We´re now at day 9 of our stay in Buenos Aires and head off to Carnival in Salvador tomorrow. BA is a fabulous and very vibrant city and it´s been great spending so much time getting to know it. We´ve got a little flat in San Telmo, which is the old colonial area of BA, with cobble streets, antique shops, plazas and tango! It´s also next to La Boca which is the poorest neighbourhood in town. La Boca is the port area and is full of slums but also the home of La Boca Juniors futbol team. So of course we couldn´t miss out on a football match while we were here....Despite wanting to go it alone and not give into booking with a ´tour group´ we were advised by local friends that it was not safe to go alone. So we reluctantly took their advice, which in retrospective was a good one, given that we saw a number of people lying on the ground covered in blood at the end of the match! The footy hooligans in this part of the world are like no other. So we arrived at the grounds a massive 2 hrs before the game started ´for safety reasons´ and took our seats, well we thought they were seats, that was until the locals were standing on our feet and kicking into our backs! Yes there was no sitting down at this match, in fact as soon as the players entered the pitch the crowd started swaying and jumping and punching their fists in the air...hmmm and we were in the quiet safe area. Across from us was where the hard core footy hooligan fans sit- they´re called the ´number 12´ as they consider themselves part of the team. There was a 20 piece band in the crowd that hardly took a breather throughout the game, flares were being thrown, and even 10 year old kids were singing and shouting ´blood vessel bursting´ hard. All in all it was the most crazy football match we have ever been to!
Check out the short video of the match and a few fotos.....
The bus took us to a club house type of place near the stadium for as much free beer as we could drink and some pizza to fire us up for the game.
After about 4 security checks we reached the stadium.
There were thousands of these guys around.
awesome!
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