クレイグの日本

First invite to go somewhere with school friends and I wasn’t about to turn it down! Not that I’m a great fan of football, but now at least if someone’s having a conversation about Manchester United I can go “Hey! I saw them!” and them go back to my non-football thinking self.

So, I met up Naoto at a station near my house. Despite there being a single train from that station that would have taken us all the way there he wasn’t keen on the idea and so we took umpteen trains there, getting lost at several points across Tokyo and Saitama.

We eventually arrived at the station for Saitama Stadium. It’s kinda like Telstra Stadium in the way it was used for some massive event (FIFA World Cup) and now just little things. Followed the trail of supporter clothing, mostly red.

The line for entry was already huge because they were unallocated seats. We sat on the ground under umbrellas waiting for two other friends. Eventually they let us in but our other friends hadn’t come yet so they had some heavy waiting to do when they did come. We grabbed some seats, wiped them down and put towels over them.

We had a few hours to wait out and while we did it decided to rain continuously. Everyone had their umbrellas out so no one could see the field. As the game started we all had to take down our umbrellas and sit there in the rain. In the middle of a Tokyo summer and we were there freezing it out soaking wet watching the game.

I managed to get a photo of a goal just as it flew past the goalie’s hands (photo). Didn’t get any nice photos of any of us, however :(.

The walk back to the station took about 40 minutes at a Japanese-style crawl in the rain. Apparently the whole world’s population was hanging out at Saitama Stadium that day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.