World Cup Fever - Part Deux

Well that’s it, I officially have watched more soccer in that last week and a half than I have in my life to date. There are three games a day on at 4:00, 7:00, and 10:00 PM local time so I can see most of the first game and all of the last two, if need be. Only one other member of the group here is very enthusiastic about the World Cup so I have to make concessions to group morale. Sunday night they watched “The Devil’s Brigade,” a classic movie about the 1st Special Service Force, a US-Canadian unit of the Second World War. Although half the cast is supposed to be Canadian, they are played by those noted Canadian thespians such as Richard Dawson and Cliff Robertson. The token “French-Canadian” is especially outrageous as he goes around saying things like “nom de dieu” and “espece de …”

Anyway back to the Cup. We went to the British Embassy pub for the England v. Paraguay match. It was a good lively crowd, but one of our group (not me!) found out that when a chair has a sign saying “DON’T MOVE THIS CHAIR” on it, it probably shouldn’t be moved as it likely has all the projection TV cables taped to it. Yikes! Thankfully every Canadian instinctively knows exactly what to do at that moment when you’ve just blacked out the England-Paraguay game, in the British Embassy, amongst about 100 Brits, all of whom have been drinking 28¢ beer for two hours…. pretend you’re American!

My view is that since you cannot escape the World Cup around here, you may as well jump in with both feet. Virtually every restaurant in Addis, that we have frequented anyway, has reconfigured their seating to create a big-screen TV viewing area. The German resto we went to on Sunday had the requisite 6-metre screen for the Mexico-Iran game. The only difference was that instead of the half-time commentary they showed what appeared to be a German version of American Bandstand (Deutche Bündstand, perhaps?). What’s with their fascination with David Hasselhof, anyway? But I digress. The African teams have all gone down to defeat thus far, with Togo looking like having the best chance of moving on. Ghana is in the group of death with Italy, the Czechs and the USA, and so likely will not move on to the second round.