More soccer, what do you know…

So the world cup has started! This means that an already soccer crazy environment is even more dedicated to soccer. Thursday afternoon I got back from a 3 day regional Safety & Security meeting, instead of working on Friday I decided to have more of a “cultural integration day” meaning it would be a soccer day. I woke up at 5 to start watching the opening ceremonies and commentaries before the Mexico/South Africa game. After this, because it was ‘students day’ or ‘week’ or something, all public schools in Santa Barbara didn’t have school all week, the high school in San Marcos was invited to play against the military high school in Pinalejo, Quimistan, about 15 minutes away. I went there with my host dad, the vice-principal and soccer liaison of the high school, with no real intentions of playing, but when they asked if I wanted to play (other teachers were playing too), and I saw that we had legitimate uniforms and everything I couldn’t say no. we warmed up for a while and then had to sit around for 2 hours for a girls game to get played, it wasn’t the highest quality game ever, but they played full 45 min halfs… I didn’t get to start the game because I don’t have soccer shoes here, but when one of the teachers got tired I got to borrow his shoes. It took a little while to get used to playing a full field, 11v11 game with people I hadn’t played with, who were all speaking Spanish, but I got into the swing of things pretty quick. Full time ended with a 2-2 tie, but everyone wanted to play overtime, I was tired and wanted to go straight to penalty kicks, but that didn’t happen. We played two 10 min overtime halves, the other team scored earlyand it wasn’t looking good for us, but we scored off of a free kick from 25 yards out with 30 seconds left in the game, sending us into pk’s . I don’t mind pk’s, as long as I don’t have to take them, I told my dad/coach this, but he said that I would be in the group of 5 that would take one anyway…thanks. We made the first one and the other team missed their first one, everyone else made theirs so we were up 4-3 with one pk apiece, and somehow I got stuck taking the last one, although it wasn’t do or die it was still a lot of pressure, if I made it we would win, if I missed it would probably go into sudden death pk’s. I tried not to think about it too much as I stepped up to take my shot, but both teams were lining the 18 yard box and the military fans/drum band were going crazy right behind the goal, and as the goalie walked by me he talked some trash, fortunately I didn’t understand him… I tried to not have my eyes give it away, I always go right, so I stared at the right side, the goalie went right, but for the first time ever I went left, scoring the winning PK. I was very relieved to say the least. It was also good because I talked to the Coronel/ director of the school and organized a meeting with them about doing some health presentations. All in all it was a very good day. Now I’m watching the Ghana/Serbia game, it’s on 8 different channels, another channel has a replay of a game yesterday, and two other channels have WC history on them. When Ghana scored my dad thought it was fun to say Ghana gana, Ghana gana (Ghana wins)…pretty clever.