Spain - Honduras + Visiting Soweto

Today was a pretty full day!

Got a start around noon to head over to the part of town where my friend Rick is living right now. Him and I went out to watch the Portugal - North Korea game on TV while having pizza. The place that we went to for these things had some interesting choices, that's for sure!

The game didn't go the best, and Portugal ended up winning 7-0. That's pretty brutal.

We did not yet have tickets to Spain-Honduras, so we used his GPS to find a mall that had a FIFA Ticket Center. Only thing was, the GPS thought it would be a great idea to take us right through the most dangerous parts of Soweto.

Soweto was like a completely different world that I didn't know existed. It was hard to believe that minutes ago I was on a regular road in what seemed like a regular city, and then all of a sudden I was in an area where the is an amazing amount of crime and poverty, mostly due to there being no real available education for the residents. I must admit, I was a bit scared driving through there even though it was daytime. People still get carjacked and killed in the daytime. Following Rick's request (he was the driver) I did not wear a seat belt through Soweto - this was so that if we were carjacked, i could get out immediately. People have been shot for taking too long while fiddling with their seat belt

One place we did stop in Soweto was the Hector Pieterson museum. We did not take a tour, but we did walk around and see the memorial. Hector Pieterson was a 12 year old boy who was shot by police when the opened fire on students on June 16, 1976. I did talk about this briefly in my June 16 post. The above and below pictures are of the monument.

From there we visited the FIFA ticket collection site. We were trying to get tickets for Spain-Honduras, but the system was giving our lady and error whenever she tried to book them for us. In a great turn of events, a few tickets for South Africa - France were re-released. We swooped in and picked up two of them. I really didn't think I had a chance at seeing the host nation play while here, but I'm thrilled things worked out this way.

We did a lot of walking around the stadium and talked to a lot of people - many looking for tickets - but we finally were able to buy some outside the stadium. We got to our seats after kickoff, and luckily, the seats were pretty fun - we were right at the corner flag in the first row.

Spain won the game 2-0 and I headed straight home. It is about a 250 mile drive to Bloemfontain where Rick and I will be seeing Bafana Bafana play against France. I'm really looking forward to it.