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Those dumbass referees are destroying the World Cup with their damn yellow cards

I fully intended to update this space while in Germany. Unfortunately the apartment that we rented didn't have high-speed internet access as advertised. Therefore I would have had to post from Internet cafes and couldn't really be bothered. So over the next few days I'm going to throw up a bunch of photos and stray thoughts. Here's the first batch.

Day 1
Appropriately the journey began in a bar. The Nomad World Pub to be exact. After watching Germany outgun Costa Rica and Ecuador deconstruct Poland, I headed to the airport.

Day 2
The hostel we stayed at in Frankfurt was along the Main river. Protruding from the middle of the river was a massive television screen. There were thousands of people on each shore of the river watching the games. Most of them were drunk Brits.

We watched the late game, Cote D'Ivoire-Argentina, from the third-floor balcony of the hostel. I was so tired from the flight that I had to stand up throughout the second half in order to stay awake. A couple of times, my head jerking down inadvertently, I nearly pitched forward over the balcony.

Day 3
We headed for Cologne, which the Germans call Koln (with one of those umlaut things over the o). I don't understand why it's necessary to have two names. We went to a famous Brauhaus called Paffgen and met up with a bunch of other Americanos. In Cologne they serve a beer called Kolsch (again with that umlaut thing) in really small glasses, perhaps 9 ounces. It's a light, crisp, highly drinkable ale. The waiters at Paffgen were amazingly adept at arriving with a fresh glass of Kolsch just as you were about to finish the previous one. Everyone drank too much.

Day 4
The first U.S. game was in Gelsenkirchen (supposedly the coal capitol of Germany). We ran into Christian Miles, the worst soccer announcer on the planet, in the train station. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Here he is with Bruce.

Getting the train to the stadium was nuts.

The German people were extremely kind and generous. Even the security guards. On our way into the stadium my brother got to experience German hospitality firsthand.

We had swell seats in a gorgeous new stadium.

Unfortunately the U.S. played like castoffs from the Solomon Islands national team. It was a long ride back to Cologne, but we kept up a brave front.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 25, 2006 3:55 PM

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