Essen, boring -- Gelsenkirchen, Mexican Town

Boring Essen
Essen is one of those cities where it is on the way to everything. It is close to Dortmund, Cologne, and Gelsenkirchen (which is where we are going but because we can not find any hotels there we ended up staying here). It is a nice city but there is really not much to do, plus is only Monday and everything seems to close early. I suppose the most relevant thing we saw here is Wal-Mart inside the mall and couple of girls being arrested for something which I can only assume was shoplifting. The town is not that far from where the Mexico game took place. It is about 45 min by subway or 10 min by DB. Because of its location there are lots of Mexicans Nationals coming to stay at the hotel where I am staying since there are zero hotel disposability at Gersenkirthen.

GelsenKirchen, Mexican Town
The town is full of Mexicans. All you see is green shirts, the "Cielito Lindo" is being sang everywhere. It is sang so much that I getting really tired of it. The estimates on the street is close to 85000 thousand Mexicans in a little town whose organization was really poor.The fanfest placed by the city is definitely the worst I have seen. Yet, local people are very proud of the fanfest taking place at the old stadium since it has a lot of history. The town consist mainly of blue workers who are willing to spend time and tell you about the town, the stadium and its history. For example, a Germany lady at the fan fest started explaining to me the greatest day of the old stadium. "The greatest day was a match between France and vs Germany right after the WW2. The capacity of the stadium is 35,000 and that glorious day the stadium fit 75,000". As I said, people here are proud of the old stadium.

The game
Mexico lost the game against Portugal 2 - 1 as you all know by now. Yet we still made to the next round and we go against Argentina where it will probably be the end of the world cup for us. The game was ours to win, We failed a penalty shot and Omar Bravo had couple of shots that should have been goal if he was much better skilled. Yet, the atmosphere was great. People sang all game, chanted Mexican sayings and never stop supporting. We were definitely the louder in comparison with the Portuguese, Televisa (Mexican TV network, largest Spanish TV network in the world) once again kick ass. They put their own fanfest (which I could not attend because I was working on getting my tickets for the game) where there was couple of huge TV screens, Mexican food, actors, music, games and lots of free gifts. There were a lot of poster like the ones on the pic that basically say "Germany is Mexican town" and or "Mexioo plays local in Germany". The tickets went for close to 1000 euros. I met people who paid 800 euros for one tickets that is worth 63 euros. There are people sleeping at the train station because they could not find any hotels since Mexican took every room in town. All I can say is even if you do not have tickets for the games, it is definitely worth it to come because of the fanfest and party atmosphere that goes on each city where games are played, specially where Mexico, England, and Brazil are playing.

We leave this town today and we are on our way to Nuremberg where I thought I was going to see Mexico play, but as it turns out I will be watching Portugal vs Holland.

Keep Watching because the best is about to come.......