Day 269: The World Cup Has Begun

The football World Cup has started. All the streets are covered in black, red, and gold. And my street, of course, in red, yellow, and red. I didn’t put it up — it was my flatmate Anton, who put it up to cheer me up, since his room is full of flags from all sorts of countries, which is why we call it “the UN headquarters.”

It’s the first time I’ve lived in a country while the World Cup is taking place: I was too young for the Naranjito World Cup, and honestly it gets a bit exhausting — you’re surrounded by the World Cup all the time, everywhere you go, even in your soup there are little football figurines… Nacho’s boss, who normally removes the sports section from the newspaper, now has to cut out 80% of the whole paper and is left with just a couple of pages.

Everyone is worked up. For example, the other day a professor shortened his hour-and-a-half class to just 15 minutes — exactly the length of half-time during Germany’s match. One good thing is that now I have the perfect topic to talk about for hours in German: I’ve studied up on all the football-related vocabulary and chat with my classmates and flatmates about everything to do with the World Cup — like whether Spain is going to win… that Germany is playing really badly… that France is the worst team in the world… you know, typical stuff.

I watch the matches with my flatmates or with friends in a big tent at the university. The best part: the German TV commentator for the matches, Günter Netzer (who used to play for Real Madrid), looks exactly like El Fary. No one can watch him without pointing it out.

Next time I’ll tell you all about the Spain–Ukraine match, which is being played in Leipzig, 100 km from Dresden…

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