The Soccer Game

This is a post from Tyler:

So a few weeks ago there was a big soccer game in Costa Rica between Costa Rica's best team, Saprissa, and the best team from Mexico, Pachuca. I really wanted to go to the game, so I organized a group of people from the Embassy--a couple of my colleagues and their families, and we got tickets and went to the game.

Traffic was horrible getting out to the stadium, so we didn't actually get to the game until about 10 minutes after it had started. As we walked in through the gates, the stadium was packed at full capacity, with twenty-four thousand crazy costa ricans yelling, screaming, chanting, and beating the drums of war...or the drums of futbol at least.

The only problem with the packed house was that we didn't have any seat assigments...all the tickets were just general admission. As we passed full section after full section we began to wonder if we'd have to stand the whole game...until we saw a section that had a bunch of seats open, right behind the goal. We made our way up the aisles, jumped over the aile railing and took some seats in the middle of the section.

We sat down, and I started talking to a guy sitting in front of us. After the initial hi, how you doing's, he asked me where we were from. The US, I told him, and asked him, "and you're from Costa Rica?" He looked at me like I was crazy for a second, and said, "No...of course not, I'm from Mexico...this whole section is the mexican section."

It felt like a hole opened up in my stomach, and suddenly made sens why there were so many police officers standing in the aisles surrounding our section and the yellow caution tape up around it. At that second one mexican fan put up a pro-Pachuca banner, and all the Costa Ricans started going nuts, yelling at our section...I've never heard as many 'puntas' in my life...which especially great seeing as how I was the fearless organizer of this family outing which included a mormon family of five and another couple with their 2 year old, made all the more enjoyable due to the fact that they kept flashing messages across the scoreboard such as "don't throw cameras...don't throw batteries...no fighting..."

Anyways, it was a pretty stressful for the first half, but the seats were amazing...we decided to move at halftime to some open seats in the corner of the stadium...worse seats, but at least we we didn't have to look out for the occasional thrown camera coming our way. Pachuca actually went into the lead in the second half, at which point the costa ricans did start throwing stuff at the pachuca section (where we had been), though as far as we could see they were only throwing cardboard pizza boxes...so, in a way they were just welcoming the visiting fans with free left over cheese and pepperoni bits...

The game ended with a Saprissa goal in the last two minutes to put the game into a tie, which wasn't the result that Saprissa was hoping for, but was certainly better than a loss. And, we made it out of the stadium alive, which was a plus....