You'll know Uruguay when...

Kia and Geneviève left today... sniff. We hugged them and put them in a taxi to the airport, where they will fly to Brazil to enjoy a week of Carnaval in Rio.

Before getting into the show-and-tell portion of the post, I'd like to let everyone know that my health is now perfect. After eleven emails asking about my bum state, I thought I'd better just make an announcement. My standardized bum aptitude quotient (SBAQ) is now a robust 87. Please refer to your international bum cross-reference table for North American equivalency.

We've had a great week. There is too much to mention in detail, so I'll include few words and lots of pictures. We made it to our first live soccer match last week, joining a tour with a bunch of English people. We piled into a tiny van, and were unceremoniously booted out by the driver about 7 blocks from the stadium, which is called "El Monumental", or, as I have seen it translated, "The Huge". Security was high. There have been some nasty incidents here over the last couple of months, so all of the men underwent a thorough frisking.

The home team was "River Plate", who are in a pitched two-way battle with "Boca Juniors" for football supremacy in Argentina. There are other teams too, but they don't have the same overwhelming support as these two. Have a look at the fascinating comment from an earlier post (tattoo/phallus) to get a feel for the rivalry between these two teams.

On this day River was playing one of those other teams: Lanús. The Lanús fans could be seen trapped on the second deck behind two layers of barbed wire and riot police. Lanús' team colours are exactly the same as River's, so it looked more like the particularly poorly behaved River fans had been put in this detention area.

The stadium was electric. The 50,000 River fans all knew the same songs and dance moves, so for pretty much the entire game there was an incredible wave of sound echoing in the stadium. Some of the songs were originals, but for the most part they would take classics and change the lyrics to "Vamos River Plate". Like Frankie Valli's "I love you baby, and if it's quite alright..." etc. And even weirder (although I think the melody is more ancient than this), Men Without Hats' "Pop Goes the World". You get the idea.

The game itself was a bit of a flop. It was the first game of the regular season, so the players may just be rounding in to shape, although their off-season only lasts about two weeks so I don't know if I should be giving them that excuse. There were a lot of long lead passes up the wing and failed individual efforts. I'm watching a lot of English Premier soccer right now, and there is absolutely no comparison. For real soccer fans this might have been obvious, but I sort of assumed that because people take the soccer so seriously here, it would be extremely high-quality. The English guys agreed; they said that it was a bunch of bollocks.

It was a scoreless tie until the 90th minute, and River scored a nice goal off a corner. The ball skidded off of someone's head to a wide-open man on the far side of the box. He volleyed a ball off of his chest into the near side of the net. So in the end, all of the River fans were very happy, and we felt as though the game had been saved by the late goal.

The funny thing was, in spite of the fairly boring game, replays were on every television for the next two days, along with in-depth white-board analyses and heated discussion groups. It is amazing how expansive the cultural machinery built up around the sport has become considering the low quality of the product... Anyway, to avoid bricks being thrown through my window by dudes with phallus tattoos, I'll stop writing about the poor quality of the soccer now.

The other excitement was a trip to Uruguay early this week. We started by taking a 3-hour boat ride to Montevideo. It was a very interesting city. Poorer than BsAs, and much quieter and slower. We had Chivitos for lunch, which is the South American equivalent of poutine. Check out the picture... I do not need to explain the concept... but I will say this: To Canadians who believe that poutine has achieved any kind of gold-standard peak of excess for foods having a french-fry substrate, you are sorely mistaken. I tried to explain poutine to our Uruguayan cab driver, and after explaining the gravy component to him, he asked "But what about the slab of meat?".

The next morning we travelled by bus to a place called Colonia del Sacramento, which is an old colonial city once used by the Portuguese as a smuggling port to avoid Spanish trade barriers at the port of Buenos Aires. The old city is a very cute network of rough cobblestone streets and nice foliage. We had read about a nice beach a couple of kilometers out of town so we took a walk in search of it. Next stop: Playa Ferrando. After a couple of wrong turns and near-military-base experiences, we found it. It was on the other side of a really beautiful rural strip of land between the edge of town and the water.

The beach was about 1 km long, and not very busy owing to the Tuesday factor, so we found a nice spot in the shade and swam. The water, because it's actually the wide mouth of the Rio de la Plata and not quite the ocean, is a nice brown colour.

After way too much sun we retreated to the Cabaña and pounded Heineken for a while. They played great music, and the entire staff would dance while working. The peak, I thought, was James Brown's "Dynamite". The kids at nearby tables started dancing, then we started talking about how bad our dancing abilities were as North Americans, then we walked home.

The next day Jen and I rented scooters! So we can now check that off of our list of things to do in this lifetime. There were many hilarious moments, mainly connected with Jen learning to use a motorized two-wheeled vehicle. At one point she managed to jam the entire horn/signal switch assembly under the housing while trying to turn off the signal, which was making a horrible squawking sound, and in so doing she managed to get the horn stuck in the "on" position. So we were sitting at the side of the road with the scooter honking and squawking, and us laughing (me laughing), before I finally decided that enough was enough, and I turned the key to the "off" position.

Now, shifting into full diplomat mode:

Jen decided that it would be best to learn the basics of scooter-driving at conservative speeds. We made sure progress along the coast north of Colonia, and we appreciated the fact that elderly cyclists took great care to use hand signals while overtaking us during that leg of the trip. Afterwards we headed back to Playa Ferrando and had barbecued meats fresh off of the parrilla before heading back into town to drop off our powerful machines. By the end of the trip, Jen was much more comfortable on her scooter, but I don't think that scooter-renting is going to become a weekly activity.

I managed to hit a top speed of about 195 km/h on my scooter... but the speedometer wasn't working, so I had to calculate my top speed using an estimate of the frequency of the tail-end of my helmet strap slapping me in the face... but I think it's a pretty good guess.