点评:So I got given a free ticket to watch a football match at Brøndby Stadium.
Free ticket. Sounds good.
I decided to drive there because I thought getting the bus would be too much hassle. I left what I considered to be plenty of time before the match. Turns out my idea of plenty of time is very different from the other 30,000 people who were there.
They’d apparently been there for hours.
Fair enough. That’s their business. I don’t know what they’ve been doing all afternoon. Probably standing around in football shirts, drinking things and discussing football, which seems like a lot of preparation for ninety minutes of people running about.
The first problem was parking.
There are 30,000 people at the stadium, so you’d think someone had sat down at some point and worked out how many cars might be involved.
I started doing the maths in my head.
Let’s say 10% walk. Another 10% cycle. Maybe 30% take the bus. That leaves 50%.
That’s 15,000 people.
Even if some of them share cars, you’re still looking at around 10,000 parking spaces.
There weren’t 10,000 parking spaces.
There weren’t even enough for me.
I ended up leaving the car on a residential street a couple of kilometres away, surrounded by houses belonging to people who probably weren’t expecting a small football stadium’s worth of strangers to arrive outside their homes.
I’d never been to Brøndby before, so during the entire match I had this horrible feeling that I’d never see my car again.
I could already imagine explaining it to someone.
“Where’s your car?”
“Well, technically it’s somewhere in Brøndby.”
The walk to the stadium was easy enough. I just followed all the people wearing yellow and blue.
Which sounds like a good system, but I’ve discovered that when thousands of people are wearing exactly the same clothes, it’s actually quite difficult to navigate.
Normally you look for a landmark.
A church. A tall building. A sign.
Here, the landmark is “man in yellow shirt”.
And there are about 12,000 of them.
When I finally got close to the stadium, I was genuinely surprised.
It wasn’t just a football match.
It was basically a festival.
There were DJs, street food, various games and even a smaller football match being played by a group of slightly overweight men.
Everyone seemed to have been partying for hours already.
And that’s when I thought:
How do these people have the energy to do this every Sunday?
I can barely find the energy to watch Midsomer Murders at the weekend.
And that’s sitting down.
Then came another shock.
Apparently a free ticket doesn’t mean a VIP ticket.
This feels like false advertising to me.
So I had to queue up with everyone else, and then I had to be searched.
They also made me take off my cap.
I found this particularly strange.
What exactly did they think I was hiding in there?
A football?
A sandwich?
A smaller cap?
She checked my hat but didn’t check my back pocket.
So if I had been planning to smuggle something in, I now know where the security system needs improving.
Anyway, I got inside.
The home team lost.
And on the way back to the car, I lost what was left of my patience.
All the other people who couldn’t find parking had apparently decided that the same residential street I’d chosen was the perfect place to leave their cars.
So now I had thousands of football fans wandering around between parked cars, all trying to remember where they’d left their vehicles.
I eventually found mine.
It was still there.
Which, in the end, was probably the best result of the whole day
翻译:于是我得到了一张免费门票,可以去布隆比体育场观看足球赛。
免费门票,听起来不错。
我决定开车去那里,因为我觉得坐公交车太麻烦了。我在比赛开始前预留了我认为足够多的时间。结果证明,我心目中的“足够多的时间”和现场那3万名观众的理解完全不同。
显然,他们已经在那里等了好几个小时了。
也行吧,那是他们的事。我可不知道他们整个下午都在做什么。大概就是穿着足球衫、喝着饮料、讨论着足球吧——不过为了区区90分钟的比赛而做这么多准备,似乎有些多余了。
第一个问题就是停车。
体育场里有3万名观众,按理说应该有人事先计算过会有多少辆车前来吧。
我开始在脑子里算起来。
假设10%的人步行前来,另外10%骑自行车。也许还有30%的人乘巴士。这样一来就剩下50%了。
也就是1万5千人。即使他们当中有些人共享汽车,所需的停车位仍然约有1万个。
但实际上并没有1万个停车位。
连给我停车的地方都不够。
最后我只好把车停在几公里外的一条居民街上,周围全是民宅。那些住户想必怎么也想不到,会有相当于一座小型足球场那么多的陌生人出现在他们家门外。
我以前从未去过布隆比。于是整场比赛期间,我都有一种糟糕至极的感觉:我可能再也见不到我的车了。
我甚至能想象自己向别人解释的情形:
“你的车呢?”
“呃,严格来说,它现在在布隆比的某个地方。”
走到体育场的路倒挺好找的。我只是跟着那些穿着黄蓝色衣服的人走就行了。
这听起来是个不错的办法,但我发现,当成千上万的人都穿着一模一样的衣服时,其实很难辨认方向呢。通常我们会寻找一个地标作为参照物——一座教堂、一栋高楼,或者一个标志牌。而在这里,那个“地标”就是“穿黄色衬衫的男子”。
这样的人大约有12,000个。当我终于走近体育场时,真的惊呆了。
这可不只是一场足球赛,基本上算是一场节日庆典。现场有DJ、街头小吃、各种游戏,甚至还有一群稍微有点胖的男子正在进行一场小型足球赛。
看上去大家都已经狂欢了好几个小时了。就在那时我想到:
这些人怎么能有精力每个周日都做这件事呢?
我周末连坐着看完《梅德森谋杀案》的力气都快没有了。
接着又有一个意外情况发生了。
原来免费门票并不等于贵宾票。
在我看来,这简直就是虚假宣传。
于是我不得不和其他人一样排队,随后还要接受安检。
他们还让我摘下帽子。
我觉得这一点特别奇怪。他们到底以为我在里面藏了什么呢?
一个足球?
一个三明治?
一顶更小的帽子?
她检查了我的帽子,却没检查我的后口袋。
所以,如果我本来打算偷偷带东西进去的话,现在我也知道安保系统该在哪里改进了。
不管怎样,我进去了。
主队输了。
而在回到车上的路上,我的耐心也彻底耗尽了。所有那些找不到停车位的人显然都认为,我选择的这条居民区街道是停车的绝佳地点。
于是现在,成千上万的足球迷在停满汽车的街道上徘徊,都在努力回忆自己把车停在了哪里。
最终我找到了我的车。
它还在那儿。
说到底,这或许是这一天里最理想的结果了。