Fiorentina ha vinto!!

Italians take their soccer seriously. Unlike US sports, people here go to the game to watch it… I mean ONLY watch it. They’re not there to meet girls, or socialize with friends, or even get drunk. Last night was ridiculous how obviously American we must have looked. Let’s just say that it was really easy to find our group of friends when we got there…

The game started at 8:30 and when we got to lo stadio (which was only a 15 minute walk from our house) I bought my purple “Toni” jersey and we set out to find our friends. It wasn’t very hard… Pretty much all of Syracuse was there which makes it inevitable that Santa Clarans were everywhere. We sat in the front row behind the visiting team’s goal… Well, we were HARDLY in the front row since the bleachers we were sitting in were about 50 yards away from the actual field. The players were so small that I basically could only follow the game based on the reactions that the crowd made (unlike US sporting events where you can watch the big screen the whole time…). It was such a ruckus; literally the entire stadio would break out into songs and chants; they waved HUGE flags the entire time; flares were lit in the very very very packed stands… I loved it! It was funny cuz the ENTIRE stadio was rooting for Fiorentina and literally the non-viola-rooter-forers (the guys cheering for Parma) were given seats that were GATED OFF from the rest of the stadium seats. I’m not kidding that the visitors had to sit IN A CAGE!!!

I was into the game. I like soccer. I like Lucca Toni too (even though he got red carded for elbowing a guy in the face...). People were beat up all over the place and the little stretcher-carriers went “hut, hut, hutting” onto the field many many times. They ended up winning 1-0 though, so yay! FORZA RAGAZZI!

Dinner before the game was awesome. Marilena and I split a bottle of wine while we were getting ready and quickly realized that a bottle of wine for two girls that hadn’t eaten all day was prolly not such a good idea. I could not stop laughing for the life of me. Our host mom, Susana, thinks we’re crazy but loves us. She told us that she liked us because we talk very loud all the time. Hahahaha, I guess it’s true. Marilena in her drunken couragesness got manuel’s (our host brother’s) phone number!!! She is my hero. He said that his friends have been asking about us. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

It’s crazy because even though we can legally buy alcohol here, I feel like people look at us funny. Hm. Two, young, girls, buying 3 bottles of wine (for our stash) at 2:00 in the afternoon. However, here, buying is the easy part. It’s the secretly-sneaking-the-host-family’s-cork-screw-into-our-room-
because-it’s-impossible-for-us-to-open-it-with-Marilena’s-mini-
swiss-army-knife-then-finishing-the-bottle-and-hiding-the-evidence-
so-that-our-host-family-that-we-love-still-has-
respect-for-us that’s the hard part. :)

Ugh. Thank goodness it’s Thursday. I love having 3-day weekends every week!