Zenit Game

Here I am catching up on the blog again! Back on April 25th, Aaron had one of his dreams fulfilled- we went to see a Zenit soccer game. Zenit (like zenith) is the St. Petersburg team. We went with some of the other teachers from the International Academy. We had great weather, and it was fun watching the game (Zenit won), but an experience before we got into the stadium kind of tainted it for me. I'll let Aaron tell you about it...

Well... a scary lesson learned, thankfully God protected us. The lesson is NEVER take your pregnant wife to an event (in this case a Zenit soccer game) where riot police are required to keep the crowd, sort of, under control!!! To my shame I did.
I did do some background checking to make sure it would be OK. I asked my friend, Jarod, who has attended many games if there would be any danger to Danielle. No problem, sometimes the Moscow fans get rowdy, but they are caged off into their own section, and this was not a game against a rival Moscow team. OK. And, we were going with a big group of staff from the school, so we weren't on our own in case we needed anything.
Problem was that Jarod usually arrived to the games about an hour earlier than our group did. So instead of smoothly slipping through the 3 separate security checks into the stadium, we got stuck in the middle of a huge pack of fans who were being prevented from entering the stadium by police in full riot gear. It was a good plan by the police, because the only access to the stadium from where we were was across a bridge and they were obviously trying to regulate the number of people crossing the bridge at one time.
I was a little nervous about our position, but the fans seemed to be fairly patient wating their turn, and there were some smaller kids and other women smattered in with the crowd. Russians are usually very attentive towards women and children.
Then something happend that set the crowd off. Not sure what, maybe their patience was just thin, but they started whistling and shouting. We should've worked our way out of the crowd, but we didn't. A minute later we were all being pushed forward towards the police barricade- where bodies were being pushed back. Now we were very scared and I was yelling to the people around us that Danielle was pregnant. At least one guy seemed to understand and started pushing away from us. Thankfully, the crowd was able to break through the police line so that we were able to get behind the part of the barricade that was still standing and let the crowd go past us. Another lady stood close to us and was sobbing. I think she had actually fallen just in front of the police.
We were very shaken, but things calmed down and we did enjoy the rest of the day.

I was close to sobbing myself when this happened! I think we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, because it was actually a relatively small part of the crowd that went crazy. Anyway, we survived just fine, and here we are at the game, still able to smile! :)



Here are all the Zenit fans, showing their colors after the team scored a goal.