BA was great but now I´m in El Calafate

Hey everyone, sorry about the long wait between entries. This one should keep you busy for a while so I hope that´s some kind of consolation. No photos yet sorry. I haven´t found a good cheap internet cafe where i´m staying yet, but the one I´m in now is alright, but I don´t have the cables with me at the moment, maybe I´ll come back. But enough of my internal dialogue, I´m sure you want to know what I´ve been doing. Well, in Buenos Aires me and Monkey saw a soccer game, which we paid way too much to do it with like this tour group, the seats we had probably cost like $15 (pesos, which
means like AU$7) and we paid P$120, which really doesn´t sit well with our plans to budget to stay for a year. However it did make it easy, as they took us there in our own bus, which was good because monkey and i did not exactly master the public bus system, usually going with the ¨that´s going in the right direction now¨ phylosophy which doesn´t really work when the bus makes a wrong turn and goes down the freeway for a few kms then drops you off on the side of the freeway where there is no bus stop because this is the closest place to where you wanted to go. That was alright though, we walked down to another bus stop that looked like a bus from there might take us to the city, and we waited, and waited, and continued to wait for ages cause all the buses were full of people coming from the free rock concert that we wanted to go to but couldn´t find so they (the buses: fragmented, no suggestion) didn´t stop. But it was alright because we got to practice our spanish with this chick who was also waiting, which was good cause you don´t get many oppurtunities where locals have nothing better to do than try to understand our pigeon spanish and talk back slowly so you can understand. In the end we had to catch a taxi back to the hostel anyway cause none of the buses were would stop, apperently about 200,000 people went to this free rock concert. Anyway, the soccer was really good. We went and saw probably the most popular team play at there home stadium. The croud was crazy, in a good way, there was no violence or anything however the fans of the other team were seperated from us and at the end left before us and were made sure not to hang around by an army of police, which was pretty intense. But back to the game. The crowd was awesome, they had all these chants and would sort of mosh in the stands, where we were we were standing for the whole game, siting down at half time, and there was like a marching band in the stands on the opposite side of us where the craziest fans were, and the band played for the whole game and still played while they were walking out of the stadium. Also across from us and to our right they pulled out these huge banners which they passed over the croud and it was just amazing because they were massive and they´d just pull
out one, pull it back in, then pull out another and another, and you´d just think, ¨where the hell is all that material coming from.¨ It was kinda wierd though because the home team lost 3-0, and when the other team scored a goal there was just silence, because there were so few of the other supporters and you´d go to give them a bit of a golfers clap, you know, good goal, well played, then you´d look around at the frozen faces of the fans around you and think, maybe not, maybe i´ll just keep that one to myself. Also on the list of things to do was to have a tango lesson, which we have and we can confidently say we have mastered tango, along with the entire spanish language . Also I tried the home made caramel icecream which is absolutely awesome. It´s like caramel fudge in sticky, milky, sorbet form. Awesome. We´ve seen alot of the touristy sites and got a bit of an insite into Argentinian
history, google the mothers of the plaza de mayo, and we went to the museum of fine art which is definately world class, with a few picasos and other very nice art (you can tell I´m a real connoiseur, and yes I had to google that word to check its spelling). All the while, we did five days, 4 hours a day, spanish lessons, which we´re really good because they gave us a lot of listening and conversation practice, and a lot more confidence to try to talk to people. After we finished the lessons, we both wanted to get out of the city. It´s a beautiful city but there´s a lot of argentina to see and we had to start sometime. We also decided to part ways for now, to try to focus on our spanish, as we were always talking in english with each other. So Monkey headed towards Cordoba and I took a plane down south to El Calefate in Patagonia. It´s the perfect time to come down because it´s just after the busy season and the wheather is still good. I went and saw the Perito Moreno glacier the other day, which was awesome, and took heaps of photo´s, but if you want to see some just google it, and google earth it, the whole area sould look pretty cool. There´s lots of lakes, glaciers and mountains, ie. the andes. My next port of call will probably be El Chalten, which sould be nice. More glaciers and mountains, then probably on to Puerto Madryn to see sea lions and penguins. Thanks for all the comments, keep em coming and I hope you´ve enjoyed the entry.

Marc/Plummers