It's Football Time in Uruguay

As football season gets rolling back in the states I thought I would take a second to tell you about my first real adventure here in Uruguay.  On Sunday, our friend Martín took us to one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.  An Uruguayan soccer game.  Martín is a big fan of one of the local teams here called Peñarol.  In Uruguay this would be the equivalent of a team in the MLS like the LA Galaxy or Seattle Sounders.  But these games are a huge deal, even bigger than high school football in Texas.  Teams like Peñarol and Nacional (Peñarol's rival) divide the city into neighborhoods where fights and violence are associated with the big games here in Montevideo.  Luckily for us, Peñarol was playing a smaller team called Racing so violence wasn't going to be an issue.

Yeah, there was yellow smoke.

Martín took us to the stadium about 30 minutes before the game started.  The stadium, Estario Centenario, was built to house the 1930 World Cup (which was the first World Cup ever)(which Uruguay also won). (Quite a way to break in a new stadium if you ask me.)  Another fun fact about Uruguay football is that Uruguay is the smallest country to ever win a World Cup.  Anyway the stadium seats 70,000 but has been recorded to hold crowds of up to 90,000.  There were only about 20,000 fans at the game on Sunday, but they had closed several sections of the stands and so the stadium was full.

Martín loved telling us about Peñarol and I loved hearing about it.  To make a long story short Peñarol was formed by the train company in Montevideo, whose workers were yellow shirts to work.  After a day of shoveling coal (carbon in Spanish) the workers shirts would turn black.  Thus the colors yellow and black and the name Carbonero became associated the team.

The Carboneros (notice Peñarol's number 1 fan in the middle).

As you can imagine the game was a blast.  I thought I could heckle referees, but the Carboneros were alot funnier than I have ever been. And I am pretty sure that Martín's little sister was the loudest one of them all.  The game ended in a 2-2 tie, which doesn't reflect how well Peñarol played, but it was fun to watch Peñarol battle back from being down 2-0.  It is definitely FOOTBALL TIME IN URUGUAY.
So there are all the details of my first big adventure here in Montevideo.  I'll have to tell you about some new adventures soon.

Thanks for reading.