¡Esta Noche . . . Tenemos que Ganar!

A view of the field.

Phil, Megan, and I at the game. You can't tell here, but we were sporting our newly purchased Liga jerseys.

Wow! I just decided to update my blog and realized I haven’t posted in FAR too long. Anyway, a word about my first experience attending a South American soccer game. INCREDIBLE. So there was this big soccer game between Ecuador and Argentina about 3 weeks ago now and we were fortunate enough to get tickets. Here in Ecuador, there are several different types of tickets you can purchase, depending on how much you want to spend and how good you want your seats to be. We purchased the cheapest tickets we could. When I say “we” I really mean that we asked the director of our language program to acquire the tickets for us. To give you a sense of how important this game was, Rosa, our director, went to buy the tickets and when she got there she realized she could either A.) Spend the next 10 hours of her life standing on line in hopes of acquiring enough tickets or B.) Scalp the tickets for a slightly higher price. She proceeded to do the following. So with our tickets we were admitted to the general admission “end zone” of the soccer field. Clearly I don’t know much about soccer because I have no idea how to describe the area behind the goal of a soccer field (end zone?). Even though we got there over an hour ahead of time, the “end zone” was already so full that we could not sit together and needed to separate. Phil, Megan, and I ended up having to sit on the stairs of the bleacher-like seats because there was literally not a seat left in the entire area. As it got closer to the start of the game, the excitement and anticipation slowly began to rise and you could just tell that the stadium was bursting with energy. Periodic fan songs and dances would spring up from nowhere and at one point a giant Liga (that’s the Ecuadorian team) flag was dropped which literally covered our entire end of the stadium and reminded me of the parachutes people would have at the birthday parties I used to attend as a child. Right before kickoff the stadium was transformed into the most wild 4^th of July-like firework display I have ever seen, people all around me began lighting torches that literally could have burned anything near them, and the entire stadium started throwing rolls of what seemed like toilet paper on to the field. It was nuts and made me think that Americans know nothing about how to support their fans. However, in America, lighting your own torch or shooting off fireworks in such close proximity to thousands of people would never be allowed. In America, they also would have cleaned the toilet paper off the field before starting the game, but here in Ecuador, the soccer players just played around it. Anyway, the energy of the start of the game basically continued throughout and Liga won! It was fantastic to be transported into a truly South American event and made me super pumped to attend more fútbol matches in the future. Side note 1: since this post should have been written weeks ago, I now can add that about two weeks after this game, I watched the second game between Liga and Argentina, which ended in a tie, making Ecuador the champions of the South American cup, or something like that. It was an awesome night, singing some of the Liga songs in the bar and seeing the city erupt with excitement. If I can’t attend any Notre Dame football games for the next two years, I might as well make the most of the soccer here, because it’s truly incredible. Side note 2: the title of this post is taken from the lyrics of the Liga song and mean “Tonight, we have to win!”