On Sunday I was fortunate enough to watch a soccer game that pitted the Argentina National Team against Ecuador. It was an experience I will not soon forget! The week before several of my roommates had gone together to buy tickets for the game. At the time they went I was in class, so they were kind enough to buy a ticket for me. We were all planning on going together, but often times when you are trying to plan anything with a large group you end up lacking organization. Come game day, we were all sitting around waiting for everybody else to make decisions. One strange thing was that none of us could find out what time the game actually started. It wasn’t printed on the tickets everybody we asked didn’t know for sure. All of the estimates that we were given fell between 5:30 and 7:00. When we looked online the only info we could find was for what time the game started on T.V. so we guessed 6:00 and planned to leave early enough to get there early, because things were bound to go wrong.
On Sunday, I was resting in my room since I knew the game would be high energy and would probably drain me. My roommates had left for lunch, but I had already eaten lunch for a friend and they assured me that they would come back and wake me up before they left for the game. At this point I didn’t even have my ticket because the roommates who had bought them were still hanging on to all of them.
At 4:30 I started to get nervous because I thought we should have already left (I was right) At 5:00 they all finally showed back up gave one of my other roommates our tickets and left to get in a taxi. This made my roommate Madie and I pretty nervous. This meant that the two of us had to go alone to the game…great they had to pick the two blondes in the house. It is a good thing that I’ve gotten pretty confident with my Spanish lately, because I knew this was going to be an adventure. For starters I didn’t have any knowledge of what the stadium set up was like and to add to the confusion we were going to be cutting in close on time. It turns out that the game started at 6:30…so we were o.k. but barely!
First of all we had a hard time finding a Taxi. I knew the general direction of the stadium…plus I figured any taxi driver would know exactly where to take us. This wasn’t a problem but finding an available taxi was. The first taxi we got into told us he wouldn’t take us there and sent us back out onto the street. Next we waiting for 20 minutes to find an available taxi although we watched about a million drive by.
When we finally got into a taxi and told the taxi driver where we were going we were really relieved. At first he kept trying to tell me something that I wasn’t understanding because he was sort of mumbling (that is sooo annoying!) At least he started to enunciate and I understood. He explained that the streets surrounding the stadium were closed to traffic and then told us how to get to the appropriate entrance. This was incredibly helpful. After we got out of the taxi and walked the remaining 5 blocks to the stadium we were feeling especially overwhelmed. We ran into a whole bunch of other American students we knew who were wandering around lost trying to find the right entrance! (Thank god for that taxi driver) We got patted down in a security line, walked to the right entrance and were right in the middle of the huge crowd making its way into the stadium. At this point Madie pulled out the tickets and I got nervous because she only had what looked like two scraps of torn paper. We made our way into the stadium and I went to show a guard our tickets to find out where our seats were. When I handed him my ticket he asked me for the “ubicación” I turned to ask Madie if there was anything else that the other roommate had given her. She turned white and explained that there had been but she had left them back at our homestay!! Yikes! The guard shrugged his shoulders and sent us wandering off to the right and said to look for seats in the next section up. I was slightly confused, I knew we could still sit down and watch the game, but I had no idea what the other part of the ticket was for. I assumed he was sending us up one section to sit in cheaper seats that weren’t assigned so we had to find two open seats. I was mostly right. We obviously stuck out at this point because we were two confused blondes looking lost and speaking to each other in English. A security guard stopped us and asked if we needed help. I explained as best as I could our current situation and he was very helpful. Turns out that nobody pays attention to the assigned seats…everybody just gets there early and sits wherever they want to in their assigned section. So, it didn’t matter at all that Madie had forgotten the other part of the ticket somebody was already sitting in our spots for sure! The guard then pointed to a section with some open seats. We sat as far up as we could in our section with our backs to a wall that separated our section from some private viewing areas. This made us both feel safer as there was no one sitting behind us to throw things and also because there would be nothing going on behind us that we wouldn’t be able to see.
The game was awesome and there was sooo much energy from the Argentina fans and even from the small section that was cheering on Ecuador. Even though neither Madie nor I are soccer experts we could tell that Argentina was not playing well. We were supposed to beat them handedly. We could tell that we were doing better because Argentina had possession for more time and attempted more shots. However, with 20 minutes left the score was still 0-0. Soon there after Ecuador scored a goal and their section went nuts. The rest of the crowd got very agitated and upset. At this point you could cut the tension with a knife. Madie and I were having a blast cheering along with the cheers we understood. Some of the more obvious ones were chanting Argentina, Punto, or general noise making. There were a couple of songs that we couldn’t make out the words to until later in the game including this one:
Vamos, vamos Argentina,
vamos, vamos a ganar,
que esta barra quilombera,
no te deja, no te deja de alentar.
English translation:
Come on, come on Argentina,
Come on, come on, let’s win,
that these raucous supporters,
don’t give up, don’t give up cheering for you.
We were only guessing how much time was left because we couldn’t really see the monitors and there was no large time clock. A few people had started wandering off so we could tell that time was starting to run out. Argentina picked up the pace of the play and at last scored a goal. Everybody went nuts. You could feel the stadium vibrate with the noise and the jumping up and down. People were banging on the aluminum wall at our backs. Then, everybody stood up; there was an announcement that we couldn’t hear. The lady next to me explained that time had run out. The goal had happened with only 5 seconds to spare. Thus, Argentina pulled off a tie at the very last second. We left the stadium with the huge crowd. At this point we really became aware of how much we stood out. Good thing we were Argentina Jerseys!
There was no way we were going to find a cab so we started walking towards the nearest subway station. About a mile and half later we entered the crowded subway stop and waited 10 minutes for the train that took us home.
Later on we estimated that there were over 60,000 people at the game. What an experience!
Hello Buenos Aires 