Hola, Pendejos!

Now, before any of you feel offended, our Mexican guests over the past week ensured me ‘pendejo’ can be used entirely in jest, and in this case it most certainly is. Except for one reader. You know who you are, cabrón. Change your iTunes password into something less revolting!

The past week has been nothing short of an incredibly incomplete and horrendously biased crash course to Mexican (and Spanish) football. The wonderful gifts from our guests, like the Chivas de Guadalajara flag, will receive a nice spot somewhere around the house (preferably: draped over the Ajax flag. That thing is an eyesore). Also, I will carry my recently obtained partial knowledge about Mexican football with me forever. Here is some of it, and I encourage anyone to fill in the blanks (or rather, the enormous hole) in the comments section.

Club Nexaca is, according to one of our guests, the ‘ugly son of Club America’. Not the little brother. The ugly son. He chose those words very carefully. This was, however, heavily – and passionately – refuted by another one of our guests. The latter encouraged me to search for the result of the Libertadores group game of his beloved Necaxa against Sao Paolo. My Spanish is severely lacking, but the headline on Mediotiempo was universal enough. They were no longer ‘perfect’, which to the both of us seemed somewhat of an understatement. The picture accompanying this headline was of a scoreboard that revealed the difference between perfect and imperfect can be as little as conceding three goals on foreign soil.

Clubs in Mexico can disappear. This happened to the club one of our other guests supported. They were relegated, and then disappeared. Upon being asked why exactly they had disappeared, no proper answer could be given. I was left with the impression of an organisation that just did not bother with such trifle things as showing up and competing anymore when they had dropped down a league. For no apparent reason.

Mexicans, like the Dutch, are not very apt at performing under pressure. This similarity meant that none of us, not my roommates or our guests, could clinch the many Pro Evolution games that ended in a draw after a 120 fictional minutes. Eventually, we collectively agreed we would no longer take penalties and settle for a draw. However, any occasions from the penalty spot that arose during the regular time were still missed with astonishing consistency.

There were many more things I discovered over the past week. How to make incredibly good guacamole, for example, and a variety of wonderful Spanish profanity. The difference between different types of Tequila. An especially beautiful Golazo is called a Golazazazo. Seventeen degrees and sunny is not to be considered good weather, and much, much more.

To Dara, Mariana, Rafael and Jeronimo, muchas gracias and I will hopefully see all of you again soon.

To Rafael and Jeronimo, you owe me a rematch, pendejos!