Football

I (Jason) went to the Kenya vs Namibia football (in the States we call it soccer) game a week ago. I really enjoyed it. I still don't understand all of the rules, but it is a lot of fun to watch.

We arrived at the stadium about 4 hours early. We then had to sit on concrete slabs and wait until the teams came out to warm up (only about 3 hours). The concrete slabs once had chairs, but they were ripped out and thrown during a riot several years ago, so now there is only concrete slabs.

The stadium would probably hold 100,000 people (it is amazing how many people you can squeeze in when there are no chairs). I am not sure what the official capacity is or was. Anyway, they only sold about 50,000 tickets, so the people who had been waiting in line for hours to buy tickets (we purchased ours about 5 days in advance) were told the stadium was sold out. Then they started to riot outside the stadium, so the police started beating on people with sticks and using tear gas. I was glad of the hard concrete seat.

They only sold 50,000 tickets because that was the number the police felt they could handle if things got out of control.

The game was a lot of fun - well the last half was actually boring, no one scored. Kenya won, which was great. At the start of the game, I was told to watch out for "P-bombs." I asked what that was (I could only think A-bomb). What they meant was "pee bomb" apparently people in the upper stands fill empty cups with pee and launch them at people farther down. Luckily that didn't happen, but we did get hit with soda cans, beer cans and watter bottles. But that only happened when something great happened or when something bad happened.
The people across the stadium from us got upset and ripped apart a bench and started a fire in the stands.

All-in-all it was so much fun, and I would love to go to another game some time. Maybe next time if Kenya loses we can get tear-gassed!