All Italians are faggots

Ok, maybe not 100% of them but at least 98%.

Rick flew in so we picked him up at the airport, brought him back to the apartment to set his stuff down, catch his breath and then promptly left for Mannheim. The trip was pretty cool but actually finding your way around a city where the streets have no names sucks (I can only guess U2 was talking about Mannheim when they wrote their song…). We finally find the place we were looking for and were pleasantly surprised by the accommodations… until we noticed that the bathroom door was see-through. What the fuck? If one of us had to crap, we had to warn the others so they wouldn’t wander by and catch an eyeful of someone pinching a loaf. When we showered, we had to give a warning to stay on the other side of the room so we would catch an eyeful of hairy man-ass. Stupid see-through doors.

The bonus of this sort of European openness was the (easy access to) pornography though. For anyone that hasn’t been to Germany – and this is probably valid for all of Europe – there are late night phone sex ads where the women are topless and, sometimes, bottomless. The interesting thing about this is that the nakedness on the television kind of precludes the calling of the phone sex number. I mean, who would call a phone sex line when the commercial had naked chicks in it anyway? If you’re that hard up, why not just beat off to the commercial and save the money? Nevertheless, we flipped past the phone sex ads and got to some hard stuff. There it was, big as shit, a ginormous dong on the telly and some hooker sucking it like it was her last meal. We got a good laugh out of that and changed the channel. Hard core ass fucking. That’s what greeted us. I thought to myself, “this is unusual” but chalked it up to being in Europe.

The last laugh was on us though, as when we went to check out, the lady at the counter charged us for the porno that we thought was free. It turns out that there was a channel that asked you to input your room number. Well, Bryan did that thinking nothing of it but what was really happening was we were ordering all the pay-per-view channels including all the hard core porn. D’oh…

I should mention that we did go to Kaiserslautern for a few hours after setting our stuff down in Mannheim. We attend the yanks-abroad.com party and cheered against Mexico during their game versus Angola. It was a great time.

In any event, we headed back to Kaiserslautern the next morning to attend the game. We settled our stuff into lockers, got geared up in our best outfits and headed off to the Irish bar to meet Aaron and some other folks. I should also point out that I had another anti-American encounter at the train station. Some random drunk, piece of shit Italian walked up to me with an American flag draped over his shoulders. When he saw us, he pulled the flag up and started chanting, “pezzo di merda.” Well, if you know anything about me, you know how well that was received. I was ready to lay some knuckles into his grill when the rational part of me won and after thinking that I might cost myself a chance to attend what will go down as one of the grittiest performances by any American team ever. So… I had to be content to remind him that I had all my teeth while his dental hygiene was seriously lacking…

After that, however, we did meet up with Aaron and had a few beers. We also randomly met an Air Force chick from Tucson and had some drinks with her and her friend too.

Several beers later and it was time to head off to the stadium. Despite our hike for what seemed like hours (alleviated by a nice Magnum Classic ice cream bar), we finally go to the stadium and found our seats. The seats weren’t as cool as the ones in Gelsenkirchen but they were more than adequate. The view of the field was clear and, again, allowed one to see all the plays as they developed. Soccer live is something that really needs to be experienced at the international level.

For anyone that saw the game though, I don’t want to sound like a poor sport, so lets just say this: the ref at this game was suspended and prevented from working in the 2002 Cup for “irregularities” and had a history with a questionable call against the U.S. in a previous game.

You know what, fuck not wanting to sound like a poor sport, fuck the Uruguayan referee and fuck the whole Italian team. Brian McBride required three stitches to close the wound on his face but he got up of his own accord, walked to the sideline, received treatment, changed his shirt and then got back on the field. Italians, however, feel that any body contact is akin to death. They sit there and roll around like a bunch of little faggots but suddenly they’re OK after the foul is called. Fuck Italy, fuck them up their stupid asses. We had a victory stolen from us yesterday and that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. Still though, there is some relief to be found in the fact that we are, technically, still alive and regardless of what happens from here on out, the U.S. played their asses off and atoned for the opening game. There are many here, and elsewhere, saying that this was the best game of the World Cup so far. And should the U.S. manage to advance out of this group, this game will go down in lore.

And I was there.