Azzuri Land

Arriving in Milan still feeling some animosity towards anything Italian, it took all of one prosciutto sambo for everything to be forgiven. With the addition of the best gelatos, pizza, calzone, wines, cheese, pasta, meats ever, I was constantly full and completely convinced that the Italians have both the worlds best food and actors. We dodged the milan shopping and went to Florence to see the beautiful architecture of the 1200s duomo dec0rated with artworks by donatello etc


The magnificant Duomo of Florence.

















With only limited time and annoyed with the sepos we (including chunder, buldge, myself and a dirty english sounding brady) missed out on the art galleries and boarded the train to Sienna for the Palio festival. Despite Buldges warnings and descriptions, nothing could prepare you for intensity and excitment of the festival. The 3 lap bareback horse race is held around the beautiful town square bi annually, and contested between 10 of the 17 districts within Sienna. Once the race is off in running, the 200,000 plus crowd goes insane, and people would literally rip you off the fence to get a better few or to get to one of their fallen (and almost always severely injured) riders. At the completion of the race, you would think that the winning district had just won lotto ten times over, with people falling to their knees in tears of joy. Quite indescribable actually.

Our short trip to Italy was fittingly concluded in a small town outside of Modena, watching Italy vs Germany. In contrast to previous encounters with Italian fans, who have shown about as much passion for their country as a high school student would for their house at a swimming carnivale, these locals would go nuts if they managed to win a throw in. By the end of the match tables were being used as trampolines, and as all wogs seem to do, celebrations were continued late into the night by doing laps of the city in their cars and communicating with one another throught their horns.















The crowd building up in the town square of Sienna















The extatic winning jockey and crowd

Phrases from the World Cup

* mannshaft = team
* mien duescht is good ja? = commonly used pick up line
* dichmann = a shop
* the world cups comin home - song constantly....not that
* bowl spray = the result of too many kebabs
* dibbo, you're a fucking idiot = no explaining necessary
* you've got a one tonne ronaldo = who ate all the pies ronaldo?
* skippy the bush bbq = some friendly banter from the croats
* posh spice is a slapper
* you've got a tabble cloth on your flag = hesitantly sung to you've got the whole world in your hands to croation fans
* chunder's blowin chunks = his nickname has been revived

Guten Tag, where ist da football fever?

Considering the socceroos are long gone, and the world cup almost over, this blog seems almost irrelevant, but here goes it anyway.

The world cup was by far the greatest event/festival/tournament i've been to; run with german efficiency, fantastic football, and many fans with deep nationalistic passion creating an electrifying atmosphere. We did our best to add to the passion by dressing up in flags, face paint, thongs, aussie inflatable fingers and blow up skippy's for each of the matches, and did aussie proud with a nudie run through a munich fountain (mark you woulda loved it)!

Having scored tickets to all the aussie matches, we started off in kaiserslauten against Japan. Prior to the match the loverly small city was drowned in a sea of green and gold, and aussie tunes lead by ac/dc were drunkely belted out to warm up for the game. Needless to say after a fantastic 3-1 win (super timmy cahill) start to the tournament the after party went off. In the 2nd game against Brazil in munich we were a little unlucky not to have come away with a better result, but it was fantastic to see so many superstars in amongst some brazilians. Next game was the big one in Stuttgart against Croatia. The croatian fans were amazing and would deafen the stadium with their chants, creating an extremely tense and almost intimidating atmosphere. We took immense pleasure in seeing their stunned faces after the 2-2 draw, and set up the match against italy. Heading back to Aussie town (kaiserslauten) we went to the match with high hopes, and had it not been for the dodgy penalty I rekon we woulda made it to the semis.

In amongst all the football we also managed to check out a little of germany. We visited an ice cave in the alps, dropped into Salzburg to check out mozarts home, headed to Heidelburg for the day, had an all to brief walk through Dachau concentration camp and checked out King Ludwig 2´s impressive Neuschwanstein castle (which according to some informative americans was inspired by Disney Land).