¡Visca Barça!

Sometimes things that are supposed to be super fun aren't as fun as they're supposed to be. Tonight wasn't one of those times. I went to the Barça game! (That means soccer.) I dunno how I pulled off knowing someone whose cousin has season tickets and sometimes shares them, but I'll take it.

My roommate said the game might be boring because it's mostly uptight rich people who go to the stadium. I've been to games like that, and they are boring. But this was a great crowd. They were singing and chanting and yelling. There was a group of Valencia (the other team) fans waving Spanish flags sitting not too far away, and our section chanted ¡Puta Valencia! and ¡Puta España! and flicked off (some people say flip off; I say flick off) their general direction whenever they waved the flag, and there was a tenish year old kid in front of me who kept throwing his hands in the air what-the-fuck style every time there was a call against Barcelona. And there was a Puyol chant going for a while. And Barça won! Very exciting.

Camp Nou, the stadium, is huge; it holds almost 100,000 people. It's pretty easy to get to on the metro, and even taking the metro home with 99,999 other people wasn't so bad. There is a major, major problem with the stadium, though, and that is that they don't serve beer. Not beer with alcohol, anyway. And that blows, especially because it was pretty cold out. (Does drinking beer in the cold really make you feel warmer? Maybe not, now that I think about it. Whatever.) Spain in general or Catalunya in particular is not a place full of drunks. But it is socially acceptable here to have a beer with breakfast in the morning, if that's what you want. Alcohol here is more beverage than vice, so basically everywhere that sells beverages also sells alcoholic ones. Except the football stadium. Joder. Maybe it's a hooligan thing? Whatever the reason, it's unfortunate. At least the crowd was able to pull off being loud and obnoxious and hilarious and entertaining while mostly sober.