So Europe is another culture. Shocking, I know. But I hadn’t fully comprehended that this would apply to sports. That means no Twins all soccer, or futbol. In order to fully immerse ourselves, and have a real good time, a bunch of us decided to get tickets to the AS Roma futbol game vs. Bologna last Sunday.
Now, I was raised on baseball and curling. I have some knowledge of futbol thanks to being coerced into watching the World Cup this summer (just kidding Ev), but other than knowing some lingo, I’m out of the loop. But the people here live and breathe futbol. They are hardcore! They have jerseys that cost 100euro (mine cost 10), know half a dozen fight songs and all of the information about every player down to what kind of cereal he eats in the morning. I was quite out of my league to say the least.
One thing about futbol tickets is that the seat assignments are more of a suggestion and if you actually want to sit in your assigned seat, you better be at the game at least 2 hours ahead of time. We tried, but considering that it took us almost 2 hours to get to the stadium, that didn’t really happen. We were lucky enough to find a row of seats that hadn’t been taken yet (probably because there were some very scary looking Italian men on either side) and persuaded them that we were actually cheering for Roma and weren’t some filthy Americans trying to infiltrate their sport. Problem was that there were still too many butts for the number of chairs, but everyone stands during the game so we just squished in.
The game started right on time. None of this “it’s says they’ll start at 3, but really it’s more like 3:15” business. And AS Roma scored at minute 7. Then all hell broke loose.
Now, we’re standing on top of the chairs which are like rollercoaster seats, preformed plastic with little backs. As soon as the ball went in the net the guys in front of us start thrashing around like fish in the bottom of a boat. It was 10 times worse than the most epic mosh-pit I’ve ever been in. There are limbs flying everywhere and I’m hanging on for dear life to anything that looks stable. The girl next to me gets thrown backwards by some dude and ends up in the row behind us. She about took me with her, but the guy behind me grabbed my arm and held me up. All this went down within about 15 seconds and continued for a good 3 minutes. I ducked for cover, feet firmly planted on the concrete.
Unfortunately the rest of the game was a little boring, right up until the last 15 minutes when Bologna scored twice to tie. It was just to be there. One dude would start singing some song and all of a sudden there would be 300 people singing with him. Pretty cool. There were a lot of flags too that people had brought in. It was also fun just to people watch. We were in the hardcore fan section, but there were people ranging from us American college kids to a couple of grandparents jumping and screaming right along with the rest of us. One more thing about Italian culture, security id very light and it is possible to sneak lots of things into a futbol stadium, like pot for instance. There were no less than 4 people lighting up within a row of us. One can only hold her breath for so long and all of us were felling a little dizzy from the secondhand smoke.
If we thought the treck to get there was rough, the one to get home was even worse. Almost 3 hours from start to finish ending with a marathon bus ride with a whole bunch of wet (it started to rain), smelly, soccer fans on a packed bus. We were all so hungry, tired, and gross afterward that all we wanted to do was shower and stuff our faces. This was the version of me my parents got to Skype with :)
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