A Jugar

So, one of the things that I appreciate about travel is that it forces me to be open to new experiences. My typical Saturday night, for example, involves a nice cultured movie or a sedate organic dinner with friends. In Xela, however, the folks I´ve connected with were, understandably, having none of this. From the San Francisco nurse contingent to my New Yorker housemate to what I like to refer to as the Iowa Mafia (a large group of med students from the state university), all tongues were wagging about the upcoming soccer game.

We got there a bit early to get seats and take advantage of the two-for-one deal, which gave us plenty of time to scout out the snack options. On the ground floor below the stadium, several families were knocking out comida tipica on portable stoves--tortillas, scraps of meat, grilled green onions. Ambulatory venders worked the stands, hawking a fascinating variety of wares. Slices of Domino´s pizza in perfect triangular cardboard boxes set you back 10 quetzales, or a dollar forty-five. Hot dogs, donuts, and chips were on hand. My favorite was the burnt-sugar peanut vendor, who also had spicy fried fava beans in little plastic pouches for a quarter a pop. A few of us had the hot pineapple cider. Many more paid about 3 dollars for a clear plastic liter bucket of pale yellow beer.

The teams were pretty evenly matched, which I imagine would make the game much more exciting if you had any idea what the hell was going on, but for me simply indicated that the board didn´t change much. There was a lot of bumping and shoving on the field, with some very dramatic flopping on the ground and entreaties towards the referees. There were many rude names to call the opposite team but we didn´t know any of them.

Soccer is big in Guatemala, and the Xela fans were pretty rabid. Fireworks were going off all over the stands, dumping scraps of newspaper in their wake. Young men stood with their shirts off, yelling cheers. A band played the run-up to ¨charge!¨ (but nothing else) every few minutes. And a bat whizzed drunkenly around in the sky, attracted and confused by the stadium lighting.

Towards the end of the game, things on the field got brutal, with more yellow cards and a brief shoving match. At one point, the fans in one section began throwing garbage on the field, but they either made their point or gave up on it, because the foodfight only lasted a minute and then the game went on.

Final score was two to two, and we all poured out of the stadium. All in all, a pretty interesting night.