A New Day, A Fresh Start

When I say Fresh Start, I mean when the night ended. The night actually didn't end for quite some time. As I was writing the post for yesterday, I got to talking with some of the staff who said they were going out that night. They invited me along, and, a few hours later at 2am, 11 of us were on our way to a reggaeton club around the corner. It was quite the experience. As a description of the music, picture the song 'gasolina' in your head then put it on repeat. No one really showed up until 2:45, and the few people who were there before weren't really moving around a whole lot. I thought we were getting there a little late at 2am, but it was in fact early. Whenever anyone tried to talk to me, all I could do was nod and smile - it's hard enough to understand people in english at these places - Spanish was a lost cause. That was downstairs. Upstairs was a little more what I'm used to, in terms of music - although when 'Funkytown' came on I had to smile. It's a whole different music world here! I should mention that before we left there was kind of a mini-fiesta at the hostel; Fabio was obsessed with music from Grease and ABBA, and kept wanting to play it. I think he's representative of the majority - if John Travolta came down here and performed Grease Lightning for a little while he would never have to work again.

After a 4:30 bed time, my day started around 12:30 with me wandering over to one of the more famous cafes of the hundred thousand cafes in the city: The Gran Cafe Tortoni. Established in 1858, its been one of the premier cafes for a large portion of Buenos Aires' history. Unfortunately it really has become a tourist trap, but still it's pretty cool nonetheless. The coffee was good; if I ordered anything else though I would have had to sell my remaining possessions that survived yesterday. In any case, the ambience of the place made me feel like I was in a cafe version of the Long Bar in Singapore. Wood panelling everywhere, a couple busts here and there and a dark, old feel. Pretty neat stuff - if only the walls could talk. In the back was a TV showing the warmup for the Uruguay-Germany game. In Argentina, there is no place too fancy for football. It was almost game time, so I jumped ship to go find a local place to watch.

On my way every TV I passed was showing the game. I stopped in front of a TV store with 10 TVs in the window just so I could say that I've watched something in the window of a TV store - it definitely lives up to the hype. I wound up at another cafe (there is seriously a cafe every 10 feet - I don't know how some stay in business, a lot of them serve the exact same stuff) and watched a great match between the two countries. The TV said 'live' but either the guys upstairs took lessons from Gandalf or my TV lied because a few seconds before every Uruguayan goal there was a loud cheer. It was noticeably silent when German shots found the back of the net, however. The Mercosur bonds are strong!

Tomorrow is the big day, though, and I've been told about a Dutch bar where I can go watch the game. I better not tell anyone I'm pulling for Spain, or bird poop might be the least of my problems.