My crash course in Spanish is progressing quite nicely despite having a few moments where I've found myself descending into spiralling sense of confusion over things like pronoun substitution. It's been good though to have something concrete to focus on and keep my mind active. My teacher (or should that be profesora) is the perfect mix of pushy (in a nice way) and supportive, so I am reasonably happy with what I've learnt so far. Yesterday, I managed to buy ferry tickets to Uruguay in mostly Spanish, until the saleswoman switched into English after she heard me mutter something to myself about the time.

I tried to go and see a football (i.e. soccer) match last Sunday with some people I met at my hostel. It started out as a rather nice Sunday afternoon walk from our hostel, through the San Telmo district (they have a street market on Sundays) and then down to La Boca where the stadium is. There was some confusion regarding the starting time so although we heard the crowd, whom I should add get very into the game - bongo drums, flags, whistles and so on; we weren't able to get a ticket much less get inside. We hung around for a while but as we were going to leave a group of guys ran at us and tried to mug us. The other guy, Chris, got punched in the back of the neck a few times; but I had three or so guys flash a revolver at me (I don't know if it was real or not) and demand my bag. By demand I mean they rather forcefully tried to remove it, but I had the clips across the front done up and they didn't realise this and thought that I was trying to resist them when in fact I was trying to undo the clips. Chris & Kara didn't know this either so they were yelling things like "just give him the freaking bag" etc. Anyway, by this time there were a lot of people around so despite me being knocked to the ground, they didn't get my bag and then ran away, although in the kerfuffle I did loose my watch but was otherwise unscathed.