Handball, Football, and REAL Football.

Yes, I have been procrastinating. So, since it is the weekend now, I will take a minute to up date you on what has been happening this week.

As I told you previously, I was invited to a Super Bowl party on Sunday. It was very long. Starting at noon and I did not go to bed until five (the game ended at four). What was very interesting was that the championship game for the Handball World Cup (nothing compares to Football in Germany, but Handball comes in as a distant second). The Cup took place in Germany and the Germans ended up defeating the Poles to win the Championship. So, that was very exciting. One interesting thing that I saw was that Aljazeera was one of the sponsors of the match.

Fast forward a hand full of hours to midnight thirty. The Super Bowl game finally starts. And guess who the colour commentator was for the German broadcast. None other than the most famous American football player in history… who am I kidding? It was totally Boris Becker, one of the best tennis players ever. And the only reason I could see that he was the colour was because he lives in Miami. Since we got a German feed, there were no Super Bowl adds, and, from what I have been hearing, I do not think that I missed a whole lot. We got to sit through a whole ton of TV timeouts and see what the players do between just about every play (they play so many advertisements). There were some interesting crowd shots, the funniest being when a kid, who what sitting behind his father, tapped his dad on the shoulder farthest from the kid (you know the drill, I am sure), and the father completely fell for it and looked around. It was funny mostly because it was caught on television. The game really was not that good, even though Peyton won. After some shakiness at the beginning, baby Rex fell into his normal routine, and the Colts got it together (after Mr. Perfect proved that he is not actually perfect after all).

In some more exciting football action, I went to a second tier Bundes Liga match yesterday. FC Köln at Eintracht Braunschweig. While rather damp, and not the best football I have ever seen, the atmosphere was amazing. It sort of reminded me of the Purdue Student Section at Ross-Ade times five thousand. And, even though Eintracht dominated the entire game, and had way more chances on goal, FC Köln won 1-0, on an own goal by one of Braunschweig’s defenders. Which was too bad. But it was still amazing to watch live European football.

Other than that, I have been having issues with my internet. I can listen to streaming radio for the most part, and talk to people on IM, but I cannot get the web browser to function. While annoying, it is not too bad, since it comes back eventually and everything is happy.

I hope all of you in the Midwest have not frozen to death and those of you in the Southwest are enjoying your balmy weather. We had about three to five centimetres of really wet snow on Thursday, but it all melted again on Friday, leaving some very large attempted snowmen on the green and in the middle of the path.