Der change of plans

There’s nothing more enjoyable than arriving in a foreign city and getting an email entitled “Call me immediately—urgent!” As the sender of this email was also the person with whom I was going to stay in Berlin thanks to his employment by a reasonably well known internet concern, the worrisome missive set off all kinds of alarm bells. I imagined that aforementioned amigo had been tomahawk-chopped by a semi while absentmindedly crossing the street, or that German authorities had placed me on the ten most wanted hooligans list, subjecting me to instantaneous deportation, arrest, and/or extended torture tickling.

But twas not the case, as I learned over the course of a very expensive credit-card conversation with web guy in Frankfurt Hauptwache. On the contrary, he had acquired tickets to see the US play the Czechs that night in Gelsenkirchen, including an extra for me. All I had to do was make my way to above-referenced city and meet up with them at the Arena auf Schalke that evening and I’d be in attendance at the American WC opener rather than watching it on TV from location slightly more proximate to the game itself than my apartment.

And that, B.R., is how began yesterday, one of the strangest and almost certainly one of the longest days of my life. Rather than write one long post, I’ve decided instead to break it down into several topical subposts w/pix. Watch this space, y’all, and it’ll be like you were there with me for all of the going on three days I’ve been consecutively awake (and which have led me to employ foregoing awful syntax).

{Original time of writing: 2-5am, Tuesday June 13.}