Germany - Thursday and Friday

Last Thursday, Chew & I bunked off work early and flew to Berlin. We spent the evening wondering around the streets near our hostel, and fortunately we managed to stumble across a couple of points of interest, namely a section of the Berlin Wall...

And Checkpoint Charlie, the former US gateway.

We also found some interesting road-signs...

However, the purpose of this weekend was not culture. It was quite the opposite. In fact, it was the first time I have ever spent a weekend away with the expressed intention of drinking copious amounts of beer and watching football, but believe me I will be doing it again. The atmosphere was just fantastic from the moment we hit the traffic in Frankfurt in our hired Seat Altea (top speed 120mph, which we hit often, and still had Mercs & beamers bombing past us on the autobahn). The English invasion they had predicted was already becoming apparent...

We had booked a hostel directly on the opposite side of the river to the official fans park. I had read that the park had room for 15000 spectators and a giant screen in the river. We arrived about 20 minutes into Germany's opening game against Costa Rica, and when we finally found our way to the road our hostel was on, we were shepherded away by a copper. We found somewhere to park and wondered back towards out hostel on foot, hearing a huge roar (which turned out to be for Germany's 2nd goal). We were surprised when we turned the corner to our road to see this...

It turns out that there were two giant screens, pointing towards both sides of the river - and while there was loads of temporary seating on the other side, on our side there were thousands of people clambering for a view on the road. I took this with my hand held high above my head!

And this was our hostel...

The atmosphere was fantastic and there were plenty of English, but obviously we were outnumbered by the Germans.

There was lots of friendly banter going on, in fact we were approached by at least a few Germans who said they thought this was going to be England's year. They also said they'd much rather we won it than the French or the Brazilians, and that Germany had no chance. I'm not so sure, as Germany always seem to get the 'run of the ball' in the World Cup, and that is always helped by the home crowd too...

Later during the Poland game, we made our way over the river and were greeted by a beaut of a sunset...

When we got to the square there were hundreds, if not thousands of England fans. The atmosphere was superb and different sets of fans were mingling. There was also a standoff between a small group of Germans and a large group of English who were chanting at each other, but surprisingly it was all in good humour. Although Chew and I did have a discussion about whether singing "There were 10 German bombers in the air, and the RAF from England shot them down" was offensive. A German guy I was chatting to at the time seemed to be laughing anyway.

We stumbled across some City fans, one of whom was getting Germans to put their hands in the air and sing "stand up, if you hate the gas", which was pure comedy. Chew bravely sang "Irene goodnight" behind him, which didn't go down very well. Actually, we stumbled across another group of City fans too, and when I told them chew was a gashead they all sang "Irene fuck off!" at the tops of their voices at him. I joined in of course.

Everything was building up nicely for the Saturday, and England's opening game against Paraguay. All I will say for now is - it didn't disappoint. It seems that poor second half performances and dodgy substitutions are irrelevant to thousands upon thousands of travelling England supporters.