Wave Your Flag

Today I went to Plaza San Martín in downtown Buenos Aires to watch the Argentina vs. Mexico game on a gigantic outdoor screen. I was accompanied by Sarah, an American student who is doing research in a lab down the hall from mine, as well as thousands upon thousands of fanatic Argentines. Even if the first goal was questionable due to a blatant failure of the sideline referee to call offsides, we still won fair and square (and yes, I do now refer to Argentina's team as "we"). I had a great time at the plaza today - half of the fun was from watching the game, and the other half was from watching and listening to all of the locals going crazy each time Argentina made a play.

This is a Palacio San Martín, the palace at the entrance to the plaza:

And here's a view of the screen from a distance, with a tiny portion of the crowd:

I tried to get a few videos to show the excitement, but there's just no way to properly capture that much energy. I believe this one was taken shortly after Argentina's second goal:

In reality, the crowd was at least 100 times louder than that, though. I find it slightly ironic that by the time my ears stop ringing tomorrow morning, I'll be on my way to the lab to study the cochlear receptor involved in natural protection against hearing loss.

As you can tell, fútbol is the central focus of Argentinian life right now. However, while listening to games on the radio and discussing the latest World Cup gossip with other lab members, I've been able to get quite a bit of really good research done. I finished analyzing my data for one of the drugs I'm supposed to characterize, and I'm pretty excited about my results. Hopefully I'll get a chance to discuss my data with my PI early this week (and hopefully after talking with her I'll still think that my results are exciting). Also, I got a new shipment of compounds from the collaborator who is synthesizing the drugs, so I'm really excited to try out the new ones. I'm really invested in this project, so it's going to be difficult to pack up and leave in just over a month when I know that I'll still have more experiments I want to do. If only I could stay in Argentina indefinitely...

I'm sure I'll have lots more science and fútbol news to report next week, especially seeing as Argentina goes up against Germany on Saturday. Nabiha, prepare for battle.