World Cup Mania

I’m not sure whether it could be described as a good or bad thing, but a bar exists within a block of my econ class that is showing all of the World Cup games. Nomads will be taking care of me for the next two weeks and will probably battle with my apartment for most amount of time spent in one location. I know at the very least I’m going to be parked there the rest of the day on Monday watching USA battle the Czech Republic followed by Italy thrashing Ghana, the other two teams in our pool.

Its so much easier to get drawn in with such an awesome environment to watch soccer in. Not only is there Hoegaarden & Beamish on tap its also in a great neighborhood and had a wonderfully varied crowd for noon on a Saturday. There were you typical west bank U of MN kids who probably wandered out of the bike co-op or Hard Times Café and then plenty of local international flavor as well. Trinidad & Tobago are playing in their first World Cup game v. Sweden & ended up getting a player ejected at the end of the first half. Even playing with 10 men they some how managed to hold off the Swedish assault to play them to a nil-nil tie. I guess I never directly ascertained the nationalities of the various locals in the bar but many of them were at least of some variety Caribbean, but a few probably actually from T&T. I’ll be curious to see what kind of crowd is drawn in on Monday for the USA game.

If stumbling across Nomads wasn’t bad enough I’ve also discovered an interesting creation of the BBC surrounding the World Cup, World Cup Daq. In essence they give you “10,000 pounds” to buy “shares” of teams in the World Cup and everything functions just like a normal stock market. There’s no actual money involved but its definitely still addicting. There are prizes for the people who do the best with their picks, but mostly I’m interested in seeing how everyone else values the teams. Its humorous, for instance, to note that England are trading at the highest and fully double that of Brazil even after England’s not so stellar win over Paraguay this morning. England are ranked # 2 in the tourney, but Brazil are still the hands down favorite to win. I just discovered it today though, so we’ll see how everything turns out by the end.

The World Cup. The best distraction I’ve found from trying to get a real job. Boo-yah.