El Que No Salta.....

Right, so I'm trying to update this with a bit more regularity but this largely depends on interesting things happening in my life, so the next entry will probably be around Christmas time.

I was going to write about Entre Todas, the girl's home where I work and how it went from a really awful place to work to a really quite wonderful one. But I can't be arsed so I'm going to write about football instead.

On Saturday night Chile qualified for the world cup for the first time in 12 years. This is a very, very big deal here for several reasons.

There's really not a lot to do here apart from watch and talk about football if you're a Chilean. They love football so much (or have so little else to occupy them)
they have two seasons in one year which means your team can win the 2009 season part 1 and be champions for a whole six months, then be relegated for the 2nd part of the season.

Every single volunteer within their first week here will be asked if they're for Colo Colo or La U. Depending on your point of view Colo Colo are the people's team who best represent the country as a whole, or they are a bunch of violent pissheads who call me Peter Crouch all the time.

Peter Crouch

Similarly, according to your point of view La U are a team that represented a form of resistance to Pinochet's Dictatorship and have a proud leftwing history. Or they're a bunch of poncey middle class students.

When forced to choose between the two I went for La U. Why? They've got an owl on their badge, and who doesn't like owls? Plus I don't actually like being called Peter Crouch all the time.

Owl (barn)


But you do have to choose, nearly the entire country is divided between these two teams. Sure, there are about 12 others in the league, most of which are better than these two, but really they don't count. The derbies between La U and Colo are called Súper Clásicos and whilst these two adjectives could never describe anything in Chilean football, everyone watches it.

But the whole country comes together for when the national team plays. And this proved to be the case on Saturday night. Chile came up against Colombia knowing a win would take them to South Africa, anything less and we would have to wait forthe final game against Ecuador on Wednesday.

In a game that involved comical defending, school boy errors galore and at least 90% of all football cliches going, Chile won 4-2. The pub erupted and emptied and everyone buggered off to the square right outside my flat:





People climbed on bus stops, jumped up and down a lot, sang the same songs over and over again, got a bit teargassed and went home. We get to see this every 6 weeks from our flat and it never gets tired. Ever. The police normally let it go on for about a couple of hours, then tell everyone to go home.

The only sad thing is there is only one more competetive game, which is against Ecuador this wednesday so only one more opportunity to watch hooligans kicking riot vans and police kicking the shit out of hooligans. Nevertheless I will be back in the pub on Wednesday for the Ecuador game because

1. I now know all the national team's songs.
2. There's nothing else to do in Chile.