Brief note of interest: I woke up this morning afternoon to find pools of dried blood leading from the chair at my desk to my bathroom. I knew immediately where the blood came from: walking for a long time while wearing Birkenstocks has a tendency to rub certain spots on my feet raw. These sores heal very slowly, so when I wear socks in the days proceeding Birkenstocks, the scabs tend to mesh into the socks. Then, when I pull the socks off at the end of the day, the scabs come right off with the socks. Last night was the first time that I have ever bled profusely from said injury. I mopped the blood off my feet with toilet paper, but since it was dark, I didn’t realize I had bled all over the floor as well. I’m thinking about leaving the blood on the floor, forever marking Funenpark 22 as my room, with my DNA to prove it.
Back to the topic at hand:
Monday began with an excruciating lesson on editing for my Film Theory in Practice class. Most of the students didn’t show up at first, so our professor went and made phone calls to all the absent students, reminding them that we had class. Forty-five minutes late, the class finally began. What followed was a pretty amateurish introduction to Final Cut Pro. I had hoped I might be able to pick up a trick or two, but everything we learned was basic and pretty much self-explanatory. I spent most of the class coming up with names to use for characters in upcoming stories that I may or may not ever write. Most of them are from the Aaron Sorkin school of alliterative names, but I also threw in the occasional old-school Mennonite name just for kicks. My favorites? Owen Thomas Oakley and Jeremiah Stoltzfus. © 2008 Tim Lehman.
After class I spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out the best way to bike to the Amsterdam ArenA. Devotees of Amsterdamning will remember a previous post where I attempted to do this with disappointing results. However, this time I had incentive to find the ArenA, since I had a ticket to see the Ajax play that evening. After a bit of finagling with Google Maps, I was able to find directions that didn’t involve me biking along the interstate for long stretches. I wasn’t familiar with most of the areas I would be biking through, but the directions were otherwise pretty simple, so I figured I’d be okay. Plus, the ArenA was only rough nine kilometers away according to my directions, which didn’t seem too bad. Nevertheless I left two hours before the game began just to give myself plenty of time.
My caution was clearly not necessary as I found the ArenA without a problem. The ride only took thirty minutes or so, leaving me with plenty of time to kill before the game. My first task was finding the correct gate to enter. I think I walked around the entire circumference of the stadium before finally finding the elusive gate ‘M’. Once I found the gate, I had to figure out how to use the automated ticket-scanning devices. This wasn’t actually very hard, but I was a fit of nerves as I approached it nonetheless. After finally entering the ArenA, I wandered around for a bit, specifically in the souvenir shop. I was hoping they would have the Ajax home jerseys, but I only saw the away jerseys, which is probably a good thing because I definitely couldn’t afford to spend €60 on a jersey. After buying some M&Ms from a vending machine, I found my seat.
I was the first among the IES kids to arrive as the other kids had decided to take the metro to the stadium. I sat in my seat, flipping through the program that had been handed to me as I entered. Unfortunately, the entire thing was in Dutch, so it didn’t do a whole lot of good aside from providing a list of all the Ajax players. I also was sure to take notes of the amazing song that played over the PA system, ostensibly to get the crowd in the mood for some football. The lyrics went, roughly, like this:
Ajax
Ai, ai, yai, yai, yai, ai, ai, ai
Ajax
Ajax
Right as the game arrived, the three remaining IES kids arrived (Shiva, who hooked us up the tickets, had arrived a few minutes earlier) all quite drunk after celebrating Cinco de Mayo before the game by downing a bottle of tequila. Apparently they had taken the metro in the wrong direction for a while, explaining their absence. The game started off slowly, but it was clear from early on that the Ajax were dominating, as the ball spent most of the time down on SC Heerenveen’s side of the field. I don’t remember the exact timing, but I believe that the Ajax scored two goals in pretty quick succession near the end of the first half. Needless to say, the crowd went pretty wild. Nothing too insane, but there was lots of chanting and (obviously) cheering.
During halftime, these really young kids were brought onto the field. Two of the kids were sent to a goal on either end, while the remaining kids tried to score on them. They would dribble the ball down from midfield and try and score once they were practically on top of the goalie. I really only paid attention to the action on my side of the field, but from what I saw, it was a losing battle for the goalie: I don’t think he was able to stop a single shot on goal. Most adorable was this really little kid, he couldn’t have been older than four or five. The Ajax shorts he was wearing were as long as his legs, and I think the stadium held its collective breath each time the kid dribbled the ball toward the goal, just waiting for him to trip over his way-too-baggy shorts and fall flat on his face. To his credit, he never did.
One odd thing I noticed about the crowd was their propensity for throwing paper airplanes. Soon, it became clear that the unspoken goal was to throw an airplane that made it all the way onto the field. This didn’t happen much during the first half, but once the Ajax had a comfortable lead (they scored a third goal, followed by Heerenveen’s first), a steady stream of paper airplanes floated from the stands down to the field. The players didn’t really seem to mind, they just ignored the litter strewn across their field. The game ended, and the Ajax won, and although the crowd was clearly jubilant, there wasn’t any sign of the rioting I had hopped to see, cars set on fire, that sort of thing. Maybe in a match with a bigger rival.
Since they won, the Ajax move on to the next round of the playoffs, which is a week from today. I’m hoping to get tickets along with my friends on the program. Maybe then we’ll see the sort of riots we’ve all been waiting for:
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