Adventures of a Gringa at Maracana

Maracana is one of the largest soccer stadiums in the world, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and built in 1950 with a capacity for nearly 100,000 people.

As such, the stadium is used for a variety of purposes, including soccer games and concerts. This week, I happened to be there twice for two very different events.

The first was Test Day on Sunday, when tens of thousands of high school students from all over Rio went to Maracana to take an exam (Eli's sister was one of them). If they score high enough, they qualify to go to technical schools, which are akin to magnet schools in New York. These schools have supposedly excellent teachers and connections to companies so that students can get internships right out of high school. Hence, they are super competitive.

What fascinated me was that in order to hold this exam with so many kids, they decide to do it in one place on one day. The kids have to sit on the bleachers (or seats, if they're lucky), and take the four hour exam on a clipboard. How this achieved without total chaos is beyond me, because it looked pretty crazy when we got there at 8am. I got a huge kick out of the fact that there were street vendors everywhere selling pens and clipboards, yelling, "Get your OFFICIAL clipboard here!"

Then, on Wednesday, Eli and I went to see the Brazilian national soccer team play Colombia in a World Cup qualifying game. I was very excited not only to see the selecao, as they are called, but because it was my first real soccer game in Brazil (we went to one at the Pan Am Games but it didn't really count because they were basically amateurs).

So, Eli being the wonderful person he is, left at 7:30 on Monday morning. Nobody knew anything about tickets when he first got there, and he wandered in circles until finally he found the place to wait. Eventually, a long line formed and the box office opened only at noon. There was a lot of media there and HEY, Eli made on the news! (in the story and in a photo).

On Wednesday, we got to the stadium three hours early. Outside, we saw a huge group of Colombians wearing matching tee shirts and singing and dancing, and inside there were a surprising number of people already there. I was really excited because Monobloco did a free show about an hour before the game, and I've always wanted to see them live (they were originally a bloco, one of the street bands during Carnval, and now they're a major musical group and they are awesome). They also set up these weird balloon things in the shape of Sugarloaf and then let all the balloons fly into the air.

So we sat around waiting and waiting, and pretty soon the stadium filled (there were nearly 55,000 people there). Lots of people were dressed in green and yellow, and they gave out free Brazil flags at the entrances. There were, of course, some crazy characters, like a guy dressed as Spiderman, another dressed as Ze Carioca, and a pregnant lady who painted her tummy yellow and green.

The players from both teams came out on the field, to much hullabaloo, and began doing homoerotic questionable stretches and warming up. They then played the national anthems, and it was a wonderful moment to see all the Brazilians singing the anthem together, even little kids. The game began and then began the insults.

I can understand yelling mean things at the other team, being that it's a sporting event, but never in my life, even at a Yankee game, heard people yell such terrible things at their own team. Brazilians are insanely passionate about soccer, which I led me incorrectly to believe that they are loyal to their national team. Words like "veado" and "macaco" were thrown around, among others, namely by men who had brought their small children.

In the end, it was a very, very depressing game because NEITHER team scored and the game ended 0-0. It was cool to see superstars like Kaka and Robinho live in the flesh (even though Eli insisted we sit higher up).