Sunday

Sunday morning, Saori and I sat down at a restaurant and realized that we were sitting right by two other friends of ours roomates Noah and Stephanie, so we joined them for a lunch of empanadas and pizza. Stephanie joined us and we continued on to Plaza Francia for the Sunday market there to finish shopping for friends and family. While I was there, I finally succumbed and bought a leather satchel of the type I'd been eyeing the entire time I've been in Buenos Aires. We shopped for a few hours and then took a break to watch the Capoeira people. Capoeria is a combination of dancing and fighting to a rythmic beat in the background. There's a lot of flips, spinning kicks, and acrobatics, with very little actual contact between the combatants. It was developed by African slaves in Brazil to hide fighting as a dance as fighting between slaves was prohibited. The result is very entertaining, and its usually pretty clear to me who the "winner" is.

After that, we dropped Stephanie at her apartment and we left Saori's for the international fair. It was getting late, around 8:30, and the street was really packed with poeple coming and going. I saw a stage up ahead and a crowd of people, so I thought I'd be able to thread my way to the back where there must be a way for people to cross. We got in really deep before I realized that the street was impassable. The stage was set facing the corner of the major intersection with a massive monument in the center. I was a little higher up, so I could see that all four streets leading the intersection were totally jammed with a sea of people, even to the point where the people were in the trees and on the monument itself. In fact, I've never seen so many people in one place since national day in Shanghai almost six years ago. Needless to say, our plan to grab a bite at the international fair had to be scrapped. Rather than fight the crowd back, we decided to just watch/listen to the show.

The event was some kind of Mozart festival, with a live orchestra, soloists, and choirs performing basically Mozarts greatest hits. When the songs ended, the entire area would erupt into thunderous applause, with the literally tens of thousands of people applauding. The fact that they would frequently applaud during the final pause before the crescendos made me think that these people were not well acquainted with his music, but that they still enjoyed it, or massive spectacles, immensely. Portenos seem to have a penchant for mobbing, whether protesting or enjoying shows, they do it jammed shoulder to shoulder. Anyway, they finished the event with a fireworks spectacle WHILE playing the powerful peices of Mozart's Requiem, and they didn't ration out these things either, shooting them off one right after another so it would be (intense classical music) (boom) (boom) (music) (boom) really distracting. The other disquieting thing was that the fireworks were exploding really low, like dropping still flaming bits onto the canopy covering the stage. I imagine that a few fires were started in the park.

After the show ended, the people flowed out and we joined the stream as the mass of people flowed back in to the city and thinned out. Saori and I walked to the movies where we watched "The Illusionist" (in English) which was really an excellent movie in my opinion, if not a little too resolved at the end.