Tonight Algeria played Egypt in a world cup qualifier match.  Egypt hasn't been to the world cup since 1990 and Algeria hasn't been since 1986.  Naturally, this was a huge match!  Algeria ended up winning, and all of Marseille's huge Algerian population decided to "celebrate" downtown and the Vieux Port.  A buddy and I had gone downtown for a cafe this afternoon and ended up staying for a beer. We noticed quite a few riot police set up all around, but didn't really think much of it as its pretty common lately.  So we were sitting at a cafe drinking and talking when we start to hear some commotion and see two guys standing on a balcony with flares.  It gradually grew to more and more people so we decided to go check it out.  We went around the corner to the port and there were just masses of people and the entire sky was red with the flares.  The streets were all closed down around us and there were people going nuts on scooters riding in all directions.  I've never seen anything like this before in my life.  I can now say I've been in a riot!  We got closer to the center of it and it was just pure madness.  There were flares, all sorts of fireworks, cars drifting around corners with people hanging out the windows, multiple scooter crashes, people jumping into the water where all the boats park, people doing wheelies on scooters with 2 people on it, people riding on the shoulders of people driving scooters, the longest Algerian flag I've ever seen (probably 50 ft long), just pure insanity!  It was nuts.  We stuck around for a while, but then headed home when people started throwing these little exploding firecrackers into crowds. Not  so much fun.  We also had to figure out how to get home, since they shut down the entire city transportation system because of this.  One very long walk and 2 hitchhiked rides later and we were safely back at home.  An Egyptian friend here said that things are even crazier in other places.  His brother called to make sure he was okay as there were people getting killed in Egypt because of this.  People take their football pretty seriously here!  
In other news, I'm going to Florence again next weekend!  One of the school's organizations is organizing a trip there for a very reasonable price so tons of people are going.  Should be a lot of fun!  And Dec 4th i'm headed to Paris and possibly Bordeaux on the way home.  Gotta squeeze in some time to do schoolwork at some point...
My trip is quickly coming to a close and I'm really not ready for it to be over!  I've been trying to do as much as possible and enjoy every minute while I'm here because before I know it, it will all be over.  
Anyway, it's late here so i'm going to head to bed and hopefully get a ton of homework done tomorrow!  See you all in about a month.