Esta Noche, Tenemos que Ganar!

Soccer, the most popular sport in the world, the fastest growing sport in America, and my third favorite sport, unless drinking games and bocce are included, then it’s my eleventh favorite. We arrived in Medellin refreshed; we were no longer on the Caribbean coast where I was averaging about 2.6 SPD (shirts per day), we were out of Cartagena where we were averaging 64.8 TFCPD (touts for coke per day), and we were out of Hotel Marlin, the cheapest non-whore house with air conditioning, that may or may not have been a hub for creepy-old-guy sex tourism (it had all the telltale signs, such as creepy-old-guys with cheap whores), where we were experiencing a 0.92 MF (mold factor, a complex algorithm of amount of mold on the walls and ceiling, divided by the total area of wall space, multiplied by the amount of hacking coughs each person had during the night, and then further divided by the level of burning your eyes felt in the morning; 1 being the worst, 0 the best). Medellin was looking up, a pleasant 70 degrees, a metro system (in Latin America!), an apparent lack of coke dealers and whores (at least street level ones, but after going out, I’m pretty sure there were plenty of high level ones… ironic), and the defending champion soccer team of the Postobon© League, Atletico Nacional.

The Metro system was cheap and efficient, and there was a stop especially for the stadium. We went to the box office (well, we went to a lot of box offices, only one of which was open, despite numerous people in most of the box offices we walked up to) and bought 5 tickets in the Popular section. They asked us North or South. I asked which was better. He responded that the South was where the party was at. South it was.

Medellin from the metro system's cable cars that go to the slums.

 We went back to the hostel and mustered up a gringo posse to go the game. After drinking rum for a few hours we realized kickoff—or whatever you call the start of a soccer game—was in about 43 minutes. We drunkenly trotted to the metro and hopped on a car, sharing 1.5 liters of Cuba Libre mixed in a large Coca Cola bottle. We ran from the Metro to the stadium, impulsively buying Jerseys along the way, and arriving to massive lines still outside the stadium. As more doors opened, stampedes of people would sprint to the new line, increasing their chance of seeing the ‘tip off’ (still don’t know the term). We chose wisely in that our line moved fast, and there was not a thorough enough search to find the drinks we were smuggling in (which was a bit disturbing, I suppose, because a handgun or IED could be much smaller than the bottles we brought in unnoticed, and this WAS Colombia).

Inside was shoulder to shoulder madness. Not one person on the South side was sitting, and only a few were not singing every word of the constant fight songs. I can’t stress enough the word ‘constant’ in this context. It was seriously incessant, non-stop, never-ending, or any other synonym. Despite the fact that Nacional was losing within about 2 minutes of the ‘jump ball’ (what DO you call it!?), they kept on singing; in the 83rd minute, now losing 3 to 1, they were still singing, as loudly and crazily as they had in the 7th minute; after losing, they continued, unabashedly, singing one of the seemingly endless fight songs that every fan knew. We went out for drinks afterwards, and it was madness and elation; you would have thought they had one 7 to nothing. 

Singing was optional, standing was not.....

Post-game beers and street food with a few friends we made. I know, sweet jerseys...

Most of the fight songs were either too muffled, too complicated, or we were just too drunk to remember them, be we did remember one; it was a recurring motif for the remainder of the trip:

Esta noche, tenemos que ganar! Tonight, we have to win! (repeat 200x)