Sunday

Today was a "free" day for the students. We woke up to a rainy morning -- we've been so lucky with the weather until today. We had planned to go to San Telmo to see the famous Sunday street fair and open-air market, but with the rain that didn't seem like a good idea. So the students chose different activities -- some went to museums, some to an art exhibit around the corner at La Rural convention hall, and some waited a little while until the rain stopped and they made it to San Telmo after all.

At 4:00 many of us met in the lobby to get on a van to the day's big event: the FUTBOL (soccer) match between River Plate and San Lorenzo, two of the "top five" best teams in Argentina. This was a very important game, because River Plate has won more championships than any other Argentinian team, but they've had a bad season and were in danger of losing their spot in the first division of the league.

Argentina soccer fans are passionate about their teams, and it was a cultural experience to be in the middle of a crucial game. This game was at La Monumental, the biggest stadium in Argentina - it holds 85,000 and most of the seats were full, as well as all of the standing room. La Monumental is also infamous as the site of the 1978 World Cup that Argentina won, in the midst of the worst dictatorship in its history. The stadium is only a few blocks away from ESMA, the clandestine detention and torture center that we visited on Wednesday. Our guide to the soccer game, Pablo, pointed out that, back then, the screams of the prisoners would have mixed with the screams of the soccer fans.

But tonight it was all singing and chanting and shouting (much of it unprintable), mostly for River Plate, the home team. River scored first and the game was 1-0 until the ball bounced off the goalie's hand and San Lorenzo tied the score. The River fans were very disappointed -- it seemed like a bizarre way to score a goal. The game ended that way, in a tie. River still has to win 3 out of the next 4 games in order to keep its spot in the first division, so the fans are still very nervous.

Most of Argentina's futbol teams have English names, because the British first brought the sport here. River Plate is a weird translation of Rio de la Plata (literally, river of silver), which is just next to the stadium. We weren't sure whether we were rooting for River, which has the reputation of being the wealthy team -- its nickname is "Los Millionarios" -- the millionaires. That name actually comes from the team being the first in the country to pay one million pesos for a player, many years ago. We thought it was funny that some of the chants were "yo soy millionario!" (I am a millionaire!) and "vamos millos!" (go millionaires!), as well as the predictable "vamos vamos vamos River Plate."