- What a spectacle. Nationalism (patriotism?), politics, larger-than-life personalities, celebrities, technology, marketing...it's hard to enumerate the passions and excitements that go into the World Cup. Let me just say that the event, in its entirety, has been remarkable.
- Despite years of negative publicity, in the event South Africa has been amazing. The stadiums are spectacular, crime has been a non-issue, the organization has been (mostly) flawless, people on the street are welcoming and friendly and more than willing to assist fans visiting the country. Extra police and armies of volunteers have ensured that the event has been safe and well-run for everyone.
- The US played well and won a lot of support. Not well enough to win, and not enough to steal support from Ghana. But the soccer world has too many players who whine to the referees and lie on the ground at the end of games. The US played in some dramatic games and their hustle and grit were a credit to their country and to the game.
- Americans were the largest bloc of visitors and spent the most money (according to Visa). Thank God they ignored those news articles (you WILL get carjacked) and the crazy marketing (some British company sold stab-proof jackets), every American we've spoken to has had a blast.
- England fans are annoying, and seem to be mostly drunk. Or most of them, anyway. Apologies to our English readers, but that's the truth. One funny English fan moment...at the Ghana-Uruguay match some guy in front of us bellowed "Come On England" every eight or ten minutes for the entire match.
- South Africans have readily transferred their support. There were some wild expectations of the South African team, but when they went out the country switched allegiance to Ghana en masse. We saw the Ghana-Uruguay match with 84,000 Ghanaian supporters (um, no, there were very few actual Ghanaians). Brazil would have been a third choice, and Spain may be the fourth choice for the country.
- We've been to four stadiums, and Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg's Soccer City are all world-class. Durban's is probably the most dramatic, with a huge arch supporting the roof over the seating and, like Cape Town, situated close to the beach.
- Live 3D technology isn't a world-beater. Sony is broadcasting matches in 3D, and we watched Spain-Paraguay in a cinema, live, in 3D. It was cool, definitely a new perspective, but I don't think I need to run out and buy a 3D TV. Unlike HD-TV, which makes a huge difference in watching sporting events, 3D TV doesn't seem to add much to the experience that was previously missing. And the glasses are annoying.
- Who's going to win? After early South American dominance, we are down to a fairly normal European threesome in the semis. But Spain and Holland have never won the Cup and Uruguay hasn't won since 1950, so we could still have some drama in the final week.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
World Cup Notes
The World Cup is down to its final four (Holland v. Uruguay and Spain v. Germany), here are a few musings about the event so far:
Kimberley
(In front of the Big Hole)History
By the 1870s, the South Africa interior was taking on some modern characteristics. Boer farmers had populated and appropriated large portions of the land, and had declared independent republics in the Transvaal and trans-Orange regions. The British had consolidated control in the western Cape and in the Natal province around Durban. Khoisan Africans were completely marginalized and had seen their populations dramatically reduced. And the black African civilizations were in the process of being subdued.
Then, in 1871, two farm children discovered a diamond on the banks of the Orange river.
In the following decade, the region around Kimberley experienced a diamond boom. Prospectors from across the globe flocked to Kimberley, staked a claim, and started digging. Those who "hit it big" bought more claims, and began to hire laborers from amongst the black population.
In the following decade, the region around Kimberley experienced a diamond boom. Prospectors from across the globe flocked to Kimberley, staked a claim, and started digging. Those who "hit it big" bought more claims, and began to hire laborers from amongst the black population.
Kimberley, as a town, flourished. By the early 1880s it had the first electric streetlights in the southern hemisphere. It soon had streetcars, saloons, banks, and mansions for a lucky few.
Diamond Mining and De Beers
The individual claims were originally staked at about fifteen feet on a side, with the claimant owning the vertical rights to the claim. And since the diamonds were underground, that meant that you had to dig. And since some diggers were faster than others, there was soon a chaotic jigsaw of holes and bridges and guywires across the main diamond site. Cave-ins were common. And the deeper holes began to fill with water. What's more, by the early 1880s the easy digging near the surface was finished, and few diamonds were found in the harder "blue earth" underneath. Small operators or individuals began to sell off their claims.
(The Big Hole today)Through the 1880s, this consolidation of claims created a handful of major operators, each "hiring" labor from African tribes and each struggling to stay ahead of his peers. Finally, Cecil Rhodes managed to buy out all the remaining operators (using loans financed from Rothschild bankers in London) and formed De Beers Consolidated in 1888. As the "blue earth" was found to contain lots of diamonds, De Beers, via their local monopoly on Kimberley diamonds, effectively gained control of the global diamond market.
Boer War
Kimberley, as an English town in the middle of the Boer interior, and as a tranport hub (the British, of course, built roads and then railroads to Kimberley as its importance grew), became an easy target for the Boers during the Anglo-Boer war in 1899. The siege of Kimberley lasted four months before the British were able to raise it, from November 1899 to February 1900. The siege is perhaps most famous for the "Long Cecil" a six-pound cannon designed by an American working for Rhodes and built in the De Beers workshops in town. The local British garrison had only small weapons while the encircling Boers had artillery, so the "Long Cecil" was built using the tools at hand. That it actually worked was quite remarkable, given that there were no gun-making tools (or expertise) in Kimberley at the time.
(The original Long Cecil)
Kimberley, as an English town in the middle of the Boer interior, and as a tranport hub (the British, of course, built roads and then railroads to Kimberley as its importance grew), became an easy target for the Boers during the Anglo-Boer war in 1899. The siege of Kimberley lasted four months before the British were able to raise it, from November 1899 to February 1900. The siege is perhaps most famous for the "Long Cecil" a six-pound cannon designed by an American working for Rhodes and built in the De Beers workshops in town. The local British garrison had only small weapons while the encircling Boers had artillery, so the "Long Cecil" was built using the tools at hand. That it actually worked was quite remarkable, given that there were no gun-making tools (or expertise) in Kimberley at the time.
(The original Long Cecil)
Modern history and Big Hole
Unlike ostrich feathers, diamonds have never gone out of fashion, and De Beers careful manipulation of the diamond market has ensured that Kimberley has remained fairly prosperous throughout the 20th century. Today it is a fairly sizable modern city, with continuing mining operations in the area. Tourism is significant, with lots of markers to nearby battlefields and guided tours of the "Kimberley Big Five" the five large holes in which open mining of diamonds took place.
Unlike ostrich feathers, diamonds have never gone out of fashion, and De Beers careful manipulation of the diamond market has ensured that Kimberley has remained fairly prosperous throughout the 20th century. Today it is a fairly sizable modern city, with continuing mining operations in the area. Tourism is significant, with lots of markers to nearby battlefields and guided tours of the "Kimberley Big Five" the five large holes in which open mining of diamonds took place.
The premier attraction, however, is the Big Hole. The site of the original diamond digging by individual claimants, De Beers continued mining the site until 1914. In the end, it became the largest hand-dug hole in the world, with hand digging from the surface down to almost 300m in depth, and underground digging (via shafts) continuing to a depth of 1000m. Today the Big Hole is partially filled with debris and water, and there is no longer any mining at the site. In all, 2.7 tonnes of diamonds were harvested from 22 million tonnes of rock.
(Big Hole statistics)
(Big Hole statistics)De Beers dominated the diamond market in the 20th century. Savvy marketing ("A diamond is forever"), the absence of a secondary diamond market, and supply constraints meant that they could largely control the price of retail diamonds. While their control has been challenged in recent years by other diamond producers (mostly in Russia), they remain the largest player in the global diamond business.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Oudtshoorn
(Oudtshoorn museum, built during the feather boom)Cape History
The Cape of Good Hope was found by Europeans near the end of the 15th century, with visits by Bartolomeo Dias and Vasco da Gama providing early accounts of the area. By about 1600, there was a permanent Dutch settlement located as a supply depot for ships passing around Africa to reach the East Indies, and over the following century the settlement prospered. Black Africans had not yet reached the Cape in their long expansion southward from central Africa, and the region was populated only by Khoi-San hunter-gatherer peoples who were rapidly enslaved or displaced by the Europeans (There is a fascinating chapter in Guns, Germs, and Steel discussing how ideal the Cape region was for Europeans to gain a foothold in Africa--with a Mediterranean climate familiar to the Europeans but alien to black Africans, the white population swelled rapidly).
The Cape of Good Hope was found by Europeans near the end of the 15th century, with visits by Bartolomeo Dias and Vasco da Gama providing early accounts of the area. By about 1600, there was a permanent Dutch settlement located as a supply depot for ships passing around Africa to reach the East Indies, and over the following century the settlement prospered. Black Africans had not yet reached the Cape in their long expansion southward from central Africa, and the region was populated only by Khoi-San hunter-gatherer peoples who were rapidly enslaved or displaced by the Europeans (There is a fascinating chapter in Guns, Germs, and Steel discussing how ideal the Cape region was for Europeans to gain a foothold in Africa--with a Mediterranean climate familiar to the Europeans but alien to black Africans, the white population swelled rapidly).
During the 18th century, European explorers penetrated the interior and came into contact with the indigenous civilizations in Zulu-land and Zimbabwe. A turning point came in 1803, when Holland itself was threatened by Napoleon. The British, being generally terrified of Napoleon, chose to pre-emptively occupy Dutch settlements around the world. Over the next fifty years, Dutch settlers and farmers came into conflict with their new British masters and chose to leave the Cape colony to go it alone in the African interior. This "Great Trek" has a lot of parallels with the westward expansion in the United States, complete with land grabs, warfare against the indigenous population, and declarations of various independent "republics."
One of the settlements in the interior became known as Oudtshoorn (pronounced something like "outs-horn" or maybe "oats-horn"). The town is located in a picturesque valley between soaring mountain ranges, and today is about a seven-hour drive from Cape Town. We spent two days there relaxing on our trip to Cape Town, and learned a bit about its unique history.
Ostrich farming
Oudtshoorn came into its own in the 1870s. A number of early settlers had learned to farm ostriches, and, lucky for them, the whims of European fashion turned ostrich feathers into the height of style. Typically the feathers would be made into plumes for hats, though apparently they could be used in a wide variety of applications (on boots or sewn into wedding dresses or as fans or dusters). The British obligingly built a railroad to Port Elizabeth and soon the "ostrich feather boom" was on. At the height of the market, Oudtshoorn ostrich feathers sold for more than gold, by weight, and the speculative boom in the area reached the usual bubble proportions. Award-winning stud ostriches could be sold for several thousand pounds (more than an automobile). Within a few years the town had a hospital, several banks, a pharmacy, a railroad depot, and nine architects building mansions for the newly wealthy ostrich farmers.
Oudtshoorn came into its own in the 1870s. A number of early settlers had learned to farm ostriches, and, lucky for them, the whims of European fashion turned ostrich feathers into the height of style. Typically the feathers would be made into plumes for hats, though apparently they could be used in a wide variety of applications (on boots or sewn into wedding dresses or as fans or dusters). The British obligingly built a railroad to Port Elizabeth and soon the "ostrich feather boom" was on. At the height of the market, Oudtshoorn ostrich feathers sold for more than gold, by weight, and the speculative boom in the area reached the usual bubble proportions. Award-winning stud ostriches could be sold for several thousand pounds (more than an automobile). Within a few years the town had a hospital, several banks, a pharmacy, a railroad depot, and nine architects building mansions for the newly wealthy ostrich farmers.
The usual story with economic bubbles followed. New settlers flowed in, banks offered vast loans at too-low interest rates, and there was a total absence of regulation or quality control. The resulting oversupply (and low quality) resulted in the first crash in the feather market in the 1880s. Fortunes were lost, lenders went bust, and thousands of ostriches were slaughtered.
The whims of fashion, however, ensured that demand for the feathers endured, and after some consolidation and introduction of local production controls the ostrich market was soon back on its feet for another go. Oudtshoorn had some of the earliest automobiles in South Africa, and the new round of feather-baron mansions were often built entirely of materials imported from London.
The first decade of the 20th century saw a slow decline in the ostrich market, however, as fashion began to move away from large feathers (the Oudtshoorn museum blames automobiles for changing tastes of European women toward smaller feathers). The outbreak of war in 1914 finally killed off the market, however, and the second "feather crash" proved to be the last. The years since the crash have seen attempts by the farmers to revive the feather market, various attempts to introduce ostrich meat to the world (it's very good, it's red meat, and it has little or no cholesterol), and the launching of ostrich tourism. None has been very successful, though there is still a large population of ostriches in the area.
The first decade of the 20th century saw a slow decline in the ostrich market, however, as fashion began to move away from large feathers (the Oudtshoorn museum blames automobiles for changing tastes of European women toward smaller feathers). The outbreak of war in 1914 finally killed off the market, however, and the second "feather crash" proved to be the last. The years since the crash have seen attempts by the farmers to revive the feather market, various attempts to introduce ostrich meat to the world (it's very good, it's red meat, and it has little or no cholesterol), and the launching of ostrich tourism. None has been very successful, though there is still a large population of ostriches in the area.
(Feather baron's car, once worth less than a prized ostrich)
(Feather baron's house)One of the interesting aspects of the bubble is that Oudtshoorn was, very early on, a very cosmopolitan city. Speculators from around the world poured in, including a large population of Lithuanian Jews (who were populous enough to have their own schism, resulting in two Jewish communities and two bickering synagogues in the late 19th century). And later the town was host to 500 Polish orphans during World War II, most of whom still live in the area.
We visited an ostrich farm for tourists and learned about the farming techniques, about the feathers, about feather fashion, et cetera. The absolute highlight, however, was the chance to ride an ostrich. You have to weigh less than 75 kg, so I was ineligible, but Becca took her opportunity and rode that ostrich around the pen like a champ.
(Ostrich riding)
Friday, June 25, 2010
US advances
So the US won their group and advanced to the knockout stage of the tournament! This is pretty exciting stuff, it's only the third time the US has advanced since they started competing again in 1990. And they have an interesting draw--Ghana is the only African team remaining, which means that EVERYONE is going to be rooting for them here (South Africans have been great about rooting for all of the African teams, and always refer to this as the African World Cup, and while the US are generally a well-liked team and would have enjoyed lots of support, with this draw they will get none from non-Americans). The match is on Saturday at 8:30 our time (should be about 11:30 am PDT).
We are in Cape Town with Jessy and Tim and Tim's brother, and will be watching the match somewhere in the city. Cape Town photos to come, with Becca's play-by-play since Durban, but let me say that Cape Town is a beautiful city that is well worth a visit if you've never been.
In the knockout round we've got tickets to Spain-Portugal, and to a second-round match between the winners of Uruguay-Korea and USA-Ghana. Go USA!!!
We are in Cape Town with Jessy and Tim and Tim's brother, and will be watching the match somewhere in the city. Cape Town photos to come, with Becca's play-by-play since Durban, but let me say that Cape Town is a beautiful city that is well worth a visit if you've never been.
In the knockout round we've got tickets to Spain-Portugal, and to a second-round match between the winners of Uruguay-Korea and USA-Ghana. Go USA!!!
Sunday, June 20, 2010
World Cup Opening Concert - Us v. England
(Been too long since the last post! There has not been a lot of internet time for me with all the soccer to watch!)
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
South African World Cup
Fan park in Johannesburg, opening match with South Africa.It is difficult to overstate the significance of this World Cup to South Africa, or to overstate the pride and excitement you can feel from South Africans.
On arrival, the first thing you notice are the flags. Johannesburg is papered with flags. The freeway to the city is lined with the flags of the participating countries for 20 km. Every other car has a South African flag flying from the back window (often paired with an English flag, or a German one, or the US flag). People have South African flags painted on their cheeks, flying from their rooftops, laid out with colored rocks in the road medians. There is a palpable sense of pride--of a kind of the-world-needs-to-know-about-South-Africa--on the radio, on billboards, in conversations.
South African flag, one of millions flying in the country this month.I was in South Africa in 2000 on the day that they were not awarded the 2006 World Cup. The FIFA governing board vote was expected to be close, but South Africa believed that they had the votes. They organized fan rallies across the country to watch the vote on large screens setup in public squares. On the day of the decision, one of the 24 representatives, who had publicly committed to the South African bid, received a death threat and chose to abstain in the vote. The final vote was 12-11 in favor of Germany (the tiebreaking vote was to be the FIFA president, who had championed the South African bid). You can imagine the disappointment, followed by outrage, followed by disgust. Eventually FIFA altered the bid-selection process, virtually guaranteeing that South Africa would host the event in 2010.
I was back in 2004 just after the 2010 Cup was awarded. Even then, you could sense the excitement. The organization I worked for provided HIV education to teenagers, and immediately launched a "Be There in 2010" campaign (the idea being that you'd better make choices today to ensure that you would still be alive to see the matches). Plans even then were in the works to get stadiums built, hotels ready, transport expanded. And everyone, EVERYONE, was getting involved in cleaning, building, planning, developing for the event itself.
You would never know it from western media reports. For the last four years all you could read in US and European newspapers was about how the stadiums weren't finished, there wouldn't be enough hotel rooms, the transportation would be a mess, and even if all that worked you'd probably be car-jacked or raped before you got out of the airport. At best this was unfair coverage, at worst it was overtly racist.
Now here we are. We've attended four events in four days--we saw the opening concert in Soweto (the Black-Eyed Peas were good but Tutu really stole the show), we watched the opening match between South Africa and Mexico in a public viewing area in central Johannesburg, ran out to the US-England match on Saturday night in Rustenburg, and saw the Germany-Australia match last night in Durban's iconic new stadium. All have been well-organized (with the possible exception of the park&ride system). People are extremely friendly and welcoming and helpful. The stadiums are spectacular. The roads are flawless. The extra signage to and from the FIFA events is great.
In the end, barring some external event (there was a lot of worry about terrorism at the US-England match), the event will finally overshadow all of the negative publicity. We have already heard this from other visitors ("People are friendly, we are having a great time, we can't wait to tell our friends how beautiful South Africa is").
Durban stadium
The largest bloc of international visitors is here from the United States and, indeed, we have run into lots of Americans everywhere we have been so far. There were quite a few at the Germany-Australia match last night. For South Africa, the visitors from every country will become ambassadors, passing out the true story despite the misleading news reporting.
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