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.