Yay For The *^&%^*@# Soccer

This soccer thing is starting imminently (tomorrow, I believe) and everyone's all a-tizzy about it. Shops all over the place have flags and soccer balls in their windows, people are flying flags from their cars, all sorts of merchandise is being hocked everywhere you look, and we people with blogs are complaining up a storm.

Much as I have absolutely no interest in any forms of sport at all, I'm kinda looking forward to the whole shebang. All my hazy memories of the Sydney olympics revolve around how much better it was than we all expected, and how everything worked so well and people were happy and we all watched The Dream on telly and I successfully managed to avoid having anything to do with sport (apart from the time when my sister and I went kayaking and someone yelled "go for gold!" at us, which I enjoyed enormously). That being the only sporting event I have ever been even remotely associated with, I'm assuming, possibly naively, that this will be the same. I think possibly the fact that I don't live in a city where games are being played is a bit of an advantage, because it seems that everyone who does is feeling bitter about the unavoidable disruption that sqillions of pesky fans descending like locusts will inevitably cause.

Meanwhile, something seems to be going on with the train line between here and Lausanne, with the result that all of the decent trains today were cancelled and I spent an hour longer than usual waiting in the freezing (really, I could see my breath, even at noon. It was allegedly about 15 degrees, but my fingers started turning purple) for stupid crowded, slow trains to arrive. On one of the trains, while we were in the throes of stopping for 15 minutes in a tunnel, a dude with a guitar tried to entertain everyone by singing some song about how it sucks to be trapped on a train in a tunnel, and then some woman hurled abuse at him for disturbing her peace. Actually it was all in french so I could be a bit confused about what was actually said, but I'd like to think I'm not. Anyway, those train people might want to work on repairing that before tomorrow, because squillions of cancelled trains, squillions of tourists who don't really know where they're going, and squillions of cranky locals is not necessarily a good combination.

I'm looking forward to it enormously. I do like a good whine.