At Nou Camp

Just came back with Faris to watch Barcelona playing at the club's stadium, famously known as the Nou Camp. It is the largest stadium in Europe with a capacity of 96,000. Anybody who happened to be in the city would not miss the chance to watch a Barca game. On the way we met many people (many are fathers and sons!) who obviously have never been there. Together we all managed to work out how to use the metro, find the direction and so on.

Today, unlike last Wednesday when a full house watched Barcelona played against Bayern Munich, there were only 56,000 people watching. Still a high number but because of the stadium's large capacity, there were lots of empty seats visible.

We managed to get our tickets from the Internet, a bit more expensive than their 40 Euro face value. Our seats are right at top of the stadium, quite an awesome sight to see the whole stadium.

The stadium is a lot steeper compare to the traditional football stadium, initially was quite a frightening experience, especially as we have to climb all the way up. In most cases, standard football stadia could probably have a capacity limit of between 60 to 80 thousands. But with the steeper slope, Nou Camp managed to squeeze in up to 96,000 seats. Novertheless the view of the pitch is still good and in a way better compared to when watching in other stadiums.

We arrived an hour before kick-off. The stadium was still empty then. Dutring the game, saw a couple of goals, the first one was in the first minute! Later there were a couple of goals disallowed, lots of good plays and chances and a Messi's penalty saved. Overall an exciting game and experience. The big names were playing - Messi, Henry and so on.

We left 10 minutes before the game finished to make a head start before the crowd start descending to the metro line. The scoreline by then was 2-0.