Coming back to Johannesburg is like coming home. We arrived in the airport on June 10the day before the first match of World Cup 2010 for the third time on this trip and the airport was abuzz with crowds of visitors looking for their rides and stopping at the various shops and vendors to pick up their team's (or their adopted team's) swag. We picked up our car and (much more comfortably) drove to Jessy and Tim's place. We only had a few moments to put our stuff down after our flight from Uganda, because Jessy and Tim got us tickets to the kick off concert! We hurried to get ready (each time we digressed into recapping our East Africa adventures, Tim would gently encourage us along with a "This sounds like a conversation we could be having in the car" - Sula, you can just imagine his nice-Tim-tone!)
Opening Concert
We arrived at the concert in Soweto around 4pm after using the park and ride system. The concert went on for more than 9 hours, we made it through 8+ (then a DJ took over and we were too wiped out to boogie any longer) and the highlights for me were:
The vibe. That's right, I just threw down that buzz word. It was great, people were really in a party mood, especially the couple next to us who were squatting in some seats and who just managed to stay in the seats through their (extremely drunk) friendliness.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu stole the show. He gave an excited rambling speech in which each of his sentences were punctuated with a little dance, shoulders wiggling and arms waving, he was so excited!
All the big names were really good, Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys, and Shakira (who brought the show down with the World Cup theme song Waka Waka), but I also loved Canine (not sure if at home they are playing the coke commercial with the "wave your flag" song, but that song is awesome live and I don't mind saying it!) and the Parlatones.
The Electric Slide - that's right, that favorite wedding dance broke out in the giant standing-room area in front of the stage and we watched it grow and grow, as a couple of hundred people joined in at various points in the concert, all electric sliding, its alive and well in RSA!
The comedy happened at the end of the concert, as 30,000 people streamed out of the stadium to get on the buses back to the park and ride lot.. Awh, the comedy, first is the smushed, pushing to get out of the stadium shuffle. As we exited the stadium, we could see that none of the buses had left yet. Curious.. How to get 30,000 people out if the buses are not moving? It turned out that the pedestrians streaming out of the stadium were blocking the street that the buses were supposed to be using for their route.. We decided to walk very quickly to the back of the line of buses, effectively cutting the empty buses off before they could make it to the crowd of people at the stadium. We hopped on one that then turned before we even got to the stadium, bypassing all that pedestrian-blockage. Genius, we made it home quickly after that and we learned the trick of the park and ride - Always walk quickly from the crowd to try to intersect the transport before it reaches the slow, bulk of the crowd.
Bafana Bafana v. Mexico
After the build up of the concert the night before, we planned to watch the crucial opening match of the World Cup in a giant public square in Freetown, a neighborhood in downtown Joburg. Tim had to go to work that morning (boy guy!) so Jessy, Scott and I located a public minibus to take downtown (one stopped immediately for us and we crammed in, the signal is a finger pointing down, for downtown I guess). We heard on the radio news in the minibus that Nelson Mandela would not be attending the match, his great grand-daughter was killed in a car accident the night before while leaving the concert - very sad, she was like 12 years old.. That was unhappy news as South Africans prepared to open their greatest international event ever.
The square filled up with people and dancers entertained the quickly growing crowd in front of the big screen. We easily found Tim and his cadre of workmates and prepared to scream and shout along with the bafana-dominated fans (although there was a lone Mexico flag waving in the crowd, I must admire their fans for showing up in the host country's downtown!). A band set up for more pre-game entertainment. Strangely, they didn't start playing until about 10 minutes before kick-off! They drowned out the national anthems of South Africa and Mexico. While the square in the crowd put up the 'substitute' hand signal, the singer droned on about how she was so excited to be in South Africa, that although they are a Canadian band, her mother is South African and her father is Mexican and that she wrote a special song for the South Africa v. Mexico match. It was a comical song which went on and on until finally they got off the stage just in time to avoid a riot, as the game began and the sound system switched over to the game commentary.
Ahhh, an exciting game!! Most of you probably know the result (tie, 1-1). The first goal of the World Cup which bafana scored was met with a crazy celebration in the square that went on and on. Mexico equalized and the square went briefly quiet. At the end, most people seemed somewhat let down but overall were satisfied with the result. We walked through the streets of Joburg back to our car along with a pretty happy crowd. Good day.
US v. England
I will admit it.. I find Hugh Grant and Colin Firth somewhat charming, I can name some members of the British royal family, and maybe I have enjoyed riding the tube, hanging out at the British National Museum, and relishing that satisfying feeling of carrying around those wonderfully weighty pound-coins.. All of that affection for the English has been wiped away through a single match-watching experience with those awful Englishmen! By the end of the match, I was hiding my revulsion at hearing their obnoxious accents and turning my gaze away from their horrible red and white flags! But let's not get ahead of ourselves...
Neither we, nor Jessy and Tim had tickets to the US-England match when we arrived in Joburg on Thursday. The game was on Saturday. By Friday night, Jessy's friends had come through with 2 tickets and Tim had found us another set of tickets on a website called Sam's Army, if we wanted them. Our dilemma was that we had tickets to the Germany-Australia match the day after the US match in Durban, about 6 hours away. We debated whether we should go to the US match, arrive back in Joburg at 3 am, get up at 8am, drive to Durban, arrive in time for the match and then get to bed at 2am again.. This was a brief debate. Saturday morning we got up early and piled into the Tim-mobile, US flag flying from our window.
A Donovan free kick.
Like everyone else, we got to Rustenburg really early and planned to watch the daytime matches within walking distance to the stadium. Thus, we spent many hours with the English fans at the only two pubs in town (Rustenburg is SMALL). This early in the evening they were generally bearable though increasingly drunk and out of control.
After a number of snafuus trying to meet our ticket sellers during which we contemplated giving up trying to buy the tickets and just heading back to a pub to watch the game on TV and save our $350 (our seller's transportation was late from the Joburg airport, our cell phones weren't connecting, their got their north-south mixed up making us walk all the way around the stadium to find their gate), we met them and followed them up to their AWESOME midfield seats just in time for the national anthems. After a yelling-version of God Save the Queen, we launched into the Star Spangled Banner and believe you me, I have NEVER sung that anthem so loudly and with so much verve.
USA! USA!
And then, kickoff! So exciting! Wait, why is England so close to our goal? Oh no, minute 4, goal, England. Boy did that suck, the obnoxious boys behind us spilled beer on my pants and all over my seat in their celebration. Then came their singing which at the time made me grit by teeth but now is kind of funny. Favorite song, "You've only got one sub". to which we responded "USA! USA!" Other songs came as well, which were always met with the old standby "USA! USA!". They then adapted a song to "You've only got one song". Funny English. They were just launching into "Are you Scotland in disguise? Are you Scotland in disguise?" in the second half when the glorious Clint Dempsey's slow-kick dribbled through England's goal-keeper's hands and into the back of the net! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAALL, USA, on Greene's error.. Oh the wonderful celebration that we had which was made all the more sweet as the English song changed to "Are you Scotland in dis-What the F#%&?"
After some more ball-kicking, the match was over and for the most part, we were happy with the tie-result.
For the park-n-ride back to the car, we initiated our system learned during the pre-game concert - We started walking back towards the car lot. We were in a large group that felt pretty safe, until we came upon three nere-do-wells. I say this, because one was urinating on someone's front lawn, another had blood on his shirt and a third was carrying a large stick, maybe 4 feet in length. Lucky us, they fell in step with we four and wanted to chat. The bloody one, who also sported a black eye, wanted to tell me an expletive-laden story about the Americans he had just beat up. His face was yuckily near mine and he was drunk and had metal braces. I was just sucking in my breath to provide a reply - something classy like "I don't like the way you are speaking to me" when Scott firmly took my hand and led me away..
I was disturbed to have them walk behind us so I was very happy to see that mini-buses were coming towards us, en route to the stadium to pick people up for the park and ride. From our place on the road, we could intercept them and they could just U-turn, avoiding all the stadium traffic. Score. The funny part was, everyone in the crowd walking had this idea, so the first 20 or so people who got to the bus could get on. You can imagine how people jockeyed to be those first 20. As a bus would approach, people would veer off into the second lane of traffic, waving widely. If the bus would slow to a stop, what occurred was something like a scene out of zombie movie, where all these people (zombies) converge on the mini-bus and half shake it over as they try to get themselves on the bus.
We zombied-out ourselves and got onto the third or fourth bus we saw. We got home by about 2am and sleepily bid goodbye to Jessy and Tim the next morning as we ventured out of Joburg, our familiar home, to the rest of the country!
We four at the match and one obnoxious english dude.
I love this blog, you guys! (BB, your voice really comes out in this post.) You tell those thugs to leave you alone! If they don't, I'm sending Jakey out there to bust some caps!
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