Soccer

So, at home in the U.S., most huge national sporting events would take place on a weekend, or at night, right? I'm thinking like basketball or football championship games.  Since those are national competitions, the timing always fits our American schedule conveniently. But here in Chile, and I guess most of the rest of the world, soccer is the #1 sporting event, always. And a good portion of soccer championships are international, such as the FIFA U-20 World Cup going on right now. Yeah, there's another world cup for players under 20. I didn't even know that existed until last week.  But anyway, it's in Turkey this year, meaning that the games are always broadcast mid-morning here, on weekdays. Which just so happens to also be the time when I am at work and students are at school. On Tuesday, when Chile played Croatia (we won 2-0!), my head teacher and I were with a freshman class that kept getting interrupted with exclamations from students who were not-so-sneakily listening to the game on the radio through their headphones.  Last week, when Chile played England (big game! we tied) we just went ahead and projected a live feed onto the white board, as did pretty much every other class at school, because nothing else would have gotten done anyway.  Thank God Chile has yet to lose a game, because that might make the rest of the teaching day difficult... But it's not over yet! There are 8 teams left, and we play Ghana on Sunday. Let's gooooo Chile!