After a gong-show four days in Scandinavia, we have arrived in Hamburg a bit weary, but excited nonetheless for some more in-depth World Cup action.

Things in Denmark were great – the weather a much-welcomed moderate twenty degrees or so. The city was busy with pretty girls on bicycles (Holland anyone?) and hip cats buying Pumas.

We have begun to follow the World Cup pretty intensely now, and are well versed in the pools, the players, the underdogs and the favorites. In studying the schedules, we saw that Sweden would be playing while we were in Denmark, and decided to hop on the 28k train to Malmö, Sweden for the day to catch the match! We arrived early in the afternoon, and were a bit suprised to see that the city was still relatively sober. All of this was soon to change though, as classic convertibles with balloons, sailor caps and whistles started driving the streets and yelling at anything in Swedish colours. We made our way to a park that had a massive screen set up for the game, and proceeded to do as the Swedes were now doing – drink!

The game was a tense blast, with lots of singing, and yelled sighing as neither team seemed capable of breaking the ice. The train schedule dictated that we would actually need to miss the last 10 minutes of the game, and regretfully we left a very tense audience for the station. Wouldn’t you know it? We got about five minutes from the park when a massive roar blew by us. The Swedes had scored – and we missed it!

The last two days in Denmark were a bit of a foggy blur, as we got tangled up with a couple of guys from Iceland – a country that now ranks mighty high on my list of people to party with. We experienced Fisherman’s Friend (the boozy version of the cough drop) and Icelandic short tempers.

Sooo that all brings us to today. We purchased World Cup tickets in January, and today is gameday for us in Hamburg! We will be watching Saudi Arabia and Ukraine, from the second deck of Hamburg’s Stadium. The match really won’t matter much in the big picture, but in its own right could make its own pool a very interesting one. Both teams will need to post a win in order to stay alive in the pool, and we all know that despite what the YMCA says, everybody can’t win.

Off to the game we go!