El Ahly 5, Zamalek 4

Last night I watched El Ahly play Zamalek in soccer. At least, that's what I was told. Honestly it felt more like I was watching the entire city of Cairo go temporarily insane. They're pretty big on soccer here.

We took a taxi to the stadium, which is about 30 minutes away. This was an experience in itself. A basic tenet of driving in Cairo is that if you're stopping, turning, slowing down, speeding up, feeling any kind of emotion, or feeling emotionless, you should use your horn to let other drivers know. The only exception to this is the evening of soccer matches, when using the car horn means you support El Ahly, which nearly everyone in Cairo does. Consequently the entire drive to the stadium every single driver in Cairo was honking his horn in concert to various pep songs for the team. It was awe-inspiring and deafening.



We arrived at the stadium about two hours before the game began. At this point the stadium was pretty much full and everyone had started screaming. Thinking about what was going to happen when the game actually started was intimidating. God forbid El Ahly ever score a point.



About half an hour before the game started people started getting excited and massive banners started being unfurled in every direction. There was more screaming, some chanting, and a lot of tenseness wherever red-clad El Ahly fans and white-clad Zamalek fans saw each other.



Finally, the game actually started, and was largely the standard professional soccer match - everyone ran around a lot and no one scored for most of the game. Eventually, of course, El Ahly scored, and there was about as much mayhem as expected. Several hundred riot police deployed around the field. Very exciting.

In the end El Ahly ended up winning 5-4 in overtime and the spectators flowed en masse to the streets to celebrate/riot. Already lax traffic safety was completely forgotten - buses, which typically are filled literally to capacity and have an additional 5 or 6 people hanging on to the outside of the door, now had an extra 20 people dancing on the roof of the vehicle. Taxis were rarely seen with less than 8 people in/on them. Traffic was being directed by an 8-year-old kid with a flamethrower made out of a lighter and an aerosol can. Honestly it wasn't vastly different from Cairo traffic at any other time except for all the red flags being waved around.