goooooooooooooooooooal!!!!

We bought our tickets for the Olympic soccer match from a guy I found on an expat website. We were hoping Lee was a stand up guy and not selling some of the many counterfeit tickets we had heard about. With tickets in hand, RC and I walked to the subway and took the train out to the "Shanghai Indoor Stadium". When we emerged from the station, there were a ton of police men everywhere. They were verifying you had tickets to even cross the street to get to the stadium. There was even a pup there to sniff for bombs. Other people were taking pics, so I thought, why not!? :)

We followed the crowd and got into line. It was so incredible hot! We were both totally sweating like crazy and in a big, packed crowd. It was pretty funny though, even the officer's were a little amazed by the event...one was even taking pics of the crowd.

After about 15 minutes, they started moving us in the opposite direction of the stadium, toward the street. We finally figured out, they were trying to point us to the main entrance to go through security faster. We were a little skeptical, but it worked and we were all piling into the stadium pretty quickly. And the best part was, our tickets were legit!

The crowd was mostly Chinese...lots with jerseys on for both the Argentina and Netherlands teams. There were also a few more Americans and Europeans than we had seen in Shanghai throughout the trip...maybe 5% of the crowd. We walked a little around the stadium, stopped to see the souvenirs and grabbed a much needed water.

When we walked up the ramp to our seats, we showed the tickets to the attendant and he started shuffling through a stack of tickets in his hand. He then handed us "new" tickets and told us these would be much better since ours would be right behind the tv camera...so we moved down to the bottom deck...sweet!!

The opening anthems started as soon as we sat down. The air was so thick you could barely see the other side of the 80,000 person stadium. It was also a little funny that it was totally open air and named "The Shanghai Indoor Stadium"...hmm. The cool part of it being outside, was you could see the bright full moon over the crowd.

There were a few scattered orange and blue & white striped shirts in the stands and a couple of little flags flying. Then the game started! I really enjoyed it! I was pretty shocked...since I'm not a huge sports fan. There is a ton of action, incredible athleticism and the crowd gets so into it! Even in China! Also, learned that "the wave" is totally universal. I think there was a constant wave the entire game!! If you look really closely, you can see it's below the scoreboard in this pic.

Argentina was first to score. Here are the guys celebrating! GOOOOOOAL! (They didn't really say that over the speaker, it was just in my head).

The Netherlands then scored and we had a tie game at the end of the second half. I don't really know enough about the game to give any play by plays...but I really did love it!

In overtime, Argentina kicked another goal and won the semifinal round! They were last Olympic's gold medalists...so they are quite a team! It was so fun to watch and a really competitive match. Can't wait to see the Dynamos in Houston now ad maybe even find my way to another world event like the World Cup. Can't even imagine how much fun it would have been if the fans were really into the teams!!!

There were 2 groups that were pretty enthusiastic and chanted here and there. This guy was pulling for Argentina...

And these totally drunk dudes I'm assuming were for The Netherlands with their orange t-shirts. They would count down then get the crowd to cheer...then raise the fabric on their tiger t-shirts to show the inside of the mouth when the tiger "roared"!

We took the subway back...check out the sweaty crowd!!!

It was a beautiful night (the only one since I've been in Shanghai with no rain!) and had a ton of fun being part of a such a cool event!!!