Saigon to Superior: World Cup

Italia! (World Cup Victory)

“Viva Italia!” These words are echoing from sidewalks all over San Cristobal, Mexico, as Italian tourists have poured out of the bars and taken over the city’s streets. The World Cup Soccer title is now theirs, following a tie-breaking shootout with France that came down to the last man, a victory that was the product of a month of hard-scrabble tournament play.

By chance, our trip to Central America began at World Cup’s start and would wrap up a day after its exciting end. We’d first landed in Mexico, to witness that country’s first win in Germany alongside the locals that had packed every bar with a TV to the gills. Quite a festival followed. We then saw U.S. hopes for the cup dashed while at a beachside bar in Belize, alongside a group of Mexican snorkelers who saw their own team perish as Angola, Portugal, Italy, and Argentina’s players rocked various TV screens with fancy footwork we Americans don’t often get to see in U.S. sports.

Then we were off to Guatemala where everyone was rooting for Argentina to kick Mexico’s butt—revealing in no subtle way that rivalries with its next door neighbor are alive and hot—only for us to then see this allegiance shift like the wind when Germany took on the victor, Argentina. “Argentines are snobs!” Their cultural difference was acutely revealed as Guatemalans jumped off their bar stools with screams of joy and arms raised high to a German goal.

Since most of the Europeans we’d met this trip were Dutch, we picked Holland as our new favorite after the U.S. bowed out. But then the Portuguese took them down with numerous spats more reminiscent of hockey than soccer. We needed a new team to root for, and a sign to guide us there. A Latin American team would probably win the most friends, and just by chance, the bar owner of the Guatemalan town we were studying in was from Brazil. Sold!

Not even the hustlers in the roadside marketplaces could peel their faces from the soccer matches on their tiny TVs. If walking down the sidewalk this month in Latin America you are suddenly enveloped by a collective roar, somewhere in Germany someone has just scored a goal.

Ten days ago, my buddy Andy and I had just finished up our first week of study at a Spanish school in Guatemala. We were piled high with Spanish vocabulary from the hours and hours of rich one-on-one conversations with our very cool and cute Mayan instructors. However, their burgeoning accusations of our being slackers drove us to a clear conclusion:

We could give up two-dollar beers and World Cup Soccer at the local pubs, and engage in the homework of serious students... Or, we could take a week of “independent study” of written Spanish in the mornings, and take the afternoons to immerse ourselves in World Cup Soccer crowds, where we might also endear ourselves to jubilant locals with our flowering Spanglish. Abandoning our accommodations with the Spanish school, we set out on our own to find a new place to live.

We soon lucked out with an ex-pat acquaintance who asked us to housesit for his pets for the week. This twist of luck also allowed us the opportunity to host garden pre-parties for fellow travelers before each new tournament game. We soon found ourselves walking away from language lessons altogether—in the spirit of the broader cultural exchanges that orbit so passionately around the final rounds of the world’s most popular sport.

A week later, we are back in Mexico, awaiting the World Cup’s final match, a day prior to our return flight home. In San Cristobal, La Revolucion Bar’s two ground-level rooms are packed, and a distinct difference is evident among the mass of people in each. In one, French tourists are swaying back and forth in somber lines, arm-in-arm, singing their national anthem with a shared gravity that keeps their feet firmly rooted to the floor. In the other, the Italians are swooping a flag back and forth amid a motley crew that is jumping up and down, as they too sing their national anthem, in a collection of raucous voices that stands in stark contrast to their opponents’ next door.

If good soccer defies gravity, the Italian tourists’ bouncing all over Mexico right now are a testament to their nation’s World Cup victory.

(07/09/06)