The last week or so...

Bit of a longer entry this time... There's few things...

The first is about the rains that BA has been having lately. In two hours on one day last week, according to Santiago, it rained more than the average level for the whole of February. Whole blocks in certain areas of the city were without electricity for days. Our hostel in Palermo lost electricity at least twice.

A friend of my new landlord (i'll get to that in a sec), showed me this video. Take note of the people holding umbrellas.



Santiago also took us to see a football game. River played Arsenal (not the English one). We arrived pretty early, and got to see the spectacle of the home team arriving for the match. It was pretty awesome. They wait until about 5 minutes before the players run out, and march in with drums, and chants, and huge flags, filling the stands from the bottom up. When the away team comes out, boos, and hisses and whistles abound. It sounds terrible. And when the home team comes out, the chants are incredible, deafeningly loud, with in-time fist pumping from the whole crowd. The WHOLE crowd. I've never seen anything like it. They continue chanting for the entire game and when there's a goal scored (depending on which team it's score for), they react accordingly. I took some video, but it doesn't do it justice, so i won't upload it. Boca Jrs play River Plate in about a month and we're going to try to get tickets... It's supposed to be one of the best sporting events you can ever experience.

From an Australian perspective, there's three unusual things about going to a soccer game in Argentina. The first is the riot vehicles which are parked out the front, complete with water canons. The second is that they don't sell any booze at the game whatsoever, and your bag is checked before you come in. The third thing is that if you're supporting the home team, you have to wait until the away team's supporters have left before you're allowed to go. These three things appear to be interrelated and it's probably quite good that they're in place; don't let people drink so they don't get rowdy and want to fight, don't let supporters physically meet, so they can't actually fight, and if these two procedures somehow fail, use the water canons.

I've also found a place to live. It's on Sarmiento, between Parana and Uruguay in San Nicolas. It's a good spot, with a big room, surrounded by subway lines, with a supermarket next door, and about 15 blocks from Uni (i can walk it in about 25 mins), but i can't help but feel i'm paying a little too much for it. The landlord also tends to let himself in without knocking. I came out of the shower this morning to find his mum sitting at the shared computer (apparently she's really good at fixing television reception). I already have two house mates from Canada (Quebec), and another from Germany who will move-in in a couple of days. They all speak English, which could be bad for my Spanish, but we'll see how it goes. The Canadians speak good Spanish also though... Yasmin is staying here until she can move into her place.

For Uni, we've been going to orientation this week. There are quite a few international students (about 150 or something), heaps from France and the US. We did a Spanish placement test on Monday, and i've been placed in intermediate level two, of four intermediate levels. If you're in one of these, you MUST take Spanish while you're here, but there are other subjects too, tailored to international students (the lecturers speak more slowly, and are more willing to answer stupid questions). Some of the easy ones include cinema, photography, and contemporary art along with others that would be more challenging, like Peronism, history of Latin America, and various literature subjects. I still haven't decided what i'm going to take, but i'll probably end up being at Uni for about 12 hours a week.

Ok... that's all for now.