Number of people at the FC Barcelona game:
101,038
Number of people ahead of us in line when hotdogs ran
out: 4
Average age of dance party attendees: 19
Number of taxis it took to get back to the
hostel: 3 (We think!)
When my friend Greg and I got wind that FC Barcelona were
playing Viktoria Plzen in the Champions League on Wednesday night
we ponied up the 50 euro necessary for a bit of football flavoured
fun. Estadi del FC Barcelona holds 110,000 fans and depending on
who you support dictates where you sit in the steep-sided stadium
but every seat has a great view of the pitch.
The game kicked off with some fancy footwork and an early goal
for Barca. To quote my friend Brendan Keane, "You go to ONE
game and you get to see the goal of the season from Iniesta.
There's no justice in the world." So I figure it was a pretty
good one. There was never any doubt who was going to win, the Czech
Republic team gave it socks but you got the feeling Barca were
toying with them like a cat with a mouse, giving them a false
glimpse of escape and then slapping them back under the paw again.
Greg and I chanted and cheered like the locals around us and the
final score of 2-0 could have been four times that with all the
shots on goal.
By the time we cleared the stadium after the game it was almost
midnight and the two of us were ready for kabed (A
new term we coined which basically means falling asleep into your
kebab). But the people had voted we go to the Dirty Dancing Oktoberfest Part 3 dance party
at a club called Razzmatazz so on we went. Things kick off much
later in Spain so when we met a group of 18 year old Erasmus
students going to the same party at 1am and were told it was too
early we took heed and joined them for a drink at a local bar. It
was clear that we were at least 10 years older than anyone else in
the joint so we decided to try and drink ourselves young. With
dangerously high levels of vodka-laced energy drinks pumping
through our veins we hit the Razzmatazz dance floor, along with
several traditionally dressed German beer wenches and a dude in a
giant hotdog suit. (You can see him at the right side of the
stage.) From that point on the night becomes hazy but after
reviewing the photos we don't remember taking or posing for we
filled the memory gaps of our evening. Sadly, the side effect of
drinking yourself young one night is that you wake up feeling
positively old the next day.
It's interesting the things we do to fit in, whether it's
wearing an FC Barcelona scarf or having a jaeger bomb in a student
bar, imitation is often the best way to feel a part of a foreign
situation or country. Have you ever done anything unusual or out of
character to fit in somewhere?