Come on, light just a little fire?

When you walk around Buenos Aires wearing your Boca Jrs. jersey you get one of two reactions from complete strangers. Either merciless taunting and complaints about how ugly your shirt is, or enthusiastic cheers and thumbs-up signs. There is no middle ground. And when you walk around Buenos Aires the day of the Boca Jr. v River Plate game, when those two teams happen to be separated in the standings by a single point, and the newspapers are already calling this game a “superclasico”, the normal reaction you would get seems to be magnified exponentially.

The Argentineans really are quite mad about their football. Actually they are just quite mad, but their madness seems to express itself most evidently in relation to their football. My original plan was to attend the match in person and witness the madness firsthand. I endured trial and tribulation to achieve this goal, but alas it was not meant to be.

When I started asking around about how I could get tickets for this game I discovered I had one of two options. I could find a travel agency that catered to tourists and pay them a lot of money (and for this game, I mean A LOT of money) to come pick me up and take me in a nice air-conditioned bus to the game and give me a tour of La Boca. Or I could do what the Argentineans do, which is stay up all night Saturday queuing (although that’s far too generous a description for the madness that occurs) in front of the stadium, wait until 4 PM the next day when the game starts and hope to get one of the standing room only seats. But odds are you won’t get in anyways, and I’ll probably get mugged or knifed, seeing as La Boca is one of the most dangerous parts of Buenos Aires.

I try to avoid doing things the “tourist” way but I didn’t really like the second option either. So I went searching for door number 3. And I found it, so I thought. “Just go to La Boca a day or two before the game and try to scalp tickets on the street.” Simple enough, I can do that, I’ll just hop on the bus and head to La Boca.

My last job at Microsoft involved manually disassembling machine level computer code and cross-referencing it against various modules in various computer languages in various components of our operating system in order to isolate a particular line of defective code out of the millions of lines of code that made up Windows. This proved to be excellent practice for navigating the Buenos Aires bus system.

The standard Buenos Aires bus guide is, I kid you not, 192 pages long and contains everything you could possibly need to figure out which bus to take to get to a particular destination, except a route map showing where the bus actually goes. But street names, intersections, maps of various parts of town broken into little tiny quadrants, names of the routes, they are all in there.

It’s this sort of absurdity that makes me love Argentina. I haven’t found anywhere else in the world where everything is quite so ridiculous, seemingly for no other reason than the fact that we are in Argentina. After several confused minutes of pondering over the guide, determined that I needed the number 10 colectivo to get from Recoleta to La Boca. But I had no idea where to catch the number 10 and the guide was of no help. So I do what I always do when faced with such obstacles. I asked the nearest person.

One way in which the Argentineans seem to be quite like their fellow South Americans is that they all have this predilection for helping wayward travelers. Perhaps there is something in the culture that dictates that one should never fail to help with directions. Perhaps it’s simply out of necessity because not even long-time residents of Buenos Aires can understand their bus system. But time after time whenever I’ve been lost, and asked a random person for help getting where I need to go, they’ve always come through. This incident proved to be no different. A random stranger on the side of the road helped me out and I was off to La Boca.

Once I got there finding the stadium was no problem. The problem was that there were, of course, no tickets left for the game. When I asked the guy working at the cashier station he gave me the same look I have seen many times, “silly gringo, don’t you realize this is the biggest game in Argentina and you’re asking to buy tickets two days before the match, of course there are none left” He advised me to try asking on the street.

So I did, and after a couple people the best price I could find was $300 pesos (about US $100). Now it would have been super cool to be able to go to this game, but there was just no way I was going to spend that much. I’ve learned a couple things about myself while I’ve been traveling. The first is that I’m a cheap bastard. And the second is I only really want to go things I want to do, not things that I should do because they’re cool or will impress other people. No my excursion to the Boca Jrs. Stadium would have to wait for another day.

So when Sunday rolled around I decided to head to one of the many local bars, knowing that just about every TV set in the country would be tuned to the game. Whenever I watch football or talk about it I kinda feel like a poseur, because, well, when it comes to football I’m a poseur. I started wearing football jerseys because I they’re super comfortable, look really cool, and are way better souvenirs than those silly “I heart AR” shirts. Not because I’m a huge fan.

But in the last few months I’ve watched enough football to be able to appreciate the skill and athleticism involved in the game. And it’s really not that complicated to follow, you put the ball in the goal, you get a point. The one with the most points wins.

But there is more to football than just that. There are several levels of a game within a game within a game. It’s a constant back and forth, not only team versus team, but game versus the clock. The tension mounts with every bit of fancy footwork, every hard slide tackle, every break away and every save. Games are generally close enough that as the minutes wind down the anxiety among the crowd builds to a fevered pitch such that the scene is ripe for uncontrollable madness to erupt.

I’ve had it explained to me that this explains the hooliganism that is rampant among football fans. Personally I think Occam’s Razor cuts to the explanation that football fans are just a bunch of hooligans. Not that there is anything wrong with hooligan’s mind you, I mean who doesn’t enjoy breaking stuff and then lighting it on fire.

This game was a perfect example. Boca dominated the first half in every way imaginable, except the scoreboard. And they went into the locker room (or wherever it is they go) down 1-0. The second half escalated beyond belief and saw 3 red cards between the two teams. Just as time was winding down and with River Plate still up 1-0 Boca scored on a penalty kick with 30 seconds left in regulation to tie the score 1-1.

And of course the Boca fans, who only slightly outnumbered the River Plate fans in the bar I was in, began jumping and chanting and waving their banners as they are apt to do. The game was fantastic, I was on edge the whole time. I got to practice my use of the imperative clause in Spanish, “Vaya!” and “dale!” And of course the pejorative in several instances. I was never quite sure I got it right but it didn’t seem to matter because I was sufficiently loud.

The game ending in a 1-1 tie meant that everyone was somewhat pleased and there was nothing broken or engulfed in flames. I found this slightly unfortunately as I was prepared to see the Argentinean football madness, but I have faith in the spirit of these people, be patient and give it time and all things will come to be in due course.