Things heat up
Heh heh, I'm here at home working on a translation tonight (yes, I know, it's a fabulous way to spend a weekend evening) and was wondering a bit ago why I heard all these air horns and people shouting... then I got a clue and checked the World Cup website. Yup, Germany is playing its first game tonight, against Australia. When more shouts and air horns went off a few minutes ago, I checked the website again and sure enough, the first half just ended. 2-0 to Germany right now, and the commentary reads "Germany have been hugely impressive... Australia just haven't been able to compete." (I forget sometimes that Germany really is good at soccer... looks like this World Cup thing could be fun.)
So it's kind of funny, even though I'm in my apartment working - which is about as far a cry from watching the game in a noisy bar with a bunch of nutty Germans as is possible to imagine - and don't have time to actually watch the thing, I can still know what's going on at any point by checking the live "matchcast" page, with its written play-by-play commentary. Miracles of technology.
Also, I think the people down on the street below my window are intent on keeping up a rate of one to two air horn blasts per three seconds through the entirety of half-time...
By the way: I'm not kidding when I tell you every SINGLE bar/restaurant/café I've seen lately has a big TV set out front, so customers can sit at tables on the sidewalk and watch. Most of them have large flatscreen TVs (which is interesting in itself - as a friend pointed out, for the last World Cup four years ago, it was still a laborious production of setting up projectors and screens - now a bar just has to invest in one flatscreen TV and it's got all it needs to be a game-watching site) but today I passed one café in the neighborhood that just had a big old regular, not flatscreen, TV plonked down outside the door. Massive thing.
Unrelatedly, on the same walk through the neighborhood, I happened to glance in as I passed a darkened storefront, and was surprised to see a woman sitting alone in the middle of a room, playing accordion. She expanded into a louder burst of melody as I passed by.
So it's kind of funny, even though I'm in my apartment working - which is about as far a cry from watching the game in a noisy bar with a bunch of nutty Germans as is possible to imagine - and don't have time to actually watch the thing, I can still know what's going on at any point by checking the live "matchcast" page, with its written play-by-play commentary. Miracles of technology.
Also, I think the people down on the street below my window are intent on keeping up a rate of one to two air horn blasts per three seconds through the entirety of half-time...
By the way: I'm not kidding when I tell you every SINGLE bar/restaurant/café I've seen lately has a big TV set out front, so customers can sit at tables on the sidewalk and watch. Most of them have large flatscreen TVs (which is interesting in itself - as a friend pointed out, for the last World Cup four years ago, it was still a laborious production of setting up projectors and screens - now a bar just has to invest in one flatscreen TV and it's got all it needs to be a game-watching site) but today I passed one café in the neighborhood that just had a big old regular, not flatscreen, TV plonked down outside the door. Massive thing.
Unrelatedly, on the same walk through the neighborhood, I happened to glance in as I passed a darkened storefront, and was surprised to see a woman sitting alone in the middle of a room, playing accordion. She expanded into a louder burst of melody as I passed by.