We took the metro toward the stadium, with more and more FCB jersey-clad fans getting on at each stop. We'd gotten on the metro in daylight, but darkness had fallen during the trip. The stadium was all lit up, and excitement was in the air as we made our way down the street toward it.
A few things about Camp Nou. First, it's capacity is just about 100,000...which makes it the largest stadium in Europe. Our gate number was 95...the gates went all the way up to 105. Our seats were in the 400 level; before you feel sorry for us, there was a 500 level. There was no roof above us as on the lower floors, which made for better viewing...and it was a lovely evening so no worry about rain.
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| Reppin' at Camp Nou |
We got to our seats early, and the first order of business was getting all of the photos taken to prove we were there. Ally is wearing the joint Sounders/FC Barcelona scarf that was issued for the 2009 "friendly" match FCB played in Seattle. Not many people in the stands, but it was still early and (like in Seattle) it was a late arriving crowd.
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| Our view |
With such a huge capacity, I was expecting lots of noise from the crowd. Not so. The Spanish audience was more subdued...no yelling and constant chanting and singing like we have at Sounders games. If someone made a good play, there was polite applause...the kind you'd hear at a symphony concert. We also didn't get constant chatter from the stadium PA announcer (not that I would have understood any of it if he had) that we're used to in the US. He intro'd the starting lineups with little fanfare, the teams walked onto the field, shook hands, and the game started.
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| So excited to be here! |
Gotta admit...it was quite thrilling to see our favorite team playing in this magnificent venue. We'd been talking about and planning this for so long...and here we finally were.
A couple other things about the stadium. The name "Camp Nou" literately means "the new stadium." In this case, "new" seems to be a relative term. It was built in the 1950s, so you do not see elaborate snack bars built into the stadium. Instead, there were small kiosks selling hot dogs located around the concourse. It didn't hit me as odd until later that people were buying hot dogs and beer and it was like 11:00 at night. At halftime, Ally and I went to the restroom. As we stood in line, I started looking around and you could see from the exterior that the restroom was not very large. Ha ha ha - it was just two toilet stalls! And there was just one toilet paper dispenser, and it was mounted on the wall outside of the stalls...so you have to grab a hunk before you went in. I will never again complain about the line at halftime at Century Link field!
The game was scoreless until the very end, when FCB scored twice to win...so we left happy. We were lucky enough to get on one of the first metros leaving the area, though we were pretty well packed in. We passed fans at other stations who weren't able to get on, so we felt pretty good. It was 12:30am at this point.
Things were moving along until we had to change trains. Every train that came through was already packed with drunken loud kids, teens to early 20s. We waited through three trains and couldn't get on. The longer we waited, the more kids showed up on the platform trying to get on trains. Turns out there was a big concert last night at the beach, and apparently every young person in Barca was heading there.
We finally managed to push our way onto a train. It was brutally hot and what little air was circulating was full of cigarette smoke and the smell of weed. The kids were loud and obnoxious. At each station, huge crowds waited to get on the train, and even though the train was full, they shoved their way on. Never so glad to reach our station and get off the train. It's now close to 1:30am. It was the perfect storm of thousands of returning soccer fans hitting the metro at the same time as thousands of concert-bound kids.
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