Day 9 (June 16th)

As a transition from Berlin to Kaiserslautern and to support Mexico, we go to Hanover for a day. The first of the raining weather showed up today, up to this point it had always been sunny and dry (but high humidity). We got thunderstorms early in Berlin, but no real rain after that. But this isn’t a game day, so that worked out fine.
Originally, we were hoping for tickets to see Mexico and Angola in Hanover, but we didn’t have any. There were more people trying to get tickets there than anywhere else we had been.
Due to the tight schedule, Gwen, Daniel and I went to a local restaurant to eat and watch the first game on TV - no, Gwen doesn't really have a gambling problem Wow, what a spanking Serbia & Montenegro got by Argentina.
We headed to the Fan Fest to meet up with Ivan & Dean. There was the threat of rain, but really just some sprinkles. It was a nice set-up as well but smaller of course than Berlin was. The Holland and Ivory Coast game was pretty good and I was definitely in the minority cheering for the Netherlands.
The place was pretty crowded, or so we thought until the Mexico/Angola game. The Mexican supporters were out in full force as we had expected. The place was wall to wall people.
We meet a lot of nice people (including some ex-pats from the States or Mexico) – Ivan’s Spanish certainly came in handy. We also met some interesting characters including a Mexico guy with a German sign “advertising” that he was looking for a woman to go back to Mexico with him. Mexico really didn’t play very well, they were lucky they were playing Angola and not someone like the Czechs.
But they will have to play well against Portugal now to get through. Towards the game as Angola camped in for the tie and the game got a bit slow, some of the women fans (at least 2) felt compelled to put on their own show for the crowd (sorry, g-rated pictures only here).