Me? A Soccer Fan? Oh Yeah!

Well I thought I'd finally recovered from all the excitement having had Spencer's birthday party and the school break finished, but a family night out on Saturday had us all power-walking to the car, escaping an angry soccer crowd!

Let me explain!    

We may have missed the AFL Grand Final a couple of months back... and I'm still not sure if Dave's fully recovered from that yet!  But we had our share of excitement on the weekend when we decided to go see the Chiangmai Football Club (soccer) play the Trat Football Club at the big 700 Year Stadium here in Chiangmai.  
We rushed through dinner and were glad to see a large crowd arriving before the game (we didn't really know what to expect).
Asking our friend Adrian Rowse, whether we could borrow some money for our tickets (we had missed an opportunity to visit the ATM) we opted for the BEST tickets in the house- you know we kind of wanted to be like MCC members LOL... to happily discover that there was no need to borrow any money, the tickets were only 80 baht each (and the kid's we all free!!).  
That, my friends is a total of $5.30 total for the whole family... whoop, whoop, I love Thailand!
I really enjoyed watching the game but I especially liked the atmosphere.  
It was the last few minutes though that were particularly eventful.  
The score had been 1-1 for most of the game but suddenly changed to 2-1 when Chiangmai scored a goal extremely close to the final siren.  You can imagine the crowd's reaction, right?  Everyone around us was going berserk.   
It was then that things heated up as several team members ran off the field in a flurry of celebration and 'tiger' dance moves (their mascot is a tiger) without noticing that the game had been restarted.  With seconds before the game ended, and the CM team momentarily distracted by their almost victory, Trat used the opportunity to quickly score their second goal.  
The Chiangmai fan's cheering turned quickly to shock and disbelief whilst the Trat supporters had their turn at celebrating along with the sounding siren to end the game.
We didn't hang around too much longer after this, as it looked like things were going to get out-of-control pretty quickly as angry fans  were already beginning to run on to the field and I later read that a linesman was punched.  
I have been checking the updates on the match since the weekend and it seems there is still a lot of controversy surrounding the events that lead to the game being restarted whilst players were off the field but anyway, it was all very exciting and a match that we certainly won't forget!
The highlight for me though was probably when the Chiangmai's tiger mascot took off his big tiger head (I wasn't quite sure how our kid's would react to seeing this) and accepted a beer from a spectator.  As he sat down and enjoyed his cold beverage, near-by children could be seen placing the big head on each other and walking around (bottom middle photo)... too funny!

Yes, just call me soccer-fan-Andie hahaha.


On the work front, I was back teaching English again today at ZOE which I LOVE, did I mention that already? 
And, after a rather long break {whoops has it really been 7 months?} I am also continuing on with my Thai lessons again (beginning this Friday).  I'd appreciate your prayers for my language study!

Thanks so much for reading, for sharing in our lives and for your support of our family.  
We truly are blessed.
Andie :)
P.S  Some photos from the school break:

At the safari park.

At our local city park