About Time!

Hi to all of you I already met in the threads. I had to check one of my posts to see when I came here. May 2005! It seems longer than that since I first came crawling in help! Just imagine, if I can manage that many problems in the first year, what I can come up with the second year!
Thanks to whoever named this vBulletin. I love this format, colors, choices, people, threads, advice.
I checked my profile and continue to look optimistically at the birthdays hoping I will soon know how old I am, but hey! Believe me! I know I'm not 23!
I'm sitting in Soccer City, and right now it looks like this here.
When I'm not struggling with my computer (my son named it rofl), I write science fiction and I like to chat if the topic interests me. That's a tiny bit about me. There's more out there in the other forums.
Thanks to all of you and hi!
abri

 

maybe it means $ucker CITY?????

 

(the 2nd one is because I had to have 4 characters to post lol)

 

Good guess! I'm in Berlin and will change my profile after all the excitement is over. I've been to one game. The U.S. against Czech Republic. I could only stare and wonder how we got into the World Cup at all. But then they played against Italy and they're great! If we play like that again, we'll have a chance of going on, however, there's one game left in their group and it will matter how the other two teams do whether our team will go on or not.

The atmosphere is ... Wow! There are a lot of ethnic majorities (haha) in Berlin, including the Germans, and anytime one of these groups win, the main street is like a symphony of car horns for hours. The idea going into the World Cup was that everyone here should be able to see the games, and so they've done things like block off the stretch of street that goes through the big park here (sort of like Central Park) called Tiergarten between the Brandenburg Gate and the Siegesäule (a big gold angel on top of a pillar) and they put up big screens all along there and have a lot of food and drink stands. It takes up a big portion of the park and they inspect you thoroughly going in. You can take your bike in but not a bottle of make-up if it's glass. It's called the Fan-Mile.

The American team is staying in Hamburg where they have the Rote Meile (the red mile), but that's a different sort of attraction. When I saw the U.S., they played in the industrial area of Germany called Ruhrgebiet at a stadium in Gelsenkirchen. Beautiful stadium. The German team is in Potsdam, and the others are scattered all over the country. I think 10 cities are hosting games, only one in the former East, and I'm guessing that is in Leipzig. The media covers the games alternately. The two big channels alternate every other work day and a third station takes the weekends. There are either 3 games or 2 games shown every day at 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 p.m. or at 4:00 and 8:00. My husband works near where the stadium here in Berlin is and he said during the Germany/Ecuador game, it sounded like cannons going off every time there was a goal.

I have to admit, it's very exciting! In this first round, the teams are playing like mad men, so I can't imagine where it will go from here!

Just shut me up when I get too long-winded! Go U.S.A.! <waves little flag>
abri