Big day for protesting

I had heard a bit about protests in Buenos Aires before I came here. Apparently some of these can get quite violent, so it was a bit unnerving to see heaps of people protesting today accompanied by loud explosions that sounded like guns going off.

The protests started first thing this morning (jetlag time 10:30 am). There were heaps of people walking past our room with the usual banners and everyone was clapping in unison... no worries really. Some of the placards had words like hospital on them, so perhaps this one was about the health system.

Then we went for breakfast (jetlag time 1:00 pm) and could see a huge stream of people walking past and a fair few police getting around on motorbikes. You could hear explosions in the background that sounded like gun shots. However most people didn't appear to take any interest at all in what was going on. It was weird really; heaps of action but almost no one even looked at them.

After lunch we went for a bit of a walk up towards where the people had gathered. By then the protest had ended and people were leaving. Then, when we got back to our room yet another protest went past. This one had someone singing and people carrying a massive piece of blue and white cloth in the same colours as the Argentinean flag.

The other weird thing is that it has been impossible (so far) to find anything on the Internet on what these protests were about. All this left me with the impression that protests are so normal over here that no one even cares about them anymore and also that simply walking around with a few placards would be such a non-event that it would have no impact whatsoever. Even with the huge flags and the fireworks going off, it seems that not even the media got interested.

Here is the video, see what you reckon.