Sunday, May 20, 2007

Bryan the prophet said "we're going to burn"

On Friday night Bryan said "we're going to burn." He turned out to be sort of prophetic. Let me explain.

Yesterday we finally got our halbtax, which allows us to buy half price train tickets. We then bought tickets to a soccer game between FC Zurich and Young Boys (Bern). FCZ was in 1st place in the top Swiss league and YB was in 3rd. So we went to Bern (Bryan the prophet). There was a cheaper, extra train going from Zurich to Bern, and we got tickets for that one instead of the normal train. Guess who else was riding? Yep, all the FCZ fans. It was a pretty fun trip to Bern with all the chanting and singing (one song was to the tune of When the Saints go Marching in and another to the theme of Tetris).

When we got to Bern, there were all these riot police at the stadium. Our tickets were in the home section - we thought we had seats in the Zürich section. So we jumped bandwagons and cheered for Young Boys during the game. We were in the lower level of the Stade de Suisse and the home crowd was pretty rowdy. FCZ scored in front of us in the first half. Then YB scored in front of us early in the second. FCZ scored about 3 minutes later to go back up one. Then YB scored again to tie it. I took a picture of our section immediately after that. Finally, with about 5 minutes to go, FCZ scored to make it 3-2 and the home fans were stunned.

On the way back, we again rode with the FCZ fans. At first the two across from us talked to me/us a little. They seemed sort of nice. After a while, there weren't being nice though. The one was saying stuff directly to me in German that he knew I couldn't understand and the guy across the aisle from Bryan was wiggling his fingers or something 6 inches from Bryan's face. Then the guy across from me decided not to throw cigarette number 21 out the window with the other 20; instead, he put it out on the garbage can thing between us, and it burned my leg (Bryan the prophet). "Sorry" he said, unconvincingly. But we made it back the rest of the way to Zürich and had awesome Kebaps or Kebabs.

See all photographs

1 comment:

Rachel said...

Hey! Travis, you don't know me but I am one of Bryans friends from Dordt. ( Well, I think he would call me a friend ;) )
Sorry about getting burned Bryan .. that kinda stinks. I know the germans get really crazy with soccer... they drop everything to go watch the games. Did you have doner kabab?? that was my favorite food when I went to germany! I think i had at least one a day :S

It is nice to see you guys made it and hope the rest of your time there goes well!