Pat West ’12

After being here only two days, I have already experienced a week´s worth of experineces and memories.  The city of Buenos Aires is gorgeous. It´s filled with old buildings and beautiful architecture, I have yet to had one thing to eat where it wasn´t one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten, and the people here are some of the friendliest people around.  

With all of these things going on, there is still one moment that has made my entire trip and a memory I will be able to keep the rest of my life.  We had just finished dinner and gotten back to the hotel.  We were told to go out and experience some the nightlife of Buenos Aires since things don´t pick up until around  11p.m here. Myself along with three other teammates decided to take a soccer ball out and go juggle in this little park area right in the middle of downtown between the largest avenue in the world.  It was incredible to be able to do something like this at night.  

The icing on the cake was that after about  10 minutes of juggling, two little boys no older than 8 years old walked up to us and wanted to play with us.  We set up our jackets and goals and played 3v3 for at least half an hour with these little guys.  It was just mind blowing to me to think that I could be 5000 miles from home in a country where I can´t speak their language well, and yet, the beauty of soccer allowed me to connect with two litte awesome kids who shared the passion of soccer just like the rest of us.  We didn´t even get their names, we didn´t really talk, we just played. 

Honestly, I can see why they call soccer the beautiful game.  It has the power to connect complete strangers like us and those little boys for 30 minutes.  Just smiling,having fun, and playing the beautiful game.