Playing Hooky

I'm ditching class today- feeling a little gurgly in the stomach, and tired, and like I just needed an extra day to myself. This Saturday we went to a Xelahu v. San Marcos soccer match. Crazy. The stadium is a few minutes north of our house, so we met some friends and walked there. Outside, there are a million amazing smells as people cook up everything from the usual tacos, fried plantains and papusas, to these stalls where they just sell grilled slabs of meat. Nothing comes with plasticware, so you really get involved with you food here. You do get a napkin the size of a silver dollar to wipe down your hands and face and the people who accidentally passed within your 'splash zone.' Anyway, I passed on all the outside food, including the plastic bags of beer they sell so that you can smuggle it past the pat-down. We were led to believe that they would only pat men down, so Mariam got totally busted with her Nalgene down the front of her pants. After smelling the contents, they let her through without a bribe. Inside, we found seats on the concrete slabs that pass for benches. The field was surrounded by police, both national and civil, dressed in full riot gear. They have a padded tunnel for the players and refs to get onto the pitch, which they take down once the opposing players and the refs are out of bottle/battery range. As people come in, they throw thousands of packets of little newpaper squares to the fans so that the fans can later fill the air with ticker tape. Then, as the team takes the field, the crowd erupts. Literally. Fireworks and ticker tape start blasting out all around you, from all around the field. The stadium itself has professional fireworks, blasting off from the four corners. But meanwhile, as the air fills with smoke and newspaper, hundreds of fans are lighting off those long strings of firecrackers, and especially, roman candles, which they aim downward at the riot police. Shooting exploding balls of fire at the well-armed police (fresh out of a civil war, mind you, in which they weren't well know for their restraint) wouldn't have been my first choice. But the cops didn't really seem to mind, as the fireballs bounced off their shields and uniforms ("Just ignore them and they'll eventually stop," is what their therapists told them in mandatory anger management class, I guess). Once the game got underway, things settled down a bit, even when points were scored. Their was a liberal sprinkling of new vocab that our spanish school failed to teach us, including a rising, stadium-wide chant of "wwwwwwWWWECO!" whenever the opposing keeper is taking a goal kick (weco=fag)(now you AND all the 7 year old kids in Xela know a funny thing to call someone when they do something as outrageous as kick a soccer ball). Not like it's any worse than a football game in the States, or puching a guy over a balcony for wearing a Yankees cap at a Sox game, as I witnessed a while ago. Anyway, I couldn't resist the meat slabs any longer, so I had me one. At half time and at the end, the refs are escorted off the field by a phalanx of shielded, machine-gun toting riot police. The final score was 2-1, Xela, but even this didn't do much to assuage the crowd's desire to bottle the refs.
It was awesome.