Ole, Ole, Ole, Chelsea

The major highlight of the trip, and the only thing we planned to do in advance, was the Chelsea vs. Fullham soccer game. Bill's favorite soccer team playing in their home stadium during our trip seemed to be like it was destined to be and Bill a full month and a half ago, set about securing himself some tickets. This was no easy task, mind you. Apparently, it is not so easy to buy a ticket for a Chelsea home game, as the stadium only seats 42,000 fans. (Many other local stadiums hold 80,000 fans--incredible!)

Bill mentioned to a couple of guys at the pre-trip meetings at school he was going to go, and they wanted to go as well. Luckily for Bill, one of them knew a co-worker in his company's London branch who was a season ticket holder. Season ticket holders get first dibs at buying extra seats for the home games. Without this connection, I doubt that Bill would have managed to secure 4 tickets all together for this game. After paying what I think was a crazy amount of money for a soccer game, we had our seats and the fun could begin!



The train ride to the stadium was an experience in and of itself. The sheer number of humans packed onto the tube trains was staggering. We made it onto one and helped protect a little boy from getting smothered by the crowds getting on. His poor grandmother was taking him, and she was having a hard time protecting him. Even I, had my full body strength pushing people off of me and was leaning against another person so hard, that if they were to move I would have fallen down. As we exited the station I took a second to snap a photo of the volume of people all coming up the station stairs.

We followed all the blue jerseys and found the stadium quickly. We made our way past security and into the stadium where we climbed at least 5 stories worth of stairs to our seats. Our seats were two levels above what I would call "nose-bleed" section only a few rows away from the very top of this giant stadium. It was still a great view of the entire field and I looked over to see Bill with a grin from ear to ear on his face. All of sudden I was happy to be there with him to watch him have so much fun.

We meet up with the two other guys from school at the seats and had one snap a quick photo of us to prove we actually made it there!