Ale! Ale Ale Ale! Ohhhh!

Is your vuvuzela in tune? Good.

This weekend was our first time attending a football game in Athens! We went to the Panathinaikos game at the O.A.K.A. stadium (which is a really cool venue because it got all snazzy for the Olympics in 2004, but if you say the name too fast you start to sound like Fozzie Bear-- oaka oaka oaka!). Now, people warned us that the fans at these things are out of control crazy, but having been to several Mets games, I wasn't that worried.

These yahoos make Mets fans look like they are attending High Tea.

This was not an important game. Panathinaikos was playing a team that none of us could tell you the name of because it was that unimportant. Their uniforms, however, were black and yellow, so we called them the "Bumble Bee Team" (No, this was not AEK). I'm fairly certain that not one person in the stadium that night was a BBT fan. In fact, there were barely any Panathinaikos fans in attendance. Why? As I mentioned, this was a pointless game. Additionally, this was the coldest day Athens has seen in a really, really long time. It wasn't just "cold for Greece;" it was cold for anywhere. Of course, this is the day we choose an outdoor activity.

The true blue fans were not turned away by the frigid temperatures, though. Right behind the goal sat the crazy people in a huge mass of green. They waved flags and sang or chanted for the entire game with literally no stops. They switched out huge banners and draped them over the stands. It didn't end with songs and signs, however. There were also fireworks, bombs, and paper airplanes.

Would this fly in the States? I'm not even going to answer that. But here, it was just another day at the O.A.K.A. These fans were hurling red fireworks, orange-dust bombs, and yes, even paper airplanes-- fashioned from the game programs-- directly onto the field. At times the field would get so smokey from the pyrotechnics that I wasn't sure how the players could even see where they were going! Also, the sounds that were produced from these fireworks was much like that of war. We would scream, duck and cover every time, thus giving away our foreignness. Let me remind you again that this was not an important game. I cannot even imagine the riotous atmosphere of a game that was of any real import.

Up until this weekend my only European football experience had been Fiorentina (Forza Viola!), which was also on a violently cold day, incidentally, but anyway my vocabulary instinct for this sport is Italian. I would try to stifle this and very quickly learned the key phrases one could get away with at an Athenian football match: 1) "ELA!" (COME ON!); 2) "OHIOHIOHIOHIOHIOHIOHIOHI!" (NONONONONONONO); 3) "EINA MALAKA!" (What a bleeeeep). In this way, we attempted to blend.

Fortunately, we won 2-0, so the crazy people with the bombs were content as we all made our way back into the frozen tundra of Greece.