OK quick recap of #2-4 The Tango World Championship. So cool. About an hour before the final show of the 2 week event Geb called me to tell me that his friend has 2 extra (and free) tickets. How lucky is that!? So apparently the even started with hundreds and hundreds of couples and on the final night about 20 were left. Each couple danced once which took about an hour or so and then there was a full tango concert while the judges did their deliberation thing. There was an orchestra and a few good singers. The couples were all just unbelievable. Surprisingly they were from all over the world- including Japan and Australia. A couple from Argentina ended up winning though and then they had a final dance number. It was so weird to see and entire sports stadium with screaming, cheering tango fans. It was one of those times when I knew I wasn’t understanding how big of a deal what I was seeing truly was. Apparently the tango singers were really famous…
Argentina vs Brazil
What a mess. A good mess and a bad mess all in one. From the very beginning things were not organized. There were problems with our tickets (real tickets that turned out to be fake tickets which were returned for actual real tickets). The bus to Rosario was supposed to leave at 10am and didn’t leave until 12:30. I got there bright and early at 9:30 because I didn’t want to be late after waking up at 7 which is the Argentine equivalent of bedtime. I was so paranoid that I was going to be robbed that I put my keys, money, phone and ID in my bra and didn’t even wear a jacket. Adam and I slept the whole way there in a van that smelled like pot with 4 guys from Jamaica, two British people one Canadian and a couple from California. We slept most of the way there, got something quick to eat and then headed to the stadium so make sure we got in okay and everything. We had tickets in a section called “popular” which basically means its standing room only where all of the crazy, passionate fans watch the game from. We were standing and waiting for the game to start for 2 hours and in that time I learned basically all of the cheers by heart because the fans were just relentless with the cheering even when there weren’t any players on the field. The game itself feels like a huge blur. Half the time I was fighting for a spot to stand, keeping myself afloat among the throng of people, and trying my best to get some sort of view of the field. I have to say that if you want to really watch a soccer game stay at home. However, the energy and emotion running through the crowd was well worth the multiple threats on my life during the 4 hours we were in the stadium. At one point everyone in the whole stadium was jumping and singing this one song and you could feel the concrete stadium shaking. It was ridiculous. We didn’t get back to Buenos Aires until 5:30 that morning officially making this the longest day trip of my life and I ended up sleeping until 5pm that afternoon.
Córdoba
Every semester the Middlebury program arranges a series of “cultural” outings. Our first one was to the city of Cordoba. Midd paid for our hotel there and the plane tickets there and back as well as our breakfast (which was included with the hotel). We arrived on Friday morning and after checking into the hotel went on a tour of a University there where Middlebury is planning on opening another program. After that we did a series of tours around the city of churches, a mate museum (pretty boring) and a fair. The next day we went on a hike for the day with the whole group, our directors and a tour guide. That was actually really fun because it was so different from what we do all the time in Buenos Aires and we were able to spend a lot of time with each other speaking Spanish and what not. Sunday we went to Ariel’s family’s house for an Asado. By “we” I mean me, Whitney, Adam, Mark, and Ellen. It was really, really nice of them to have us over like that. We spent about an hour eating and another two hours just talking and sitting in the sun. Sunday was a national holiday celebrating students so we went to this giant fair for students that ended up being so boring. We ran out of things to do after an hour and ended up just killing the day in a restaurant. Overall it was a good trip, mainly because of the bonding and hiking.
