Ola Uruguay Real Estate and Investments

My relationship to soccer, or as they say in Spanish, fútbol, has grown since my move to Montevideo. Though I played in high school and a little in college, a torn ACL led me to a life sans soccer. I had all but traded my cleats for yoga. In Montevideo I started playing again on the city’s female league, and for the first time, I began avidly watching matches. I would attend every game I could of both the selection team and my hometown favorite, Nacional. I learned the songs, wore the colors, swooned over the players, and spent a fair amount of pesos in the process. Once en route to the Uruguayan League Championship I texted my mother, “I’d probably have a lot more spending money if I didn’t go to so many soccer games.” She laughed. I am notoriously cheap. It isn’t easy to get me to overspend. Equally hard is to get me up, happily, in the morning. The celeste, or the Urugauyan national team sometimes play at 7 in the morning. Somehow Uruguayan soccer got me to do both—I was officially a fanatic of fútbol Uruguayo.

I started a new job in the U.S. mid-Cup and had to ask for two (very) extended lunches to watch the matches. Had I been in Uruguay, I would have assumed that I could watch the game at work, or in my house. Asking permission would not have been necessary. In the U.S. it was.

For Uruguay’s game against Ghana, I found a coffeehouse near to my work known for its year-round commitment to showing soccer matches. Surely I, a lone supporter of Uruguay, would find another lone supporter? Wrong. The entire place was for Ghana. Entirely and wholly, as if each of them were on furlough from the tiny African nation. It had the story behind it, whereas Uruguay was being considered lucky in defending itself to victory. But then:

A handball to end all handballs.

A penalty kick that should have ended it, but didn’t.

A smugly chipped goal that brought one small nation glorious victory, leaving another wrecked with defeat. This was soccer: agony and elation intertwined; two nations forever connected for the two hours they once spent together on a field in South Africa.

The game was described as one of the best of the Cup (if not the most controversial). In 120 minutes Uruguay put itself on the map. Joe Posnanski of ESPN wrote the next day that South Africa was abuzz about it. “Nothing about the ending felt right, exactly. A goal stopped with a hand. Missed penalty kicks deciding a classic game like this. Ghana losing a game it rightfully won. But even if it didn’t feel right, it did feel remarkable and emotional. There’s no perfect way to end a soccer match like this. There is, however, an unforgettable way.”

The buzz was palpable. All over the web, all over the world, people were chiming in. Each second hundreds of people were Twittering about Uruguay. ESPN couldn’t get enough of debating the game, and I couldn’t get enough of ESPN. I couldn’t stop reading it, or talking about the game, the country, the justice of sacrifice. Every new person was a new outlet of my joy, or my wrath.

I was often asked who I would root for if the U.S. were to have played Uruguay. “Easy, Uruguay.” And they did, to the nation’s delight.

I was in Montevideo for the first two World Cup games and got to experience a taste of what it was like to shut down a city for soccer. However, if I regret anything, it is leaving Uruguay in the middle of the competition—for being in a cafe in Seattle and not in Montevideo, to watch Uruguay win over Ghana, lose against Holland, and then battle Germany to the end. I regret living through my friends’ photos on facebook and excited texts. I wished more than anything to be on 18 de Julio, the main street in Montevideo’s downtown, full of fellow fans, cheering for the team that made its nation exceedingly proud. Instead I walked back to work alone… For the first time since arriving in the U.S., I felt very far from home.

More than a fan exiled from the celebration, I felt like an expatriate in my own homeland.