Slept in again today! On Sundays there’s a big market not too far from our hostel that takes up a good number of blocks of this one street, so of course the girls were planning on shopping there in the afternoon. David and I thought that it would be cool to check out a soccer game instead.
The night before we had asked the person working at the front desk if there were any excursions to the soccer game in the neighborhood of town called La Boca. I’ve heard that La Boca is the rough part of town and that it is better to go in groups to the games. The dude at the desk told us to check back with him in the morning if we still wanted to go. He told us that there are always tickets to the games and that, with this tour, we get to go and get some drinks before the game and then eat afterwards. He also explained to us that this tour company buys their Boca game tickets from a gang and that it’s much safer because then apparently other gangs won’t mess with you. “You are untouchable” is what he kept telling us. This conversation was in Spanish, but David and I understood the same thing, which makes me confident that we did indeed understand him correctly. When we went down in the morning to check to see if there were tickets left, however, we found that there were no spots left on that tour. But they did have 2 tickets left for the game without the tour. These tickets weren’t much less than the entire tour was so we decided not to do it. We went back up to our room and within 10 minutes changed our minds and went back down to the main desk to buy them. Apparently within that 10-minute time frame the 2 tickets had been sold.
The guy gave us some numbers of other places that sell tickets to Boca games, but they didn’t have any either (it was a championship game so they sold out quickly). We were kind of frustrated at this point and we knew we didn’t want to spend the rest of the day walking around shopping. So we decided that we would just take a bus to La Boca and see if we could buy some scalped tickets outside the stadium. I was half expecting this strategy to fail, but figured it would be better than shopping.
So we went to the stadium and walked around for a little bit until we were approached by a man asking if we were looking for something. We nonchalantly said yes not saying exactly what it was we were looking for. Then he said “tickets.” Unfortunately he only had one, so we kept walking. We encountered another man outside a store who seemed to be standing around for no good reason. He also approached us asking if we were “looking for something.” He brought us inside his store grabbing a shirt that was on display in the front and bringing it with him to the counter as if we were inquiring about it. I thought he may have totally misunderstood us, but apparently it was just a cover-up so in case the police happened to be looking in or something they would think we were inquiring about a shirt instead of illegal tickets. He showed them to us but we had no idea how to tell if they were actually real or not. So we said we would come back shortly and went outside to try and get a glance of real tickets before buying them. From what we could tell they looked the same and they were only 80 pesos anyways, which is about 22 dollars (compared to the 200 pesos the hostel was charging for their tickets) so we decided to go with them.
They ended up working, even though I was a little bit nervous with all the police at the entrance to the stadium. Even though we were in an upper deck and had to stand and maneuver a lot to see the game, it was totally worth it! Especially since we were able to rub it in to Hannah and Susan, since they thought we were crazy for going (Susan said they weren’t taking our stuff back with them if we didn’t make it out of La Boca).
In retrospect, the La Boca neighborhood didn’t even seem that bad. There’s a section called El Camenito that is actually rather touristy.
Tomorrow we’re going on a city tour. I’m happy that it doesn’t start until 2pm so yep, again, get to sleep in.
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