27 June 2006

Year after next in Zürich (or Vienna)!


Well, it ended in tears. Big delicious chocolatey tears. It still seems silly to me to end 2 hours of soccer with penalty kicks, but I suppose the fussball doesn't lend itself to infinity quite as well as baseball does.

On the plus side, I made a new friend while watching the last gasp of Switzerland's World Cup hopes. One of the office maintenance guys and I now have a relatively lively rapport centered around soccer. He's from Albania, but for some reason supports Italy. He insisted yesterday that Italy "played nice" with the USA and let them draw. But, he did join me in rooting for Schweiz because he could see how worked up I was. And, when it was all over, he rather sagely pointed out that the Swiss still get to be Swiss, while the Ukrainians must continue to live in the Ukraine (Update: In retrospect, I remember that Seth made the very same observation earlier in the day... I was too blinded by grief to remember it until now. And no, Seth is not the Albanian maintenance guy at my office).

They're a young team, though, so look out for them when they're on their home turf in 2008's Euro Cup.

1 comment:

J said...

Albanians look to Italy for a lot of their cuisine and culture-many Italian restaurants on the east coast are in fact Albanian.

Italians however look to Albania for cheap labor and, well that's about it.