Panini

A couple months ago, I wrote about Gary _____, an interesting character I met while spending five April days in Bogotá with my friends Ben, Fed and Meg. Today's post features something else which unexpectedly became a recurring theme of our five days in Colombia's capital, and with the World Cup ending recently it seemed an appropriate time to finish up this long-delayed post.

Several weeks prior to this mini-vacation, I had started to notice a new fad among my students; they all had these soccer trading cards, which are sort of like traditional baseball cards, and they would bring them into class and, well, trade them. Even though I'm a big sports fan and I also love embracing trends around here, especially among kids, it mostly got on my nerves since it was disrupting my classes. Especially because they're not actually cards; they're stickers, which the kids peel off the backing in order to stick into the Official Album so they can try to complete their collection. This, of course, creates an endless flood of sticker-back garbage on my classroom floor. (Colombians are terrible at waste disposal of any kind, recycling or garbage.)

Although, I have to admit, even though the cards mostly annoyed me, they did look like fun, and when on several occasions my students urged me to get in on the game, I had to admit that if the opportunity presented itself I might be tempted. At first, the opportunity didn't present itself, since as far as I could tell (and according to one of my students), there was only one place to buy the cards in Barranquilla.

Bogotá was different. The cards were available on almost every street corner.

Meg buys a new set of cards

Actually, selling stuff on the streets seems to be generally more common in Bogotá. We constantly had people trying to sell us stuff that looked like it had just been lifted from a store, including flash drives and awesome Spiderman toys that actually climbed down walls on their own. The most hilarious, though, was the guy who tried to sell us a whole thing of laundry detergent. Dude, we're obviously tourists; what are we going to do with laundry detergent???!

Back to the cards. In Bogotá, my friends and I instantly noticed their prevalence, and I immediately recognized them as the same cards that had taken over my classroom. We also recognized the official album, where you stick the stickers, which I had previusly been sort of aware of, but hadn't really understood. And we all agreed that the cards would make for a fun diversion; on our own, merely collecting the cards would be boring, but having three friends with whom to wheel and deal sounded like a good time.

Fed and I lay our collections out on the conference table in order to better assess our strengths and weaknesses 

Despite coming to this conclusion early in our trip, we didn't get around to buying any until Saturday, our 4th day. But we were instantly hooked. While none of us know much about soccer, Fed and Ben and I are generally aware of the very top players, as well as which countries are usually the strongest. This meant that Brazilians instantly became the hottest commodity, even though we had no idea who most of the Brazilian players were. Other criteria for card-valuation began to emerge: single-named players (y'know, like Pele) were extremely valuable, as were Italians, since Fed obviously wanted all of them. And Ben was always open to trading anyone on his roster, except for one guy from Ghana we had never heard of, who became known simply as "The Ghanean". Through Ben's constant refusal to even consider trading him, we all started to really want this guy, and he became one of the most valuable commodities in the game.

Ben does a little research to ensure he's getting
fair value for his commodities

I was worried that Meg would get bored by all this sports nerding, and maybe she did, but if so she hid it well behind her hilarious strategy of trying to collect the best-looking player on each of the 32 World Cup teams. Upon opening a new pack of cards, we would instantly submit our five new players for Meg's inspection, and if she liked any of them, we'd start to talk trade. Needless to say, when all was said and done, Meg's team would have run away with the Mr. World Cup crown (and her team was definitely handsomer than this one).

Meg ogles one of her hotties

In the end, while it's tempting to beat oneself up over "wasting" valuable vacation time doing something pointless like trading soccer cards, it was just really fun. Joe Posnanski, superstar of the online baseball community, wrote a blog this morning about how going to the World Cup for the first time made him feel like a kid again, because, over and over, he heard diehard fans speak wistfully of the stories and legends of soccer that every fan learns as a kid and never forgets, the likes of which exist in every sport, from Babe Ruth's called shot to Paul Henderson's goal. Trading cards are part of that too, I think; I'll never be into baseball or hockey cards the way I was as a kid, because I simply know too much, but spending a few hours over a couple days playing General Manager with some friends allowed me to re-live my childhood trading card glory.

Plus, when I got back to Barranquilla, I totally grifted some of my students. Haha, suckers. (And I got a text from Fed claiming he'd done the same in the Bogotá Airport.)

The Boardroom