The Chivas Run

One of the things Lisa really wanted us to do in Mexico was to see a professional fútbol (soccer) game. Almost as soon as we landed in Mexico City, she started to survey the landscape to see where and how we might do this. Early signs weren’t good: the professional Liga MX was on hiatus, between the regular season and the playoffs, and big stadiums were empty.

Two weeks in, though, we relocated to Guadalajara, and it seemed like there might be a possibility of seeing the homegrown Chivas play Mexico City’s Cruz Azul in the quarter finals.

We weren’t sure of the date—various sources (AI, local friends, Uber drivers) told us different things—but Wednesday, November 26 emerged as a clear front runner.

With this in mind, we found our way to the ‎Boletomóvil app, where we found official tickets were being sold, and, after a lot of to and fro, we secured three, on the first level, row Y.

We were chuffed.

Until we noticed that the date for the game was still shown as “TBA.” 

Apparently some things had to be sorted in the league before the date was set, and, for a time—indeed almost until the last moment—the game could have been the Wednesday or Thursday we were in Guadalajara, or it could have been in December.

Fortunately, the fates tilted toward us, and the game was eventually set for Thursday: not ideal, as we needed to leave for the airport for our flight home the next morning at 4:45 a.m. But better than December.

With tickets in hand, and a date for the game confirmed, we were left with the question of how we were going to get to the Akron Stadium and back. 

We’d been relying on Uber and DiDi to get around the city, and that had been working well; I was afraid that they would fail us on game day,  though, as thousands of people flooded into, and out of, the stadium. I needed to get us some backup plans, so on the Monday before game day I took the afternoon to run some simulations.

The Recon Run

Akron Stadium was about 4 km from our home in the Guadalajara suburb of Zapopan, about 10 km by car:

I was fairly sure that we could get to the stadium by car, so I ordered up an Uber, and Victor had me there in 15 minutes flat, in mid-afternoon traffic, for 100 pesos (about $7.50 Canadian). This was my best-case baseline.

What happened next was a study in what my friend Edward writes about in Wayfinding without a smartphone, describing the plight of The Amazing Race contestants making their was through Bucharest:

We may think of smartphone apps as “route finding” tools, but the problems we saw in this episode were less of route finding than of route following. The racers mostly did use smartphones to find routes: Their first instinct was not to ask a passer-by for directions but to ask a passer-by to use their phone to look up a route. But then they tried to follow those smartphone directions without a phone in hand, which is a different problem.

In my case, Google Maps showed a 40 minute walk from the stadium to the Ciudad Granja bus stop. Before just assuming that was the best way, I stopped at the security gate and asked the very helpful guard what the best way to the bus was, and he pointed me to a much shorter route, to the Estadio Chivas bus stop.

I set out on foot, and was at the bus in 15 minutes.

I did some scouting of the local area, and found an OXXO convenience store where we could recharge our transit cards, and pick up water or snacks, if we needed to.

The bus in this area travels on a separated “busway,” with a dedicated lane on the highway. The bus got me to the San Juan De Ocotán bus stop in 8 minutes.

My original plan at San Juan De Ocotán was to call another car, but I realized it was only a 40 minute walk from there to our house, so I decided to survey that route on foot, just in case all else failed and we needed to make a late night walk home (not my preference, but it’s always good to have a backup to the backup). 

The walk proved pleasant, and looked well-travelled and well-lit for all but a sketchier 500 foot section, midway through. I made it home for supper.

The Game Day Run

Kickoff time on November 27 was 8:07 p.m., and we decided to leave home at 6:00 p.m. to give ourselves plenty of buffer. 

I looked for a DiDi starting just after 6, and came up dry—the first time in 3 weeks that the service hadn’t almost-instantly offered up a ride. There was nothing. 

I tried Uber: same thing.

I started to formulate Plan Bs: walk, or take a car, to the San Juan De Ocotán station, and get the bus from there. Just as I was starting to look into how that might work, Lisa (essentially competing with me, but for our common goal) scored us a DiDi ride directly to the stadium for 249 pesos (about $20 Canadian; more than double my test run, but understandable, and welcome, given supply). 

Traffic to the stadium was very heavy, and what had been a quick 15 minute test run ended up taking more than an hour on game day. By the time we got dropped at the stadium entrance, made our way through the Fan ID verification, security screening, and ticket validation, and then made our way halfway around the stadium to our seats, it was 8:10 p.m. We sat down just about 3 minutes after kickoff, happy that we’d made it at all.

The Game

The game itself was an all-consuming experience, the likes of which I’d never experienced. Here’s a small taste, which doesn’t really convey the true feeling of being in the presence of so many people and so much aural and visual stimulation:

Lisa, much more well-versed in the ways of soccer, was disappointed by the 0-0 score at game’s end: she would have preferred a nail-biting contest to an evenly matched journeyman match. I was content to just bath in the experience: it was epic.

The Run Home

The game was over by 10:00 p.m. Our first plan was to see if we could call an Uber or DiDi to pick us up; my research had suggested this might be difficult or impossible, but we decided to give it a go. We need not have bothered: competing with the thousands of other mobile phone users in the stadium meant that neither of us could get a data connection at all: even if a car was there to be called, we couldn’t connect with it.

So we set off to follow my practiced walk-transit-car plan.

The exit from the stadium was calm and orderly, despite the crowds, and we followed a steady stream of other transit-takers toward the bus stop. 

As we passed through the parking lot we heard a lot of “taxi, taxi,” whispered carefully under the breath, sent our way; while it would have been wonderful to have simply hopped in a car at that point and motored home, this was a line I wasn’t willing to cross, my head filled with “avoid unlicensed taxis at all cost” advice from multiple sources, and visions of all manner of bad endings filling my head (my mantra in Mexico, generally, was “most people, most of the time, in most places, are kind and helpful”; in this case I wasn’t willing to suspend my disbelief enough).

We got to the bus stop in about 20 minutes, stopped at the OXXO to recharge our transit cards, get some water and chocolate (amazingly well-organized process where customers were titrated in and out of the store by a security guard). We crossed over the pedway to the bus stop, and joined about 50 others waiting for the bus.

While we were waiting, Lisa was chatted up by a devoted Chivas fan who’d travelled all the way from Monterrey, with his father, to see the game. He was excited enough by our coming from Canada that, when we all squeezed into the bus 10 minutes later, he led a chant of “CA-NA-DA” that filled the bus.

Some things, no matter how much you plan, you can’t possibly imagine.

We were at San Juan De Ocotán 10 minutes later, squeezed from the bus claustrophobia, energized by the chanting, happy closer to home.

We had a couple of false starts with securing a car home from the bus stop, but Lisa sweetened the pot—DiDi allows you to optionally set your own price—and we got a ride home in short order for 200 pesos (about $15 Canadian).

We walked off the elevator and into our apartment at 11:56 p.m., almost two hours after the game ended.

Doing Things That Are Hard

Kevin Dahlstrom turned 55 last week, and posted 55 pieces of advice, among which was this:

24. Do hard things. Choose courage over comfort. Everything you want is on the other side of fear and hard work. As Jerzy Gregorik said, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

Going to a football game in Guadalajara was hard. It was also a little scary. And involved a lot of moving parts. 

But, yes, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear and hard work.” 

I’m very happy we put in the work, got to experience something epic (and to show young L. what experiencing epic things is like), and emerged out the other end.

🇨🇦 CA-NA-DA!