Nosotros somos campiones, mis amigos (We are the champions, my friends)

Xelaju son les campiones de futball en Guatemala!!!

My day started with an earthquake, and ended with an eruption. I think it was the chicken commotion that woke me up yesterday morning around 5:30, just in time to feel my bed sway in a gentle circular motion. The amount of time it took my brain to formulate the thought of "hmmm, feels like an earthquake" was about the amount of time it lasted. Maybe 20 seconds. It was a very small one, I'd guess around a 3 something on the Richter scale. If you hadn't been laying or sitting very still and quiet at the time, you'd have missed it.

Last night Xelaju, the Xela football (read: soccer) team, won the national football championship in their home stadium.

The entire city erupted in celebration (and from the occasional horn honks this morning, some appear to still be celebrating). It was an intense playoff, played in two parts. The first game was earlier this week on Wednesday and the opponents, Municipal, scored the only goal, putting Xela behind by one. The final game was played here in Xela, and almost my entire host family went to the stadium. It was apparently an all day affair - my host mom packed 2 and a half dozen chicken salad sandwiches for them and they left in the morning, although the game didn't start until 8:00pm.

In the first 10 minutes of this second, final game, Xela scored the first goal, tying up the score 1-1 (the score from the previous game apparently carried over). It looked like it was going to stay tied for most of the first half, until Municipal scored as well, vastly sobering up the atmosphere of the fans. But Xela pulled through and scored again in the second half, and made numerous attempts at a third, to no avail. So, tied 2-2, the game went into overtime, 30 minutes total, broken down into 15 minute halves. By this point it was 10:00pm and me and my classmates, who had converged at a local cafe/bar to watch the event, were exhausted. Half of us (not me) had woken up at 4:30am-ish to hike the local volcano and were running on very few hours of sleep. However there was no way you could miss this game. No one scored in overtime either, so it went to goal shoot-outs, which Xela won on the 4th shot after an intense back-and-forth. In a testament to how tired we all were, I noticed that our celebratory exclamations after the win was more subdued than they had been after the first goal Xela had scored.

There was one extremely emotional fan who was almost better to watch than the game itself for his passionate reactions to every key event. He broke down in tears of joy at the win and was giving folks enormous hugs, unable to contain his excitement and happiness.

There were firecrackers in the streets and fireworks in the air, every major central square in the city had crowds of celebrants yelling and dancing about. Every car on the street either blared the radio broadcast of the awarding of the cup or was honking in celebration. Or both.

While the excitement and energy on the street was palpable, I had no desire to hang around for the swarm of people leaving the stadium, which is about a 20 minute walk away in Zone 3. So I retired to my house and watched another half hour of the TV coverage of the players' celebration with my host mom and host sister (the one who's 8.5 months pregnant - they stayed home while everyone else went to the game). We listened to the cacophony of noisemakers out on the street. I was so tired that they didn't even keep me up when I went to bed - I was out within 5 minutes of my head hitting the pillow.