LOVES European Football!!

WOW!! What a day! Probably my most exhausting day of the trip so far, but it was incredible!! I just got back home from the soccer game: Paris Saint-Germain v. Montpellier. It was absolutely amazing. We went to the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris so obviously Paris SG was the home team. We went to the stadium yesterday and bought the cheapest tickets (30 euros) and figured we would just take whatever we got, but we could not have picked a better place to sit. True we were pretty far up, but we were right in with all of the crazy people cheering the entire game! I think soccer here is a bigger deal than any sport is to the US. We took the metro there and there were people singing the team songs and yelling and just getting so pumped even two hours before the game and when they started singing their songs everyone on the metro sang along with them. It was interesting to see how the people here reacted differently to the game than we do. They pay really close attention to the game, but it is still very social and they chant and sing and scream without stopping the entire game, but they don't really make a huge deal about calls that the refs make and they didn't get really anxious when our team was getting close to scoring. They just kept on chanting. PSG ended up losing 1-3 to Montpellier, which made the fans very mad. Whenever anything went wrong or if someone on our team made a mistake they would boo their own players very loudly and everyone would raise their arms waving the middle finger to them. We picked up on some of the cheers. The tunes were almost all from familiar chants and nursery rhymes so if we couldn't understand the words, we just yelled things that sounded similar. Who knows what we were saying. The section we were in was called the Kop of Bologna and it was absolutely crazy. The same people come to the same sections for every game the entire season so a lot of people knew each other. They had a leader with a microphone and they had set up speakers around the Bologna section so the Bologna leader would start chants and songs and everyone would follow in. We didn't know this ahead of time, but this was the last game of the season, so it was even more crazy than normal. I took a video of it and I'll post it, but on the other side of the stadium the fans set off at one point around 10 flares in the stands and they started throwing them down onto the field so they had to stop the game! someone lit a flare just two rows directly in front of me too. And there were several others around the stadium. I bought a PSG scarf and it is very cool. Everyone at these games has a scarf and they hold them up like banners for certain cheers. We were around some very interesting people. They guy next to me was rolling stuff in with his cigarettes and was blowing his smoke in my breathing area--didn't really appreciate that. The guy in front of me was at one point smoking a cigar and then he moved on to a rolled cigarette and then smoked like 3 more cigarettes during the game. There was a lot of smoke everywhere.
The game was really cool though! Montpellier was definitely the better team. PSG didn't get very many good looks at the goal, which made the fans more upset. I tried to get some pictures of it, but we could see the Eiffel Tower lit up in the background behind the stadium and it just made the whole experience incredible! Oh! and there was a "manifestation" as we were walking to the game. Basically hundreds of people filled the street and were demonstrating by chanting that they didn't approve of something the Ligue 1 was doing. So cool to see!!
For one of the chants we had to put our arms around our neighbors and all link in huge lines across the stands and then we would jump repeatedly to the right and then to the left with the beat. That was a fun one because I was next to the guy who was rolling cigarettes. After the game finished, the entire Bologna section stayed in their seats and the leaders kept leading cheers for another hour after all of the players had left the field. I think this was because it was the last game and they didn't want it to end and also because they were still mad for losing. Anyway, it was absolutely incredible. Just how I had imagined--it was so crazy!! I love european football!!