The flight went smoother than anticipated. Eight and a half hours on a plane may not be quite as bad as I remember. I only managed one movie, a bunch of reading, and four plus hours of very interrupted sleep. Upon arrival to my destination, jet lag had yet to set in. I was tired but not terribly so.
A quick bite to eat at the hotel bar and a mediocre german beer and then back to the room to try and catch an hour or two of sleep before I needed to go back to the bar to watch USA v Portugal. Sleep wasn't that good but but I got a little before the game. The game also wasn't that good. If you didn't watch it, first off, shame on you. Second off, US Defense, can you please for one world cup finally get your $#!% together? You handed Portugal a free goal in less than 10 minutes, then your offense brought you back to life and to the lead before Portugal earned their second goal. It was a fun game to watch at least.
The next morning I managed to sleep 'till 10:00, which was good since I didn't get to bed until 2am and hadn't had any real sleep in the past 48hrs; jet lagged mostly kicked. After a quick train ride out to the conference center to do the little amount of set up work required, my cohorts and I headed back to town, dropped stuff off at the hotel then headed toward the downtowny area to see if we could find some good food and drink and a good place to watch Holland beat up on ???. 
Dinner was where we had our first truly German experience. No trip to Germany is complete until two things happen. One, you drink out of a massive beer mug and get drunk off a single beer. Two, you get a ginormous plate of meat; just meat. So I was happy to seee one of the top options on the menu where we settled to eat. Look at the Reisenhaxe. Haxe is a dish in Germany that is always good for an amusing laugh. It basically means large hunk of meat on the bone. I knew what this was going to be so I passed on it since I wasn't quite ready to bring this trip to complete fruition just yet. We did get to see another person; a man probably 5'10", 160lbs order and consume this spectacle. It was a pork leg nearly the size of my head and I don't know how he put it all down, but zee Germans are made of something impressive I must admit.After dinner we hit up a Soccer viewing area near our hotel that looked like a good place to watch the game. And apparently there are a lot of Croatians in the area because this was a Croatian party and I'm not all that certain we were invited. We didn't stay to the end of the game and that may have been for the best since they lost 3-1 to Mexico. I was feeling no need to go rioting through the streets so I was happy about it.
A good start to the week and more to come I'm sure. I just hope I have enough time to write about the adventures!
Have fun Tim!
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