Adventures in La Plata

I was sure I had already blogged about this, but apparently I am even more behind than I thought. I'm jumping back to October 29 here...

The morning after arriving from Mendoza with Joseph and Victoria, we set out to see some of Victoria's family in La Plata, about 1.5 hours south of Buenos Aires. This turned out to be a popular time to visit, as Victoria's brother was in from New York and her uncle was in from Paris as well. After surviving a "You speak English? I learned from watching tv, so let's practice!" conversation on the bus and brief ride in a subcompact car with 6 adults, we arrived at Victoria's mother's first cousin's house. Kind of like my family in Charleston, there seems to be less emphasis here on how you are related and more on simply being related, so I received an extremely warm welcome.

The asado, the Argentine equivalente of a barbeque, that followed was pretty darn impressive. As far as I can tell, the custom simply involves showing up at around 11 am and eating without pause for the rest of the day. Just about everything was cooked and eaten in the back yard of this house in an extremely picturesque setting. The highlight of the first round of food was certainly the scrambled Ñandú egg. For those of you in the same boat I was in, a Ñandú (pronounced nyahn-DOO) is a giant ostrich like bird that lays giant eggs, and you can read more about it HERE. Just two of these eggs were enough to feed our hosts, their 5 children and their families, and the 7 out-of-town guests (although I should say 6, since I didn't actually try this...).

The second round of food consisted of just about every part of a cow that could possibly be cooked (which I did not try) and salad (which I did try). There was lots of toasting, and I learned that the Argentine custom includes making eye contact with everyone else toasting with you. I thought this was a beautiful way to demonstrate sincerity (which it still is!), but apparently it's also a supersitious custom to avoid 7 years of bad luck in bed (not as beautiful a custom when thought of this way).

Then came the desserts. In Argentina, the word postre has two possible translations. The first, just like the English word, is simply dessert. The second is either an investigation into every possible excuse to eat dulce de leche. In this case, both translations applied.

You can take a look at the pictures from the asado HERE.

About a week later, we made the trip down to La Plata again to join Victoria's cousins for a fútbol game. There are two major teams in La Plata, but, as I learned, the one worthy of my support is Estudiantes de La Plata. All of Victoria's family members are die-hard fans and club members, which means they pay membership fees and can go to all of the games (there are no tickets). They all joke (I think?) that each time a baby is born in the family, they stop to sign them up as a club member on the way home from the hospital before even going home. I was very glad to have the opportunity to go to a fútbol game and not look like a completely out of place tourist (although I probably still did...), since they are notoriously dangerous environments.

I was pretty impressed by the amount of security to get into the game. Walking up to the stadium, we were stopped about every 30 feet by a series of police roadblocks to slow the flow of people. Two pat-down searches later, we were inside the stadium where the fans were already chanting, jumping up and down, and shooting off firecrackers. Everyone was pretty serious about these chants, which, to my amusement, sounded kind of like they were taken out of a Shlomo Carlebach album and had the words changed. When the 3-0 victory was final, the chant changed to "No tienen gas, no tienen luz, son los villeros de Lanus."..."You don't have gas, you don't have lights (electricity), you're the villeros of Lanus". Villeros doesn't really translate into a single word, but it's essentially the residents of a shantytown and something you probably don't want to be accused of being. Before leaving the stadium, police lined the field to make sure the visiting team (separated by lots of barbed wire) exited safely through the far side of the stadium before we were allowed to leave through our side.

This was a really fun experience and something that was a "must do" during my semester here, so check out the videos HERE and HERE as well as my pictures HERE.