Buenos Aires is obviously a metropolis, 3rd world or not, ALL the “big ones” make this huge detour and organise concerts here. Rolling Stones, Rod Steward, Beyonce, Black Eyed Peas, Bon Jovi, Madonna… and of course U2, the biggest rock band in the world! Whereas in Belgium we sometimes had to travel to Amsterdam or Paris –which is, to Argentine standards, not far- here we just stay in BA to see them all. Although sometimes, especially when we want to travel, we feel like we are living at the end of the world, when it comes to things like this, we live in the centre.

The fun thing is that here, everyone seems to know when there is a big band or singer coming. It is all around town, and really lots of people go to see them. It’s as if it’s ‘the event of the year’, even though there are many events like this. It’s as if they all realise this is something special that won’t happen every day, they all want to go. Even though it was, even to European standards, very expensive.

This is the first concert organised in the completely new Estadio Unico en La Plata. It is the most modern football stadium of Latin America, and it is indeed a very nice and impressive construction. It gives room to 40,000 people (seated) and another 13,000 standing. U2 organised 3 sold out concerts.

It is a bit of a hassle to get there, it took us 3:5 hours to go whereas we got back in only 30 minutes. But then we did leave the concert a bit early. There is hardly any public transportation, and coming back to town is a real problem.

I’m not a die-hard U2 fan, but I absolutely wanted to see the show organised by Belgians –well couldn’t miss something really great done by Belgians could we? – And of course I went out of nostalgia. I was in my teens when “Sunday bloody Sunday” was a huge hit. And after that came many many more hits. Although I don’t have any U2 song on my IPod, I realised that I know about all the songs they sang by heart! They have so many huge hits that they can easily fill up a whole concert. I realised that U2 is a lot better live then on the radio. It is in a way easy music and singing along is really easy. I wasn’t the only one singing, or better screaming along with “walk away walk away, I will follow”,  “Get on your boots, hey sexy boots”, “Hello Hello, I’m at a place called Vertigo”,” I lie in the sky, You make me feel like I can fly, so high, elevation”, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”, “Where the streets have no name”, “It’s a beautiful day tada dada da”… We all  know them, don’t we? The crowd -most of them a bit “more mature”- went crasy.

The show was absolutely magnificent. The “claw”, designed by the Belgian company Stageco, was like a huge spider object standing over the stage, changing colours all the time, and it had a circular video screen in it. Wherever you were seated, you had full view. At one point during “Sarajevo” the screen went down like a huge funnel on which the band was projected as giants, but under it they were there own “little” self. The contrast was spectacular. Technology in general brings a different touch to the concerts of today, as the 1000 lights of the people’s cellphone gives a twinkeling view as if everyone has lighters.

The concert was absolutely fabulous, I enjoyed every minute of it, to me, Sarajevo was the absolute climax of the show. U2 360°, highly recommended.