Back to Romania

Well, after a long period of “inactivity”, I finally have the time and the mood to write some stuff in my blog. I reached home really tired, since I started my “odyssey” Thursday evening 8pm and I arrived home Friday evening 9 p.m. (8 p.m. Aarhus time), hence it took 24 hours. One should not imagine that it always takes me that much to get home, but since I don’t trust DSB anymore (and the DSB people behind the counter advised me not to count on the trains arriving on time) I had to catch the 2 a.m. train instead of 4 a.m., and before that I was to Sherlok Holmes with four pretty girls for a karaoke evening, which was really fun (hanging with the girls, of course) b.t.w. At home, after some initial days of sleeping almost non-stop, I started meeting my friends, going out, making holidays plans and so on. It’s always nice meeting old friends, chatting with them for hours while drinking the cheap, good romanian beer (or wine). Actually one of my friends sent me a link with one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in ages, and I must share it with you. It’s about learning English the really hard way (it’s set in China I think). Here it is:

http://www.tubel.ro/modules/news/article.php?storyid=105

Enjoy! (I certainly am ).

Tyskland impressions

Last week, I’ve been to Germany to watch the football game between Italy and Australia at the WC (i.e. World Cup). Basically, what happened is that I applied last winter with a friend for tickets just for fun and since we’ve got them I had to go see the game, even though I wanted to see any team BUT Italy.

Way there

The way there rivals the return trip from Vancouver for worst trip ever. It started Sunday morning in Aarhus around 7:00 a.m. and ended in Saarbruecken around 1:00 a.m. next day. Well, first of all I couldn’t buy a seat in the train, because of an event I couldn’t really foresee, namely the Roskilde festival people that booked all the seats. If until Fredericia they appended some extra carriages where I found a seat, from Fredericia to Copenhagen I had to stand for three hours (yeah, the train was three hours late). When finally arriving in the airport, I found out SAS made overbooking for my flight, so my departure was delayed by a few hours and I had to go to Frankfurt via Gothenburg. When finally arriving in Frankfurt, the last direct train to Saarbruecken was long gone and I had to change twice, in Mannheim and Kaiserslautern. I remember that I was almost running to catch the train in the airport when I saw that Holland and Portugal were playing and the score was 1-0 (I though for Holland). So, when in Kaiserslautern I saw some dutch supporters the most natural thing to do was to ask them what was the score. I guess this wasn’t the best question to ask them, since immediately I realized from the looks on their faces that Holland lost. Fortunately, they weren’t the “hooligan” type, since otherwise I would have probably been in some trouble.

The game

Since my friend has some locomotory problems, we left Saarbruecken quite early to avoid any unpleasant surprises (the famous highway “stau”s – traffic jams, finding parking space, finding the stadium etc). As a consequence, since nothing went wrong, we arrived quite early at the stadium. It was quite a funny experience to watch the game surrounded by “aussies” supporters, which I remembered to have quite some funny “supporting lines” out of which unfortunately I remember only one: “you’re blue, you’re white/You go at home tonight!” – useful to remember b.t.w. In what concerns the game itself, as everybpdy knows, it was screwed by the referee who gave a free red card and a strange penalty in the last minute. Anyway, I conjecture Italy will not receive any goal this world cup, they have a five star defense (and now Nesta and Materazzi are back). Therefore, even if I didn’t point out Italy as the winner in our tipping competition, “Forza Italia!!!”

PS. A bunch of pics is to be found at http://www.daimi.au.dk/~gabi/pictures/set025-VM2006/