River Plate

Above: Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Wednesday 11th May 1988

I got up at 09:00 hrs. for breakfast and after a couple of coffees went out to change money and buy tickets to Iguazú Falls with a Swiss bloke called Steve. We rumbled across town on the rickety old SUBTE and spent a while amongst the shoppers on Florida looking for a Cambio which would change travellers cheques.

The price of bus tickets were high in the super new airport-like Bus Terminal. We eventually settled on a ticket to San Ignacio, which is a town and municipality in Misiones Province in north-eastern Argentina, for a bus tomorrow for ₳227 Australes.

We then walked up the busy smoggy Avenida del Libertador which was designed for traffic only, no pedestrians, to El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) is one of the most important public art institutions in Argentina. It houses an extremely diverse heritage, which includes more than 12,000 pieces, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, textiles and objects. Its collection is made up of pre-Columbian, colonial, Argentinean and international art, in a temporal range that goes from the third century A.C. to the present.

Here there were a couple of nice paintings and a lot of crappy ones. There were also quite a few sculptures of men grappling with mythical beasts. There were a few wanky works by famous artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Édouard Manet, which looked like the ones which nobody else wanted!

I walked back to the obelisk via the affluent fashion shops and top hotels on Callao and Santa Fe. Beautiful girls. I took the SUBTE back to Constitucion Station and picked up my washing from the laundry at 16:30 hrs.

A new sign had appeared on the door of the Youth Hostel kitchen saying that nobody was allowed to use it before 19:00 hrs. Thus stymied I went and bought a hunk of cheese, onion, red pepper, bread and wine for a European meal.

The dining room was lively as usual and everybody chatted and shared wine around. I boiled some eggs for tomorrows breakfast. Six eggs was the minimum that you could buy. I then joined eight Aussie and New Zealanders for a trip to the River Plate Stadium to see the River Plate Side play a Brazilian team.

It took two long bus trips to get to the Estadio "Monumental" Antonio Vespucio Liberti, also referred to as River Plate Stadium, Monumental de Nuñez, or simply El Monumental It is a stadium in the Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina (although popular belief wrongly states that the stadium is in the Núñez district), home of the football club River Plate.

The buses hurtled around corners and hacked across crossroads with a “he who hesitates is lost” attitude. The game had already started when we got to the huge concrete stadium at 22:10 hrs. All the cheap ₳20 Australes tickets were sold out, but we were told that we could get in for free at half time.

This we did, sitting in an almost empty section of the huge amphitheatre while the home team kept most of the action around the Brazilian goal. No one (of us) was quite sure what the final score was, but the home team won, and the fans were happy and singing as the packed onto the buses back to the city centre.

We went into a posh bar/pub and had a few beers while the crowds dispersed. Bow tied waiters kept us supplied with peanuts, crisps and cocktail sausages while we drank. Many of the bus services had packed up at midnight so it took us two bus trips to get back to the Youth Hostel, arriving at 02:00 hrs.