This is our little secret

SO...we have not told you about our little secret, or the 'seffegen secret' as some might say about our last 4 months. Given that Stu loves mulled wine and Christmas charols, we spent Xmas in the small but fabulous country of Luxembourg, Europe. It's the size of the Isle of Skye in Scotland, but there are definately more people than sheep here, and lots of nice people who like drinking wine as well as beer. After waiting for snow for 4 months, it was finally white in March in the Grand Duchy, and we could take off again towards the sun. 21st March 2007, 10.10, rue du Grunewald, Blaschette, a lonely cowboy and his hat were waiting for the bus to take him to Buenos Aires.

Big day out

First we visited Maradona's first (and last) team Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires and then we went to see the favourites River Plate play Gimnasia.

Spot the intruder

We're all Socialists now...

A Quiet day out in BA

We had been wondering about why nobody was shopping...thousands of people were in the streets, demonstrating to remind people of the 25th March 1977 the day the military took over the country in a coup d'etat and ruled during what is now called 'the dirty war'. In those days more than 30 000 people were killed and up to today noone has been made accountable for that.

Becky and Lindsay did not want to come downstairs from the hostel because it was 'too dangerous'. 'Too dangerous'? I mean, what was going to happen? We really enjoyed the action and sat down in a cafe outside our hostel and had a couple of glasses of wine, taking pictures and watching the people.

In the evening we switched on BBC world and watched a report on Buenos Aires where riots had taken place down the street from us, in the Aveninda de Mayo.

Well, the wine was fantastic.

Buneos Aires, 22 marzo 2007. Buenos Dias, ¿que tal. That's about as much Spanish as we know. Stuart did, however, practiced his useful sentences from the phrase book to order food and not come across as a silly tourist. So we went into a lovely bakery to buy a piece of ricotta and spinach pie and one of leek pie. Stu, having pracrised extensively beforehand, proudly walks in with his discreet hat, points at the pie and proclaims: UNO and UNO, pointing at the two pies. The girls bursts out laughing and repeats: ONE and ONE? YES... that'll be all.

After having gone for a lovely tour of the city, which is very clean, quite hot and has a bit of a Paris feel due to its Haussmann architecture but also a bit of Spain or Portugal due to its beautiful, very lightly dressed ladies, we end up in the Avenida del Mayo. This is where marches used to take place, but as the guy in our hostel confirmed, the Argentinians are not very united anymore nowadays, ...

Football Festival.

On Sunday we went to see River Plate Football Club play a team with a Spanish name that I can´t pronounce (By the way, we are learning Spanish for 35 minutes every day for the next six weeks with a book we bought. Today we sat in the kitchen like a real pair of school teachers and tested each other with Flash Cards -we´ll never be mistaken for Bonny and Clyde). The atmosphere at the game was completely different from European football. The crowd behind the goal sang continuously for 85 minutes no matter what was happening on the pitch. Even after the Away-Team scored they just started singing again. It was only in the last five minutes when they were 0-1 that everyone concentrated on the game (many people at the singing end were facing the wrong way for most of the match). Unluckily they didn´t equalise and luckily for us the Riot Police were not used and only a few bottles made it onto the pitch. We would have run onto the pitch to protest ourselves, but we would have had to jump 2 metres over a moat filled with sewage to get to the pitch and then face police with sheilds and batons. We would have thrown our bottle of water, but that was taken off Martine at the first of two search points. Call me observant, but I think the supporters take football quite seriously here.