BUENOS AIRES Part 3

On Friday we went to La Boca neighborhood of BA. We checked out El Caminito (which is a really touristy area of all painted houses)

Manu's bball court??

Then we went to the soccer museum attached to the Boca Stadium and saw maybe the best museum movie I’ve ever seen. It was a 360 degree movie making it seem as if you were a soccer player trying out for La Boca and scoring in a real game. I thought it was exciting, but the Argentinian guys next to us looked like they were in heaven with God sitting on their left and Argentinian God (Maradona) sitting on their right.

Here are some pics of the museum, and of the stadium.

For lunch that day we went back to the first restaurant I ever went to in South America - I went there in January when I went to BA for 4 hours for a layover there.

That day I tried on a really nice leather jacket that I really liked, but I decided to think it over before I bought it.

In our never-ending quest to take as many modes of transportation as possible, I demanded that we take the subte (subway) home to the hostel. It was actually really fascinating. At first it seemed a bit dirty (or maybe normal on a subway scale of filthiness), but the train itself reminded me of the old New England commuter trains – it had all wood paneling and it looked like it could be crossing a snowy covered-bridge in Vermont instead of traversing the underworld of Buenos Aires. Also, it costs less than a quarter to go anywhere in the city. There's a picture at the end of this link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Buenos_Aires_Subte_Linia_A_-_interior_of_a_Subte_train.jpg

That night we went to a sushi place (which I wasn’t really down for, since I’m not big on sushi). They brought us about 200 pieces of sushi to split between 8 of us (we met some of Elisa’s friends from school there), and after we finished them her friend told me I HAD to try the national drink of Argentina, Fernet and Cola. That was a mistake; it may have been the grossest tasting drink I’ve ever had. I drank about half of it then didn’t want any more. I immediately started feeling sick. We went to a bar across the street and before my friends even ordered drinks I was in the bathroom returning the sushi to the source. There are two things I’m never doing again: eating sushi and drinking fernet.

Of course it was five minutes after this that my friend from Kenyon showed up at the bar. I recovered fairly quickly though and we went to a cool club right on the River Plata called Club Mint. It had two rooms for dancing, and an open air patio in the back that was about 20 yards from the water. On the way home (around 6 AM) we had our second run in with a sketchy situation in BA. We got into a cab and I told the guy where we wanted to go, but I immediately noticed something was wrong. He couldn’t speak clearly, but through hand signals and mumbling I figured out that he was saying that the meter was broken and that he was going to charge us about 8 times what it should have cost. Once I figured this at, I yelled at him using my special Chilean Spanish (adjusted with the Argentinean accent of course) and told him that we were going to get out right there. We took another cab home and it was fine. However, another guy from our hostel was robbed on the way home from the same club. Once again, I’m glad I’m staying in Viña and not in BA.