Ayoba! World Cup 2010

As we wrote in the last blog, the excitement we could see in all South Africans before the World Cup started was truly amazing. Yet, after we finished our last exam after a 3day marathon with no sleep and too much coffee, and the day after when the WC opening match was taking place, it all exploded in a potpourri of joy and happiness!! We were woken up in the morning at around 05.30 by our neighbours and their vuvuzelas, followed by the sound outside: people singing, cars honking, people dancing on the street, waving their flags. We had been looking forward to this event ever since we knew we were moving to South Africa last summer, but never had we expected such excitement as we felt when Tshabalala hammered in the first South African goal against Mexico in the opening match! We were watching the match at a packed Brazen Head (the local Irish pub here in Stellie) with a lot of South Africans but also a lot of international students cheering for our current home country. The feelings for South Africa just grew during the match as Bafana Bafana ("the boys, the boys" - the nickname for the SA football team) were playing like heroes, and even if Mexico scored a goal making it a draw, it could not stop people from being overexcited about the fantastic start of a World Cup that proved to be a great success for the host country.

Later that same day Siri went into Cape Town with our friends Vicky, Per and Sonia, to watch the opening game at Green Point Stadium with France-Uruguay. Although it was a pretty boring match, the experience was great! 70 000 attendants at the fantastic stadium is a great memory no matter what the game is like, and seeing stars like Forlan, Henry, Evra etc. does not happen everyday. A week later, we both went into the stadium together to watch Portugal-North Korea, and what a match that turned out to be! North Korea put up a hell of a fight in the first half, impressing everybody by playing just as good as Ronaldo and the crew, and going into the wardrobe only one goal behind. However, in the second half the Portuguese decided to step it up to another level, and they didn't stop the brilliant show until 6 more goals was behind the poor North Korean goalkeeper! The small group of NK fans (about 50) which was heavily debated in the media (soldiers turned into trained fans?)still impressed us and everybody else with their constant cheering and smiles even if their heroes were "killed" and humiliated on the field. An ironic turn is that this game was actually the first in the history of the country that was shown live on TV, a decision taken after they had a really good first match against Brazil. Ouch for the dictator Kim Jong-il, but YAY for us that actually got to see live in person one of the most-scoring games in the world cup history - and this was Roger's first World Cup match ever!!

About a week after this game, Roger went into the Green Point Stadium once again to watch the game between Holland-Cameroon. This group was pretty much decided in advance, yet it turned out to be quite a good match, and Roger got to see players like Robben, Van Persie, Sneider and Eto'o. Another amazing experience! It is hard to explain the atmosphere at this fantastic stadium, as it almost leaves you speechless. Overwhelming is the best word we can think of...We only hope that some of the feeling was translated well through the TV-screen, even though I know a lot of you got tired of the extreme sound of the thousands of vuvuzelas. Funny enough, at the stadium the sound wasn't that bad. We too did not appreciate its sound when people were running around outside our apartment day and night blowing constantly with no sense of rhythm at all. But at the stadium it was actually a quite good factor in creating the fantastic atmosphere In one of the nearest days we will create an album with some of the pictures we took during the events, hopefully this as well will give you an image of how it was like.

At that same day, Siri went into the Waterfront in Cape Town to watch the Holland game from a pub with some of our other friends that didn't have tickets. She, Alex, Melody (from USA), Maiken (from Norway) and Sanne (also from Holland) drove in Sanne's ancient 1973 Tarantino-like Audi which was a collectors item, but when they came to the Waterfront the car broke down in the middle of a roundabout!! Alex knew less than the girls about cars, so there they were stranded in the middle of the street with loads of cars and people around them. Those moments are never fun... luckily they were really close to an Audi garage, and by getting pushing help from 4 heavily armed policemen they managed to make it to a mechanic there who "fixed" the car just enough to keep it on the road - although, Roger was a passenger on the way home to Stellenbosch after the game, and the old Audi couldn't use any other gears than the second one (slooooow on the highway - doing max 50kms/h in a 100-zone!) + he had to hold one of the windows the whole time as it was falling out...

Apart from going to the stadium in Cape Town, we mostly stayed in Stellenbosch with our friends, watching the games at different pubs and restaurants, enjoying the break and all the excitement around us. Stellenbosch hosted the Algerian fans during the cup, and the streets was swarming with hundreds of them, dressed in white and green. We met two of the fans one evening at a pub here, and talked to them for a while even though their English was not too good (Algerians are French-speaking). At Brazen Head we also met a lot of people at every game, from all over the world. We hung out for a bit with Torben, a Danish guy that lives in Switzerland. He actually saved Alex's day as he had extra tickets to the game between Holland and Cameroon. Alex had been unlucky as he bought tickets for all the Holland games from a fraud-company - it turned out that they were selling tickets they did not have. Naturally, Alex was devastated when he found out, but Torben saved his day by providing him with at least one ticket

During the World Cup weeks a lot of our good friends sadly left South Africa, as they were finished with the studies down here. Luckily, some of them are from Norway so we'll meet them again when we are back home, but some are also spread all around the world, and it is always extremely sad to say goodbye to people we've had so much fun with. One night, we had a dinner-party for 4 of our leaving friends: Cindy and Nina from Norway, Heidi from Finland and Mike from South Africa. We're actually pretty proud of ourselves (even though Siri's mum was with us on the phone a lot of the time), as we for the first time ever made a roast, filled with cream cheese and various herbs, with bacon slices wrapped around with string. We must be getting old.... anyway, we had a hard time finding a decent roast and we were running around the whole town before we got lucky in the end. The butcher where we bought the roast told us that it was hard finding good meat like this since the pigs in South Africa are a lot smaller than what we have back home...(?)...

We had another unforgettable experience when we went to a pub in Khayamandi (the township just outside Stellenbosch) to watch the second Bafana game against Uruguay together with the local population. Although South Africa had a fallback and was crushed 3-0, it was amazing to see the game together with so many South Africans and really feel their excitement over the first African World Cup! People were singing & dancing as there was no tomorrow, both to traditional songs and the official World Cup songs (Waka Waka, and Wave the Flag). One of the traditional SA-songs we learned to love during the event was Shosholozah, a song originally sung by mine-workers in South Africa when going home by the steam train (stimela). The first verse of the song goes like this:

Shosholozah (go forward)

Shosholozah (go forward)

Ku lezontabah (on those mountains)

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa (train from South Africa)

Shosholozah

Shosholozah

Even though South Africa did not make it through, people here seem to be overly happy with the fact that their boys did excellent (beating the falling giant France in their last game), and that the World Cup turned out to be a great success. There has been extremely few negative incidents during the event, and both journalists and tourists alike seems to be more than happy with how it was arranged.

Even better is that this was not only a South African event - it was an AFRICAN event, and we read news from so many countries on the continent that the excitement had reached them as well. It seems like everybody was proud of Africa, creating a lot of hope and promise for the future. A major disappointment did strike everybody when Ghana was robbed from making history by Luis Suarez "hand of god" on overtime in the quarter-final - we also fell some tears for Africa at that point...One negative thing that we should mention is the fright of xenophobic attacks towards African foreigners (perhaps particularly Zimbabwean and Somalian migrants). Still remembering the horrifying events that took place in South Africa just a few years ago, where South Africans attacked migrants believing that they were taking their jobs, it was a chilling sense that something similar could happen again. We heard rumours as well before the World Cup started that foreigners living in townships was threatened with being attacked if they did not leave the country before the events finished. It was also discussed quite a lot in the newspapers here during the whole thing. Mike, a friend of ours from Congo, further told us that he was moving out of Khayamandi during the World Cup because of this, as he was afraid something bad might happen. However, despite all the threats, not much happened, and Mike told us now just a few days ago that he was moving back to his place in Khayamandi as it was perfectly safe. Another negative incident was of course the horrific terrorist bombings in Kampala, Uganda, where over 70 people was killed while watching the World Cup final (including an acquaintance of our friend Alex, a 26 year old guy from Holland). Al-Shabaab, a rebel-group in Somalia with close ties to Al-Quaida, took responsibility for the bombings. They are in my opinion not gaining anything but proving to be the true face of evil - targeting innocent people that has nothing to do with the problems they are facing in their own country. Their "excuse" or reasoning behind the bombings was because Uganda has troops (as part of the African Union) in Somalia...

However, nothing could kill the happiness of proving the critics wrong, with Africa hosting its first major event in a more than successful manner, and we hope that you back home did not only see many of the exciting games, but also that you got to see some of the extreme beauty that this country and continent represents! Hopefully a lot of you now want to come down and visit, and feel the magic first hand!

In the nearest future we'll write another blog about our trip to Zambia and Namibia during the break, and a lot of pics of both the World Cup madness and our fantastic trip will be posted asap.

Hope u are all fine and dandy, enjoying the summer back home! Miss you all loads!

Roger & Siri