find rain outside yet again. It seems to be raining more frequently now,
we had a really noisy storm yesterday morning with thunderclaps right
overhead.
Hopefully it'll clear up in 20 minutes or so as we are all s'posed to be
going to the beach this afternoon.
We were going to go yesterday but some other plans started to be made
for alternative uses of a Saturday afternoon. One of these plans
involved a trip to Dakar to watch Senegal play Burkina Faso in a
qualification match for the 'African Nations Cup', to be held early next
year.
A group of nine of us went in with the school minibus, picking up four
more at the WEC guesthouse in Dakar.
Tickets for Senegalese international football seem to be fairly easy to
get hold of in comparison to international football back home. We paid
£2 each for ours and sat on concrete steps with numbers to mark each
alloted space but we could have paid just £1 and stood in the terraces.
There aren't many proper seats but if we'd wanted them it would have
only set us back £10 a piece.
Getting into the ground was somewhat more difficult. Whilst we were
allocated gate numbers on our tickets we were still made to queue
outside the stadium walls regardless of where we were sat. After walking
around the stadium and hopping from queue to queue in the hope of
getting in quicker we finally settled on a fairly short looking queue by
the entrance for the terraces where we were assured we could enter with
our £2 tickets.
Eventually we got through the stadium walls and also through our proper
gate to our seating area where we settled down, just in time to see the
teams walking out onto the pitch.
We were sat next to a very large and noisy drum group and a guy with
dual air horns charged by a large metal lever which he was pumping away
on, also very noisy. The atmosphere was great but I was surprised not to
have ringing in my ears that night because it was so loud (for some
reason I chose to leave my earplugs in England for my second year here).
The pre-match crowd antics were fairly standard for a European game, a
mexican wave a few times round the stadium and the familiar chant of
'ole ole ole ole'.
We had a fairly decent view, looking out across a corner of the pitch.
For the first half Senegal were shooting towards us and it seemed like
the crowd's cheering always went up a notch when the ball came to
El-Hadj Diouf in the final third of the field.
Senegal were definitely in control for the first twenty minutes which
culminated in the first goal after about 15 minutes. For the rest of the
second half they seemed to lose the plot a little and Burkina got an
equaliser looking likely to score again if it weren't for the half time
whistle (which we had no chance of hearing thanks to the drum group
beside us).
After the half time break things were back as they should be, Senegal
dominant, scoring again after ten or fifteen minutes and continuing to
attack throughout the rest of the game giving us the final score of
Senegal five, Burina Faso one.
After the game we made our way through the jubilant crowds back to the
minibus and headed back the the guesthouse and then LGM for food and ice
cream.
We finally arrived back at school at around 11:30pm.
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