Allez Les Bleu!!
Things in Berlin are getting busy, so I am sorry for not updating since Sunday. The main problem is that I don’t have internet or e-mail at work, so I have to do a lot of work from my hotel room in the evenings. This is a slow process and has been taking a lot of my time in the last couple of days. So that’s my excuse, but I’ll give a full update now on everything that has been happening.Both Monday and Tuesday were days that should have been a holiday for me in the US, but since I am in Germany, I didn’t get to take them as holidays. That is fine though, since it means that I make more that double time for those days. That will help me a lot when I go to Zimbabwe in August because I will be missing 16 days of work and will only have about 11 days worth of vacation time. The other 5 days will be unpaid leave. So to basically make up 2 of those days now will really help me then.
As I said in my last blog, I was in desperate need of doing laundry on Monday. Fortunately, one of my co-workers knew of a laundromat that was only a couple of minutes from my hotel, so that was convenient. What wasn’t so convenient though was that the owner only spoke German, so it was a little difficult to figure out how to use his machines (which are quite different from washing machines that I have used), but I was able to figure it out. I didn’t get out of there until 7pm though, and then I still had to eat dinner, so I just ate at the hotel restaurant and then spent the remainder of the evening watching what little English TV I get (I found a German channel that plays a lot of American TV shows and has German captions), and doing some work from the hotel.
On Tuesday, my DVD trouble continued. I don’t think I mentioned this, but last week I felt like watching some DVD’s. I don’t have any DVD’s with me, but I thought that I would buy some and then watch them on my laptop, since it is equipped with a DVD drive. I bought 3 DVD’s at a store nearby which is much like Walmart (but it isn’t Walmart, so no lectures N.L.!). Then I took them back to my hotel only to find out that this laptop does have a DVD drive, but it doesn’t have any DVD software. At home, this wouldn’t stop me for long, but on a company laptop I am wary about loading external software. So I left it at that and didn’t watch my DVD’s.
On Tuesday, I thought that I would buy a cheap DVD player, bring it back to my hotel, and watch my DVD’s that way. But I forgot to check my hotel TV to see what it was like. I bought the cheapest DVD player that I could find, brought it back to my hotel, and went to plug it into the TV. What do I find? This dilapidated old TV only has coax input! I couldn’t believe it. Coax hasn’t been the standard input format in a long time. The DVD player came with RCA cables, like all electronics seem to come with now. It doesn’t even have a coax output. So, I was stuck again. Now I have another DVD player (I have 2 at home, plus my computer) and this one has a European electrical plug! I will try to take it back tonight…not looking forward to explaining that one to the German customer service desk. I might look first to see if there is an RCA to coax adapter, but I doubt that there is, and if there is then I doubt that it’s cheap.
Anyways, that tale will continue, I’m sure. I really feel like watching a movie. The rest of that night I just stayed in and watched Germany lose in the semi-finals of the World Cup. I just did not feel like battling a million fans downtown by that point.
Wednesday night, I finally did something actually exciting with my week though. I had been talking to Ying-hong through the week and we decided to go to watch the France-Portugal match down on the Fan Mile. I didn’t really know who we would be cheering for, and I didn’t really care. Football is frustrating to me. I just don’t understand how the best players in the world can always seem to be so out of position and so inaccurate with their shooting. I think of the strategy to be very similar to hockey, but the net is huge and the players can’t hit it. It reminds me of watching Bantam hockey players. They always fall down, they have no sense of where their team-mates are around them, and they only hit the net about 15% of the time…but that’s just my take. If I were to state though out loud here in Europe then I would likely be lynched.
But Ying-hong and I went to watch the match and she showed up with France flags painted on her cheeks, so I thought that we would cheer for France, and we did, until they scored. The majority of the crowd was cheering for France too, so we got to yell with all of them some of their chants. They are all pretty simple. Their three favourites are “Allez Les Bleu!” (literally “Go the blue”), “Aller, Aller, Aller, Aller, Aller!!!” (Go, go, go, go, go”, and “Zizou, Zizou!” (France’s captain is Zidane, so this is his nickname. I don’t think it is an actual French word…some of my francophone friends might verify that). Creative, no? But at least the chants are easy to pick up and then you feel like you fit in, even if 75% of what they’re saying in French I can’t understand. After France scored, we changed allegiance and started to cheer for Portugal. Portugal has never made it to the final, so it would have been nice to see them win. They also have a player named Christiano Ronaldo who Ying-hong (and all women, apparently) like. So she didn’t want to see him cry after they lost. It was fun though, to be in the heart of that atmosphere and to have someone else to cheer alongside.
It was really hot in the crowd though. The temperature was in the 30s (Celsius) when the match started, and with all of the people it was much warmer than that in the crowd. One guy who was near us (and had been smoking up) passed out in the second half and had to be carried off. So after the match we walked down Under Der Linden Strasse and stopped for a drink at some fancy restaurant where we continued to sit and talk for about another 2 hours, until they closed up at 1AM. It was a good night.
So, that has been my last couple of days. I don’t have much going on tonight. I’m not sure if I’ll head out to do anything exciting or if I’ll just stay in. Tomorrow night I have a community group from the church that I went to on Sunday, so I’ll see about going to that and meeting some more people. Then on Saturday, Ying-hong and I are going to go to the Museum Island and she is going to show me around. So I am starting to fill my calendar. That by itself is making me feel more normal. As most people know, I rarely have a spare hour when I’m home.
I will continue to update though. Thanks to everyone who is reading and commenting!
Peace and blessings,
JZ.
posted by JZ @ 10:24 AM
Comments: 3
