Coca-Cola and Doritos presented the MEXICO vs. SOUTH KOREA futbol fiesta on February 15, 2006, 7:30 pm.

The huge event was held yesterday night and I am staring at the general admission ticket. You know how the ticket handler rips the ticket along the perforated line and they return the other half, which is the receipt, well, the ticket I am staring at has both sides of the ticket attached to each other along with the perforation in the middle.

Yes, I missed the event! Here's the story.


I was scheduled to go pick up my dad, my brother, and my cousins and go together in my car to save the parking fee ($20 main stadium and FIFTY dollars at some shady parking lot privately owned). I left my last class at 3:20 pm., registered for the spring quarter successfully at 3:30p.m. and left campus. Picked up my cousins at Cerritos and left their place at 4:30 pm. Picked up my dad and waited for my brother and left the place at 5:45 pm.

We stopped at McDonald's and to go'ed. This was around 6:15 pm somewhere in Soto. We were getting close to the Los Angeles coliseum stadium at around 6:30 pm. McDonald didn't quite satisfy our hunger so we once again stopped by Church's Chicken restaurant. Took awhile to get our family meal and left immediately. 6:45 pm.

About three miles away from the LA Coliseum stadium (which is next to USC campus), mad traffic. All lanes were heavily congested to the point where it reminded me of Manhattan in New York City. The Los Angeles Parking Enforcement vehicles were at every corner, waiting for victims that willingly park their vehicles at a tow-away area to bypass parking fee or just because there is no parking (rolleyes).

But what do you expect. Over 75,000 spectators (estimated) where 4/5 were Mexican-Americans. Unlike the previous soccer between South Korea versus the Los Angeles galaxy, this event probably had 5 times more spectators. Mexico sure represents. Mexico and futbol goes hand in hand so you would expect all the Mexican-Americans to not miss this event.

The spanish newspaper (La Opinion) has the frontpage cover basically about that evening's match between South Korea and Mexico. La Opinion writers covered every detail possible, all the way down to the statistics of the South Korean soccer players and their recent winnings and losses. Both the local Spanish and the Korean radio stations announced about the upcoming match hours before the actual game and broadcasted live on the radio live. I don't know if the local Korean television stations broadcasted the soccer match live but the Spanish channel (52 in Los Angeles city) broadcasted live.

So going back to the traffic, hundreds of vehicles were crawling outside of the stadium, trying to get a parking space. 7:25 pm, the United States national anthem was being played! 7:30 pm and the players are getting out on the field. As the cars are lining up to get somewhere, it seemed as if the parking enforcers were guiding all of us far away from the stadium. How frustrating. I see a large amount of people running, gramps to little kids, running to get into the coliseum stadium.

I told everyone in the car to get out and run along with the crowd to get to the event, stats! Shortly after, I was alone in the car, waiting in a line that was going nowhere. To end this story, I didn't end up parking my car. I parked a few blocks away and got entertained by the radio announcers. 8)
On the bright side, South KOREA won!