Food, Futbol, and Protests

Happy day after Thanksgiving!!

I've left the land of cow and tango to spend a wonderful Thanksgiving with my brother and friends at Evan Parker's house (thanks Evan!) in California. I flew in the day before yesterday and am attempting to adjust to the time change while hanging out with Chris and Cheryl - my friend from Ningbo who's magically at Stanford! I'm also still walking off the extra chub I've gained from a tasty exploration into Buenos Aires ice cream. The Lonely Planet lists 6 top ice cream stores in Buenos Aires, and I decided that my last week in BA would be a good time to sample all of them.

Jimmy and Katie and Ice Cream

Mmmmm.... Ooooooohhh.... Owwwwwww..... They give you itty-bitty little cones here and pile them super artistically high with two flavors of ice cream! And at a fair we went to last Sunday (more about that later), they sold a 1/4 kilo of ice cream for 2.50 pesos - about 80 cents. I think I've decided that the fruit ice cream here is fantastic, the mint is terrible (a different interpretation of what mint is supposed to taste like, I guess), and if you like dulce de leche (caramel) then BA is certainly the place to be.

Marlboro Man!

So, the "Feria de los Mataderos" (Fair of the um, killers?) - there were horses and lots of leather and dances in a very different vein than tango (folk dances with scarves). Supposedly it's about gauchos (like, cowboys) and there were costumed and wizened old Marlboro men looking guys on horses. The horsemen (no girls) were playing a game where one at a time they'd race their horse down the street as fast as they could, holding a metal stick-like-thing which they were supposed to get into a tiny tiny ring hanging from a stand. If the stick goes in the ring then the ring pops off and the horsemen holds up his prized ring-on-stick and the crowd cheers, yay!

Little Boy on a Big Horse

My favorite was a tiny boy riding a big horse - he must have been about five years old (they had to lower the ring a few feet for him because he was too short to reach the big people height) - and the first time he hit the ring, while the second he perfectly skewered it on his stick, hurrah! Definitely skills I don't possess...

Jimmy Meets Argentine Food

My last week in Buenos Aires Jimmy Chu also came to visit me! Well, maybe he came for work, but eh, same thing... Jimmy, a friend of mine from decadance, came down to BA with Google and discovered that the Argentine tax system is ridiculously complex. Aside from that though, we went and saw an amazing Boca Jr. game.

We All Love Boca Jr.

Boca Jr. is the big soccer (or futbol) team in Buenos Aires and the fans are crazy! We sat in the cheap seats with the rest of the hooligans and therefore got an excellent view of the BA fans at work. They didn't seem to care very much about watching the game, as there were blue and gold banners hung strategically to block one's view of the field. Everyone was also standing up on anything they could (including bars about four feet off the ground), singing (yes, yes, for 2 1/2 hours) Boca Jr. songs (the only one I really understood was about how much we all loved Boca Jr.) to the beat of drums (yes, real drums), and jumping at intense moments. There were also a number of fans who were turned around, facing away from the field the entire game. I'm not sure what the score was, but the Boca Jr. songs are still stuck in my head.

Protesters Coming

We had the opportunity to hear the same melodies again at a protest a few days before I left BA. I wonder if the protesters were the same crowd as the Boca Jr. fans? Between 1976 and 1983 (yay wikipedia!), there was a state-sponsored "Dirty War" that left 10,000 - 30,000 people "disappeared." The generals from the military government of that era are now being tried for their crimes. However, the day before a key witness, Julio Lopez, was supposed to testify, he "disappeared." Hmmmmm.... On the 2-month anniversary of his disappearance, Jimmy and Google coworkers, and me and Dustin, were hanging out in downtown BA when an enormous protest headed our way down the street. I have never seen a protest this huge. We must have watched it go by for about a half an hour, and there were still people pouring in. They were marching to the "Casa Rosada" - or the Argentine equivalent of the White House - with signs and stencils that said basically, Make Julio Lopez appear alive! I am doubtful that it will happen, but I'm impressed at the involvement of people. The people in the protest were also a lot browner than the average person I see on the streets of BA every day (who are by and large very European looking) - making me wonder if more indigenous people were effected during the Dirty War, or if the protest just drew people from other areas of BA where people are browner (and if so - why the color distribution of pale at the city center to brown on the outskirts?).

While, after my brief visit with friends and Chris at Stanford, I leave tomorrow night to fly to Taipei and National Taiwan Normal University to study Mandarin! My plan is to be there through the end of May, but we'll see how everything turns out. I also hear that there is a good tango scene in Taipei, which is excellent, because my spiffy new tango shoes need some chances to practice their stuff.

Happy digesting (for those of you in Turkey land)!