Football Anyone?

On the way home from the Great Wall I noticed a bunch of people wearing green and yellow jerseys and carrying soccer scarves. While I was noticing this Teresa was telling me something very important that I was not listening to because I was distracted and curious about what event was happening. When she finally finished I said, "that's great but there are a lot of people wearing the same jerseys so there is a game tonight that we need to go to". 

We went to our hostel and asked the folks at the from desk which local team has green and yellow jerseys. Clearly they aren't sports fans because they had absolutely no idea what we were talking about. They couldn't even find it online. Thankfully, even with Chinese characters, Teresa found out that there was indeed a football (soccer) game tonight: Beijing (the green and yellow team) against another Chinese city that won't wear green and yellow. We showered and were on the road in an hour. No rest today! We hailed a cab, got tickets from a scalper (third row for $5 or so), I bought a t-shirt and we were off!

Being in the third row we got a great view other game, and of the Chinese army dudes that were EVERYWHERE! They took up the front row seats of 80% of the stadium, 100% of the seats in our section. In the first seat was a very young looking man (21 or 22?) wearing a white shirt and the rest I the row was filled with green shorted boys (18/19 perhaps). The white shirted boy scanned the crowd. The green shirts sat without their backs touching the seats at all, straight, only staring ahead, at the field, with hands on their knees for the entire match. The only time there was movement was at half time: the white shirted dude watched the field and the green shirts, on command, stood up, turned around and watched the crowd. At the end of half they switched their roles back. This also happened when we (Beijing) scored an the crowd got extra excited and enthusiastic. I felt like I was in 1984 Big Brother land where we, as fans, were always watched and when things got a little extra-ordinary the state was there ensuring we knew we were being watched. It was just plain eerie. 

We walked the couple of kilometres back from the game and crashed, only to get up early on Thursday morning. That was the longest day of life. Stay tuned.