To take this huge step forward, I had to overcome a huge obstacle: the exit from my temp apartment’s garage is about a 30 degree slope up and has walls on both sides of the exit, meaning I had to get my (manual) car up to just the right point at the top that I could lean forward and look both directions, then get going without rolling back into the closed gate behind me. I picked what looked like a good break in traffic, prayed hard, and gunned it. Coming out of there in my small car, I probably looked like something out of Italian Job. (I’d like to think so, at least.)
This statue says a lot about South Africans and the World Cup. At 4pm I got a note saying someone had an extra ticket to Brazil/Chile, and I pounced. Great experience, though unfortunately I didn’t have time to get any gear, so I looked like the people I dislike at professional sports events – the ones who have corporate season tickets, don’t really care about the game, and don’t fill their seats half the time. Traffic crawled as we approached Ellis Park. Note to self: next time, use the Hyundai park/ride, because any official Hyundai fan transport van gets a police escort to make it through the crowd. All along the way there were street vendors hawking flags, vuvuzelas, and other paraphernalia.
It took us 20 min to get through security, but only because of the mass of humanity – not because they were really checking for anything. My belt, camera, and cell phone all went through the metal detector fine. Others walked through with open beer bottles, drums, and I probably don’t want to know what else. Maybe it's a good thing Brazil won.
We got in the stadium right on time and off we went. There were dots of red in the sea of green/yellow, but there were a lot of non-Brazilian Brazil fans. I got a pretty good video of the field/crowd right as Brazil scored their first goal and things went nuts.
Contrary to my ingoing opinion, the vuvuzelas weren’t terrible. If someone blows one next to you, you’re in trouble, but maybe the open stadium diffused the sound sufficiently to not be deafening. The one thing that TV doesn’t pick up is that they aren’t always constant; sometimes people would get in rhythm and the sound would ebb and flow like a revving car. The worst thing was an air horn someone had in the row in front of us. Blowing a vuvuzela inside a closed, echoing restroom, though, is deserving of death. Or at least some deadly stares.There was no way this night could end right after the game, so we went to a local place to hang out. The place was packed. In the course of the night our table expanded/contracted as we met a trio of Americans, a very friendly pair of Mexicans, a Brit, and a couple of locals. The WC is like the Olympics in that it mixes up people from all around the world who have nothing to do but go to a few events and hang out with other people, and thus many new friends are made. I had a very interesting conversation with two SAs of Indian descent about SA, different cities, race, Indian culture in SA, and a lot of other stuff. While we talked they ordered margaritas, mojitos, and nachos – however, when I asked about a Mexican/TexMex restaurant, they came up blank. The nachos lacked good salsa but otherwise weren’t bad, but the cheese instantly solidified in the 50 F night.
After 2am rolled around I found out that there is no mandatory closing hour. My body is thoroughly confused, and that night didn’t help. However, it gave me plenty of time to watch Brazilians live up to a stereotype: they aggressively hit on anything female.
