazillians, and Israeli, and 2 Brits.  Then had a 2PM appointment for the 4 hour bike tour ($20).

While walking to the meeting point, I discovered that the Argentine police have a paddy-wagon that would make Mad Max proud.

We started the tour on the south side of town.  A pack of Aussies, a Dutch couple, a few Brits, and a lady from Miami.

We rode around Mendoza park, where the first failed attempt at founding the city occurred.

Then we left the park and came to another park with the local soccer stadium.  Apparently this is the most popular stadium because it was built on land ‘reclaimed’ from the river, so when the crowd gets jumping, it feels like an earthquake.  They say the stadium has a pulse.    The cross-town rivals have red and white colors, so when Coke sponsored this stadium, they told them they could use any color combo except red and white.

Then we rode on the the port side barrio where all the poor families used to steal paint from ships to decorate their shoddily constructed homes.  This was restored a while back, so it’s what you always see in Buenos Aires travel brochures.  There is a whole arts community, tango themed bistros, and a massive tourist trap.

I fell for the tourist trap.  $10 pesos for 5 picutres… it was worth it…

A little farther along, you reach the old port with the “2nd most polluted river in the world”.  It smelled pretty bad, and the picture doesn’t show all the floating debris.

We moved on to a nature preserve that was a project of the military government in the 70′s.  They tore down a massive number of old buildings and dumped the debris to ‘reclaim’ about 5 square miles from the river.  When they lost power, the project was forgotten.  Eventually the native plants overgrew the rubble, and in the 80′s it was made into a nature preserve.  Build on pulverized houses… kinda odd.

At the beach, instead of sand, there are the remnants of walls, windows, plumbing, etc.  Our guide said that people do not swim here because there is so much glass.  This is actually the river.  The widest navigable river in the world.  You can’t see the other side.  If you could, it would be Uruguay.

Leaving the preserve, we headed back to downtown to the 2nd port that was made in the late 1800′s and abandoned after 10 years because it was obviously too small.  This area is experiencing a real estate boom with prices around $3000 UDS per square meter – where most places are $1000 per square meter.  Here you can see the “Women’s Bridge”, named because all the streets in the area are named after important Agrentine women.  They also say that the far-leaning angle of the bridge matches a woman in certain a tango move.

Finally, back to the Presidential office (the house is in the country).  For Broadway fans, you can stand on the balcony and start singing “Don’t cry for me Argentina”.  Or as one clueless lady asked “oh, is that where Madonna stood filming Evita?”  Some people need to be slapped.

On the way to dinner, I saw a guy doing a pretty sweet soccer demonstration

After hearing so much about Argentinean beef, I ate at a steakhouse.  The prices in the pictures are in Argentine Pesos (AR$3.5=$1)

I tried asking for mashed potatoes, but I don’t think they understood me.  The steak was good (for $10), but still not up to my standard.  The beer and water cost as much as the steak.  When I get home in July, I’m getting one of my butcher’s fresh bacon wrapped filet, my Weber grill, fresh cracked peppercorns, buttered asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes, and salt the beef a dash just before serving.  Add a bottle of boujelais or cabarnet to top it off.

MMMMMMM.  Ok, Anyway…  this was miles better than any attempt at beef in Central America.

Here’s a bonus for my friends who are avid South park fans…  on the way back from dinner, there were plenty of Peruvian flute bands to protect Buenos Aires from the “Furry Death”.

The Brazilians (about 10 of them now) want to go to some club tonight that doesn’t even open until 1 AM in an old Museum.  Free admission…  what the heck?  Why Not?  All I’m doing tomorrow is catching the National Semifinal Futbol game at 2:30.  I can sleep in.

This city has redeemed itself…

As tourist pub crawls go, this one started oddly.  You pay at the hostel, then they give you the address of a park on the other side of town and tell you that the bus leaves from there in 30 minutes.  I figured the bus would take me there, but I apparently made a few erroneous assumptions in my logic.

I met an Irish couple before we attempted navigating the Buenos Aires subway system.  That worked, but we still had to walk 20 minutes to the park.  Once you get there, it’s pretty obvious which crowd of people are the tourist gringos.

There were a log of Brazilians and Brits on the crawl, as well as girls from Sweeden, Germany, Chicago, Alabama  and Texas.  Fun crowd.

The tour company actually posts photos on the web at http://www.pubcrawlba.com and http://picasaweb.google.com/pubcrawlBA3

I don’t think last nights pics are up yet.

We started in the park with free beer and pizza.  The organizers gave us bracelets to identify the crawlers.  We walked to 3 pubs where everyone on the tour got a free welcome shot and discounted drink prices.  After the 3rd pub we boarded a bus to the disco.

The last club had a hip-hop DJ from NYC.  Kind of annoying, actually.  I’m not much for that type of place, except that an old school break-dance fight broke out.  Some of them were pretty good…

The Sweedish girls and Brazilian guys held me back from breaking out my old white-boy moves from my years in Detroit.  Actually, I just couldn’t find anyone to do the Ghostbusters breakdance (where you lay on the floor and someone grabs your feet and runs around in a circle).

I left the disco at 4 am with a taxi full of Brazilians.  Back at the hostel, we ran into a few other crawlers and set off to find the Argentinean equivalent of a Waffle House.  On the main avenue (supposedly the largest avenue on the world), we found  one open place near the famous obelisk.

A Brit, Brazilain, Texan and I had grilled ham & cheese.  I had water.  A few of them actually drank more beer.  I went to bed around 5:30 AM and had to be up before 11 for checkout (a single room is like $60/night, so I switched into a dorm with a bunch of the Brazillians I met for $13/night).

I’m leaving right now for the bike tour!!

This is for Erinn – since I know she’s reading this… I promised to give her this music.

One night we were trading music from our iPod’s.  She’s a huge Metallica fan, so I introduced her to a band with 4 Cello’s that play all Metallica music…  Apocolyptica.  If you’re into it, it’s pretty sweet.  Almost relaxing…