Open Air Entertainment

One of my favorite things to do for entertainment in our country is watch soccer games. I have a special international team I follow, which happens to be the same team our language teacher follows. So he and I have had many good times going out to different venues to watch the team conquer almost all others. It’s kind of like the equivalent of going to a sports bar in the US, with the same type of atmosphere, but no alcohol. The biggest place to go is the city’s old cinema, which doesn’t actually show movies anymore (too risqué I assume), but is open air with a gigantic wall like a drive-in movie. It is great for viewing at night, because there are no bad seats (besides the fact they’re all wooden benches) since the picture is so large, but the projector often quits at important moments. There will probably be 300-400 people there for important matches, which is similar to another venue at the city’s soccer stadium, where they project a cable satellite feed on to the perimeter wall and let people in for the equivalent of 25 cents. Other smaller venues are set up by the side of the road with tarps that block off an area from outsiders viewing, and often have a tarp covering where 50-100 people can sit. These are also fun depending on what team’s supporters are the majority at the time there and work better during the day because of the shade. They use primarily flat screen TVs that are wheeled out from an adjacent shop, and so sometimes they are showing multiple games at once. 

Unfortunately, these aren’t really places where La Maestra could come or the children, as the whole clientele is adult males, with a few teenagers. Not that there is anything shady going on (besides the occasional cigarette smokers who don’t exit the area), but in this culture, the ages and genders tend to do things exclusively with their own. Last weekend I saw a game in the late afternoon, which must have been different from most other times I’ve watched, because I noticed something new. Around the time of the late afternoon prayer, they turned the volume a good amount lower, and then shortly the call to prayer for a local mosque came and about 1/3 of the people left for prayer. A few minutes later, a different mosque called to prayer and smaller trickle of people left. Then the volume was turned up again and they were all back in about 10 mins. It made me wonder if soccer games in Muslim countries are scheduled around this, or if the same sort of thing happens in the stadiums? 

-- El Padre