Emily Lisa

Upon arriving back into Moscow we got brunch while waiting for our hotel room to be ready. Once our hotel room was ready we rested a bit since we were tired from our journey. After resting we spent the rest of the day at FIFA fan fest! The FIFA World Cup is currently happening in Russia so in each city where games will take place there are FIFA fan fest events which are essentially free events in parks where they project the games onto large TVs, have concerts between games, and other various food and activities. Since the US did not qualify for the World Cup I pretty arbitrarily decided to pretend to be a Portugal fan. I was trying to root for an underdog but later found out that Cristiano Ronaldo now plays for Portugal so it looks like I made a decent pick! When we got to the fan fest Coca Cola was doing free face paint so each of us got our face painted with the country we decided to root for. Marc had Russia face paint and Pradhith had Egypt. We then watched the first game which was Egypt vs. Uruguay. Uruguay won at the very end 1-0 which was a little disappointing since there were many Egypt fans at the event. We then decided to walk around for a little bit. We wound up going to a restaurant pop up right outside the fan fest for dinner. The pop up was in an excellent location overlooking the city and the Moscow stadium. The place was pretty hipstery and had various games to play such as foosball which we wound up using while waiting for our food. It was the worst foosball table any of use had used before with a fourth of the table unreachable by the players, and the colors of the players not corresponding to teams. It was still a lot of fun to play, and Pradhith won every game. After dinner we went back into the fan fest to watch the Morocco vs. Iran game. Iran won at the very end of the game 1-0 due to a Moroccan player accidentally hitting the ball into the wrong net with his head. Yikes! We felt really bad for that Moroccan player. We then went to secure good spots for the big match of the night, Spain vs. Portugal. The place was packed for that game. The fan fest got to max capacity which was 25,000. It was really cool seeing people from all over the world at the event sporting their countries colors. We were definitely some of the few Americans there. Even when entering the event the staff was so excited to meet people from the US since there were so few of us. The most hype country at the fan fest was definitely Brazil which was a bit surprising since they didn’t play in any of the games today. They were always jumping around, cheering, and singing. They were a lot of fun, I hope they make it far in the cup (they are definitely predicted to). The game was a lot of fun to watch in such a large crowd. At first we thought that most people in the crowd were fans of Spain since there was tons of yelling for Spanish goals and booing whenever Ronaldo would appear on screen, however whenever Portugal would make a goal it seemed that the same people would also cheer for Portugal. What a fickle bunch! I stayed loyal to Portugal and only cheered for their goals. Whenever the crowd got loud they would show the decibel levels on the screen which was fun and encouraged a lot of cheering. I don’t remember the maximum level we got to but it was definitely loud. The game wound up ending in a 3-3 tie which was a bit disappointing since it’s fun to see a winner. I also like Spain a lot though so I wasn’t too crushed. All in all this was a really fun day and an awesome experience to be in Russia while they were hosting one of the largest sporting event in the world!Read more