Sunday, October 27, 2013

STEELERS IN LONDON!!!

So yes, they lost. Let's just get that off the table. It sucked, but it was still absolutely awesome and absolutely worth it. The camaraderie among the fans was electric. Neither of us realized that there was such an NFL following in Europe, but there are serious fans. The best part about the game was the mix of the crowd; I would estimate about 30-40% Steelers fans, 20-25% Vikings fans, and the rest were just NFL fans wearing whatever team jerseys they enjoyed watching. We were surrounded by Dolphin fans at our seats. One cool fact was that back in the late 70s, London broadcasting would stream the Steelers games, thus yielding a large Steelers fan base there, with it being passed along through the generations.

This is the line? Let's go find food

Found the best Indian restaurant EVER...excessive maybe, but we were hungry.
We finished ALL OF  IT!

Seriously, if you ever end up out at Wembley Stadium and like Indian food, Lahori Masala is about a 0.5 miles walk from the Tube station, and AMAZING. Even if you have tried Indian and did not like it, you should try this place....

Fat, happy, and ready to wait in line...this lay before us

This lay behind us

So the line seems quite obnoxious but it was SO much fun, with fans doing their team chants, riling each other up in good fun, and actually moved quite efficiently. It only took us about 15 minutes to get into the stadium. That is one thing I must say about this place...they have efficiency DOWN pat. There are no security lines with people interference, you must scan you own ticket to make it through the first turnstile and then go through the medal detectors, and there are many dozen of these set up. It  was impressive, and enviable, I am not quite sure why the US cannot adopt these methods, and their stadiums are even smaller than this one.

Together and too happy to care...HELLO WEMBLEY!


Here we go Steelers

Unaltered view from our seats, Adam did GOOD

Hello boys!



Pre-show




Most efficient exit EVER

So I was raving about the efficiency before, this was the most impressive thing I have seen. Wembley Stadium holds about 90,000 people. I would estimate that 85-90% of them took the Tube to the game. We were on the opposite side of the stadium from the Tube station (i.e. the furthest point away), and we only stood still once on our way to get on the Tube. Seriously. From our seats to being on the metro was less than 20 minutes. If you are venturing to Wembley for any reason, I could not recommend taking public transportation any higher. Was it crowded, sure, but it was exhilarating with all energy from the game.