So, it was off to the Stadium we go. One small problem - we actually didn't know where the stadium was. Keep in mind that we were still Navi novices and didn't really know what the system was capable of. I had been to the stadium once before a few years back on bikes and I knew we had left from Sven's house. And I knew that on Saturday we were at the train station which was by Sven's house. Putting these facts together (I'm smart like that), I decided that we should go to the train station using the Navigation system. And it worked brilliantly - it took us right to the train station. Hmm, well that doesn't really help since we still didn't know where to go from there. But we were close! I pulled over and asked some cab drivers if they knew the way for our stadium day (poor rhyme, I know). The spouted out the directions - turn left somewhere, go around a roundabout and go straight, you'll see a sign somewhere, make either a left or right turn, etc. I nodded my head and realized that we'd probably never find it since I only vaguely understood his German - my fault, not his :). But, fearless, we headed off into the sunset (well, not really) trying to find it. Eventually, we started heading into downtown Frankfurt and I knew it wasn't there, so we pulled an illegal U-Turn and headed back into a tangled mess of lanes and Y-intersections into a gas station, since we needed to fill up our thirsty Benz (ouch!). If the cabbies were hard to understand, the gas station attendants were even worse. They said it was a piece of cake from that point and pointed us down the road a bit further.
After some last-minute, illegal lane changes we were rolling down the road and - - the Frankfurt Waldstadion / Commerzbank Arena appeared in our crosshairs. Eureka! Now, where did we need to go to buy tickets. We pulled into the stadium and the volunteers baking in the sun said we had to go across a bridge behind us and there was a ticket booth over there where we could get tickets. Sure thing, we flipped a (legal!) U-turn and headed over the bridge and followed the road through empty parking lots, along the main road, and drove, and drove, and drove until we were heading back into downtown Frankfurt again. This was not working for us! So, we pulled another illegal U-turn and headed back to the stadium, and this time we noticed a ticket booth - but we had just passed it. We went to what looked like a parking lot up the street and pulled in. It looked like there was another ticket booth there, but the parking attendant said that we had to walk way back to the first one that we saw, and so we did. Kelly wasn't feeling well and stayed in the car to sleep a bit more while we mosied down to the first ticket booth and got our tickets and public transportation directions for the evening game. Finally!! It only took us like 3 hours to figure it all out. And yes, we could have bought them at the ticket booth next to the parking lot :-/ ...
Now we were ready to hit the town and go shopping. We made a quick phone call to downtown Frankfurt to get ahold of a cute girl (Martina) that we had met on Sunday who (foolishly) volunteered to be our tour guide for a few hours since I don't really know Frankfurt all that well. We decided that we'd do lunch once we got there, so we bought a group day-metro pass at the closest public transportation spot to the stadium and headed downtown to meet up with her at the Konstablerwache exit on the train.
Once we met up, we ended up going to a little Italian lunch place that makes freshly tossed pastas and pizzas in front of you. Kelly was still not feeling well and we decided to avoid the bratwursts for this meal (and this meal only, pretty much!). After lunch, we meandered down to one of the skyscrapers (Frankfurt being one of the only cities in mainland Europe to have such things) to get a complete 360 degree view of Hessen, the state to which Frankfurt belongs. It was a pretty impressive view, actually.It was hot out again that day (like pretty much everyday that we were there. One of the things that I got annoyed at was not sweating like a pig, not that the waters were served at room temperature and had a funky taste sometimes, and not that I was bordering on sun strokes 90% of the time. No, I was annoyed because after spending all this time in the sun, my skin still glowed in the dark it was so white. I would occasionally put SPF 15 sunscreen on, but if I used nothing I would be just as white as when I left in the morning...err, afternoon. What's an albino gotta do to get some color?
But I digress. We were hot, so naturally we headed back to the main pedestrian street to get some ice cream from the omnipresent Haagen Daz (however the Dutch spell it) ice cream store. Kelly was getting on Daniel's nerves about having something to drink (just because she's sick and it's 100 degrees outside doesn't mean that you have to complain so much, does it? ;o) We got our ice cream and proceeded to further support the local economy by hitting up some stores to buy some clothing items and trinkets. Adidas did a fine job of supplying us with discounted gear from eliminated teams and Karstadt had some very nice vintage polo soccer shirts that I had to get my hands on. Kelly said that she thought they were something a gay guy would wear and I took that as a compliment on my trend-setting style. Thanks Carson Calandrino ;o) ! I did, however miss out on buying a fine Adidas "deutschland" jacket that Kelly and Daniel both bought. I waited a hair too long and before I knew it (well, really the next day), it was snapped up (Note: I purchased it two weeks later at the Adidas store in NYC). The Puma store, however, left much to be desired and we were thoroughly disappointed with their lack of discounts and their expensive space-age shoes.
But, it was time to go anyway. We'd wasted enough time shopping (for that day) and we had to head off to the Commerzbank Arena for the day's main event: Germany vs. Italy semi-final. We said our good-byes (or, in my case, "see you in New York!") to Martina and trying to be adventurous, I foolishly led us to a different train than we had taken from the stadium
. This train dropped us off on the complete opposite side of the stadium as our car was on, so we had to suffer not just a 20 minute walk around the stadium, but also hearing the crowd inside roaring without us, even though the game hadn't started yet. I couldnt' hardly wait to get inside and see what the ruckus was all about and to join in the cheering myself, even if I had no clue what they were saying. Since the game was starting in less than an hour, I was a bit worried about how crowded it would be inside and what kind of seats would be available. It was general seating, so first come first served.Eventually we made it to the car and dropped off all of our newly acquired football gear and what night and headed back to the stadium. The first order of business was hydration with some beer and provisions of giant German pretzels that were not as fresh as they appeared. I think Stefan had the right idea with cheese lathered thick on a slice of bread, I could practically see the oil from the cheese dripping off of it and nestling itself at home - in arteries. Ahhh...gluttony at its finest.
It was a beautiful sight, walking into the Commerzbank Arena with the crowd roaring and seeing the tens of thousands of fans inside ready for the game. We tried our luck at finding s
ome seats, and there were plenty available still. We found a spot up towards the top of the stadium underneath the giant retractable roof amongst the thousands of throngs of Germans. There was a small patch of Italian fans who were at the game, but they were on the other side of the stadium. We briefly contemplated going to that side, but we decided to do it after halftime instead.And then there was my moment. One of the more common decorations for fans was taking crayon-like face paint with your country's national colors and painting your face, arms, whatever with it. The girls in front of us took a brief break from blowing cigarette smoke up and into our face to paint each other with the little crayon. They put their tribal marks on their faces, their arms, and then one drew something that went
straight up, then across at an angle, and then straight up again on the other girl's back. I thought it was interesting and could have used some more creativity because alone it wasn't enough and besides, I like things to be symmetrical. Tap-tap-tap on her back and I told her that she should draw the other side as well to make the lines symmetrical and kind of like an "X". I was thinking of "Triple X" with Vin Diesel and that cool logo that they had. The girl doing the painting looked at me and said no and then Stefan and Daniel were all over me. I was confused. I had no idea what they were so excited about and laughing at me. Swastika. They thought I was trying to tell the other girl to draw the second half of a swastika! Obviously, that proves to me that people still associate Germans with Nazis, when I clearly don't. As you can see from the picture, drawing the second half of the X would look nothing like a swastika, but I can appreciate their concern for my health and well-being considering there were thousands of 
Germans around who might have tried to kick my arse if they knew. I guess that when Daniel saw the girl draw the first part on her back, he gasped and was thinking that she was going to draw a swastika and he couldn't believe that I would say something like that. Ooops. Yea, maybe not the best place for me to interject my opinion on body art. Plus, that blew Daniel's chance to try to bum a cigarette from them ;o)It was a pretty good game and at half-time we switched places so that Stefan, who had stood with his Italia hat off during the Italian national anthem with his mouth shut since he didn't know the words, could be among his nation. We sat next to some cute girls that didn't want to have anything to do with me (the story of my life) and watched as the game went into overtime. Then, two minutes before the end of the game, the Italians drove a stake through the heart of the German nation when they scored. And then scored again. Germany was devastated and the Italians were ecstatic. That was it, and the last team that I had been rooting for was out. I was now a spectator to the World Cup, not a true fan of any team left, which was disappointing but Stefan was insane with joy and showed it by blowing his whistle as loud as he could, possibly piercing my eardrum several times. The Italians celebrated in the stands and came up to Stefan to say things, but he had no idea what they were saying either because his Italian is so rudimentry or because the Italian fans were actually German-Italians. Mostly the former rather than the latter (I can get away with saying this since I know he doesn't read my blog :oP ).
One chant that the Italians started singing was pretty funny. The Germans had been singing about the Italians being pizza delivery boys and after the game the Italians took that and started singing that they would be delivering pizzas to Berlin, since they were going to the finals. Pretty funny stuff.
Once we finally got out of the stadium and found our way to our Benz, we headed downtown to Frankfurt to enjoy the celebrations. There were hundreds of cars in Frankfurt flying around
honking their horns with people hanging out of the windows waving their Italy flags. Stefan joined a huge throng of Italians in the middle of the street singing and dancing and shooting fireworks while Daniel, Kelly, and I headed over to a snack shack where I formally introduced them to currywurst, a German delicacy. Well, not so much as a delicacy as a cheap item that is commonly sold at snack shacks on the side of the road as fast food. Essentially, it's a sausage that's covered with ketchup and curry powder. I love that stuff!After we finally met up with Stefan again, we walked around and eventually found a part of the walking quarters where someone had pulled his lifted Jeep off to park. It was advertised with an Italian restaurant's name and had a huge sound system, smoke machines, and disco lights. They were pumping out Euro dance music with the occassional folksy dego music and the Italians were just dancing and singing. Cars were still driving around honking and at one point a huge group of Italians stopped traffic and we think there was a car stuck in the middle of the group. The police finally intervened and said that the people had to stop jumping on the car and get out of the road. This was seriously the only time on the trip that we had seen the police involved at all, which was pretty nice. They let the fans party as they wanted.
That night we got home excrutiatingly late with Stefan pretty quiet because his voice was torn up - which was pretty nice ;o). Nonetheless, we had poker to play. That night, we played poker until the week hours of the night with a bottle of Rum and Cokes and ended up seeing the sun rising.
Justinho, having connection problems, you'll have to wait for pictures!
Videos:
Cheering at the game I
Cheering at the game II
Cheering at the game III
Cheering at the game IV
Italians cheering at the game
The Italian Jeep Celebration I
The Italian Jeep Celebration II
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