Gooooaaaallll!!!!

For anyone not watching the game at home, Ukraine spanked Saudi Arabia with a final score of 4-0. How awesome!

This is not to say that we were actually cheering for the Ukranians, simply that we wanted to see some action — and action we got! Sure, we were wearing blue and yellow, but this decision laid more in safety than it did in loyalty.

The game was an absolute blast, from beginning to end. Even before getting anywhere near the stadium, you could tell that something was up. The open-container laws were in full effect. The metro was peppered heavily with Polizei. Yellow and blue jerseys with Shevchenko were donned at every corner.

We piled off the metro at the stadium station, and followed the mass of people to a paved trail that would take us to the game. “OOkrAAniA!” was belted in unison by excited fans, nervously anticipating a big game by their home team.

After a long wait in a crappily organized gateway lineup, we got to the stadium itself and found our seats. We found ourselves surrounded by… Germans? It turned out that the majority of people in attendance hadn’t crossed any borders to get to the game. Most of the Ukranians were in a corner next to us, while the very limited number of Saudi fans were in a corner opposite to the Ukranians.

The game was an absolute riot — in the fun sense. We did the wave. We went nuts when goals were scored. We drank… American Budweiser? Of all the beers that I could picture sponsoring the World Cup, Budweiser would have to be my least favorite. And yet there it was, the only beer available at this year’s Cup. Bust.

So moving forward, we fled Hamburg, and made our way to Dresden, a short distance to the Czech border in Eastern Germany. The city is laid back, and a repeat destination for myself. We wandered around as usual, ate forcemeat and pretzels, drank in biergartens, and ended up at a joint called Lebowski bar. As in The Big Lebowski. It wasn’t until the next day that we realized we should have been drinking Caucasians (white russians) instead of gin. Is it a bit ironic that my favorite line from the movie is actually the Germans, yelling “Ve’re Nihilists! Ve don’t care!” just before getting the crap kicked out of them by fat Americans with a bowling ball?

We’re now sitting in Prague, but all of this may be a bit too much for you to digest at the moment — I know we’re still digesting German forcemeat! *Shudders*