Evro Football

I went to a soccer match with some other volunteers, there was over 30 of us. Yerevan was pretty crazy this week because this was the first football game of the year in Armenia, and it was against Russia. (Reasonably close country, strong ties, lots of Armenians speak Russian as a second language) There were about 1,000 or 1,500 tickets sold to Russians and even more came trying to buy tickets from whoever was scalping them. On top of that you had a lot of Iranians in Yerevan for the Persian New Year which took place on March 20th.

Basically a ton of Russians running around speaking Russian, expecting every Armenian to know it, and a bunch of Iranians that know some English, and then you have us, the big group of Americans that all speak Armenian.

I needed to get to the Peace Corps office to meet up with some people before the game and it's about a 30 minute walk from where I was near the opera. I tell the cab driver where I want to go, get in, and he starts driving. Then he says the road I want is closed, it's near the football stadium and they had closed off some streets, but then he keeps driving. he tries a few intersections, they are blocked off, and I tell him, go to Sayat Nova Street. He insists it is closed, I have to get off at another point across the city, about a half hour walk from where I wanted to go. Great. Absolutely no help. Oh and then I walk up to the PC office, and sure enough Sayat Nova is open. Worthless cab drivers. I actually just got angry writing that.

But anyways, we walk up to the stadium, as we work our way in we've got police, some with riot gear, firemen, the military has got people there--you might be able to call it, a little much. We go through one little fenced in area getting pushed by people behind us, really, it felt like we were cattle. And then we get to another checkpoint. We go through that. And then there's another checkpoint. They didn't really do much, they asked what was in your bag, maybe they looked inside real quick and then let you pass. And so we finally up the steps to go to our seats . . . and the gate is closed, and people are yelling and screaming about trying to get in. Nothing really makes sense, we're out there for 40 minutes, miss the first half hour of the game. I think what eventually was the problem is you had Russians that were trying to get in, and the problem was, this wasn't the Russian section. So finally some very diligent volunteers in front kept talking to the guards and then they finally let us in.

After I sat down someone pointed the Russian section out to me. It was a small little corner section with a blue fence around it. There were military guys out in front of it, and they kept everything in order so nothing exciting there, but it was interesting to see caged Russians.

The game ended in a 0-0 tie, and just reinforced the idea that soccer is an extremely boring sport. It was still fun to be there, chanting, and I'll probably go again. The stadium was so tiny. Big high schools probably have larger stadiums.

I'm a bit tired so I'm going to end this post abruptly

See, I didn't even use a period