Italy vs Costa Rica in Recife

Friday was a big adventure. We have tickets to see Costa Rica vs Italy. Italy is a if favorite in the cup, but tiny Costa Rica has been playing really well including beating South American powerhouse, Uruguay in the opening match.

The game was in Recife which according to Google and TomTom is about 3.5 hours away. Since there is a lot that TomTom doesn't know about driving in Brazil and we don't know where the heck we are going in Recife, we left Pipa at 6am for the 1pm kickoff.

We made it almost all the way to Recife without much trouble. We successfully stopped for gas and a game of breakfast roulette. Much of Brazilian breakfast involves a baked pastry loaded with something. We suspect the shape might mean something, but we haven't cracked the code yet.

After 200km of driving, I'm saving the Brazilian driving details for a separate post, we finally started to see signs for the stadium. Unfortunately, at 11km the traffic stopped completely dead. Eventually everyone got out of their cars to wait, and it was obvious that with the exception of the truck drivers, most of us were heading to the match. Finally, the police decided to let the traffic go, but we never did figure out why it stopped in the first place.

A bit later, we saw signs for the FIFA park and bus area, which was a huge relief because we were a little concerned about having to improvise parking.

Arriving at the stadium was really cool. It was about noon, by the time we got there and there was a lot more energy around the stadium than in Natal. People were mingling, music was pumping, and beer was reasonably priced.

We found my friend Kirk from Maryland and hung out with him and his new British buddies before the game. Stupidly, I forgot to take a picture of us all!

The stadium is great with no bad seats. Jon had decided to root for Italy out of his love of a visit there a few years ago. I was pulling for Costa Rica because they are an underdog, they are our soccer neighbor in the conference, and their star forward is an Arsenal player. The crowd was pretty equally split, with the majority of the Brazilians supporting Italy. The Costa Rican fans were definitely more rowdy, often breaking into song to cheer on their team.

The Italian team had several legends on the field lead by Pirrlo and Buffon, which made the game even more exciting to watch. Spoiler alert, Costa Rica wins on a single goal in the first half and the stadium roars. After the match, I continued to chant along with the Costs Ricans in my USA jersey and flag. When I stopped to ask some Costa fans what we were chanting, they told me "Tico Tico" and offered to trade jerseys with me. I had to switch my brain back to Spanish to say Muchas Gracias!!!

We made it back to the car with no issues and even got on the highway and a away from the stadium pretty easily. What we didn't expect was that we would hit horrible traffic at every city and town along the single highway that connects Recife to Natal.

I think we spent about two hours stuck in traffic getting hungry and grouchy. We could occasionally hear matches on the radio, but our Portuguese isn't strong enough to catch anything but GGGGOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLL!!!!

When we finally got to Pipa (look for that adventure in the driving post coming soon), we found out that it had turned from a sleepy little beach town to a great big street party while we were gone. Normally, that would be great, but right now we were starving and the only way we know how to get to our hotel is through that crowd and the guy won't let us try. He gives us directions for the backway in Portuguese and we have to turn around. It turns out there are more than 5 blocks in Pipa. After 45 minutes of wandering through alleys and deadends, we tried to get back to the town entrance for the third time to tell him what we thought of his directions. We were almost there, when we suddenly realized that we had stumbled into our hotel! Unfortunately, our usually empty parking spaces were all taken by the new weekend crowd. We did some creative backing up narrow alleys and eventually found a spot on the street at 10pm. 18 hours after we left, we were finally able to check in with family on the wifi and eat our first meal since we lost the breakfast game. Several beers and a big caipirinha later we said good night to the still raging street party and hit the bed. Saturday will be our first travel free day. Should be a bit more relaxing!

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