Big Day Today

It is extremely difficult to keep up with American sports over here in Europe. Most of the games, whether they be Hockey, Football, Baseball, etc. tend to happen when I'm already asleep (4pm EST is 10pm Berlin time), so the most I can do is often wake up the next morning, hop on ESPN.com and check scores. I hadn't watched an NFL game or anything else for ages and living in a place where Soccer rules supreme, I tend to just do as the Romans do. Give up any efforts and just show up on a saturday and watch some Footie.

Naturally, the time I'm gone and away from the States is the time that my favorite NFL team, the New York Jets, decides to make a run and is now one game away from the Super Bowl. Tonight, they'll play the Indianapolis Colts in Indy in the AFC Championship Game.

For the few of you who don't follow Football, and probably for my European friends who especially don't. The Jets are most often the lovable losers of the NFL. The Chicago Cubs of the NFL. They haven't won the Championship since 1968. There is no real reason to hate them. (Unless you're a Miami or New England fan) The Jets are often mediocre more often than not. And when they are good, they tend to blow it. Leaving their fans heartbroken for getting their hopes up for what in is essentially nothing.

I grew up learning this firsthand, watching the Jets go from periods of utter shit (in 96', they won 1 game) to periods of greatness, only to blow it (1998 AFC Championship, Doug Brien's missed FGs against Pittsburgh) I've become so used to it, and used to get so angry at it, that I literally almost don't care anymore.

That said, I'm pretty stoked they're in. Literally no one expected them to be there, and still no one expects them to win. Yet they keep winning. They have the cockiest SOB of a coach I've ever seen. And the players play with supreme confidence. For entertainment's sake, I hope they kick the bejesus out of the Colts, but if they don't it'll be a good season nonetheless.

J-E-T-S JETS! JETS! JETS!

Sleeping Awake

Today's entry takes us back to the friendly confines of Berlin. I returned from the States bearing gifts and cheap wines last sunday.

It was a great trip, to say the least. Since I left for Europe in October 08', I hadn't really seen much of my family. I'd been back once, in August for 10 days. Beyond that, both my sister and mother had made separate trips to see me last spring. When you're the sole member of the family out and aboot for a lengthy period of time, you can't help but feel like your an outsider on the group looking in.

Over the last year, my 5 year old niece has started Kindergarden, my brother has gotten remarried (to a wonderful woman I might add) and my new nephew, Reed Thomas Stanton, was born on Dec. 4th. What these events all have in common is that I wasn't present for any of them. The price I pay for living abroad, I suppose. So as you can imagine, being home for 3 weeks was a great chance for me to feel like one of the family again. I got to hang out, was taken to just about every restaurant I had missed in the last year (my stomach is still recovering), and had a great christmas. It wasn't all fun, as after Christmas, my final two weeks were consumed by graduate school applications. Luckily, I'm finished and can't sit back and relax, at least for a week (on to Fellowship applications!)

I had originally planned on being back in Berlin on January 6th, but an unexpected turn of events caused me to find myself in Orlando that day instead. I spent a week with Noel and her family, which gave me another week to relax and for once, enjoy some warm weather. I got to see high school friends I hadn't seen in years, as well as a few college buddies, Austin, who just so happen to be in Kissimmee for a Football tournament, and Joey, who just so happened to be with Austin, and drunk, which makes Joey all the more fun to hang out with. Add a zipline obstacle course that I did with Noel and he family at a State Park and it was a pretty damn good trip.

My return trip to Berlin ended up being on the 16th at noon, with a flight to JFK and about a 5 hour layover before flying on to Berlin to arrive at 10am Sunday.

Overnight Flights. Son of a bitch!

For those of you who've experienced jet lag flying to Europe, you understand the vital importance of sleeping on an overnight flight. For those of you who haven't, let me explain.

When flying international flights, you are always going to have it easier flying East to West than West to East. Going from Berlin to Detroit, for example, is never a problem. If I'm leaving Berlin, and say 9am for a flight and arriving in Detroit at 4pm, even though the flight has been 8 hours and I haven't slept a wink, the fact that it will still be nightfall by the time you reach there gives you solace that you're exhausted self will simply just fall asleep at a normal hour.

Flying West to East, however, is a bastard.

I don't sleep.....at all...on international flights. Having a 6'4' frame cramed into a tiny space for 8 hours isn't going to convince my body it's snooze time. So I get stuck being awake the entire time, watching terrible in-flight movies which always seem to be romantic comedies (in this case, "Love Happens", and "He's Just Not That Into You", both utterly garbage)

In my case, my overnight flight landed in Berlin at 11am Sunday. Which means from 10am Saturday Morning till 10am Sunday morning (berlin time), I hadn't slept at all. Common sense tells you that if you get home from something like this, best thing to do is probably just stay up. It's 11 already. Stay up and become so tired that when normal sleeping time rolls around, you're ready to pass out.

Instead, I fell asleep at 1:30pm and woke up at 8:30pm. Doh'!

My sleep hasn't been the same since. In the last 5 days, I have had sleepless nights in 3 of them. The 4th I slept a grand total of 3 hours and the fifth I somehow fell asleep at 3am and woke up at 3pm. Going through this puts your mind and body through hell, where I've had neither the energy to do anything, nor the state of mind to get anything finished. I completed and submitted academic essays for fellowships, and I barely remember doing it. Let's just hope Subconscious Josh is as good on the type as his better half.

But it feels good to be home, and for now, home is Berlin.

Cheers.

Charles De Gaulle Airport: Where Common Sense Goes to Die

Im finally back home in Michigan after what I could only describe as the worst flying experience I have ever had. Just.....sickening how bad it was.

We had a Thursday morning flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris scheduled to take off at 9:55, which we would then have a two hour layover before flying directly to Detroit from Paris at 1:55. To start off this disaster of abad trip, we find out at midnight the night before that the flight from Berlin to Paris was cancelled. Barely any notice other than an email simply stating "your itinerary's changed; call us". After some finanguling, we managed to get ourselves onto a 6:55 flight to Paris. Of course, for international flights like that, if your flight is leaving in at 6:55, that means its probably a good idea to get there 2 hours before hand. Great. We have to be there at 5am, which means I'm waking up at 4am.

12am-4am: No sleep for Josh.

We took a Taxi over to Flughafen Tegel at 5 and managed to get on the first flight with no problems.

When we arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport, our flight was still scheduled to leave on time. We relaxed a bit, grabbed a coffee and waited. For such a new and modern airport like Charles de Gaulle, it was incredibly cold inside. You could even feel the wind breezing through the terminals. I literally froze my ass off waiting for our flight to come.

We managed to board the flight at 2. Little did I know that I would be sitting on that plane for 4 hours before we took off.

Why 4 hours? Because the officials at the Air France decided it was important to wait the first two hours for the passengers who were supposed to make our flight but hadn't gotten into the airport yet. You know, all TWENTY FIVE of them. Naturally, none of these people actually showed up. I always thought that it was your job to get to your flight on time, and if it wasn't, then you were SOL. So because we had to wait for all of these people, not only would we be late, but people who had made the flight on time would now miss their connecting flights in Detroit. Great job boys.

So finally, they close the doors and pull out of the gate. Great, where taking off right? Not so fast. The plane has to de-ice. So we ANOTHER two hours just to de-ice the plane. We finally took off at 6pm, a mere 4 hours after we were supposed to.

The delays, of course, were blamed on the "snowstorm" that had rolled into Paris.

I have lived in Michigan most of my life, and my definition of a snowstorm is something dropping nearly 15-21 inches of snow. This French "Snowstorm" dropped what amounted to a quarter of an inch of snow. So a quarter of an inch of snow cancelled flights, delayed others, and made my life a living hell for one day.

I'm glad I'm finally home. I've got no sleep between 10am Wednesday (Berlin time) got to bed on Thursday night at 11pm Michigan time (5am Berlin time), which is probably why I feel like this blog post isn't flowing at all. Maybe when I've slept enough I can write something witty and coherent. But for now, I'll just be glad to be home.

Hello, US of A. Good to see you again.

Get Off Tiger already! Your mom just did!

When I was growing up, I always held a very high opinion of reporters and journalists. My parents, from as far back as 6, always had me reading newspapers and watching the nightly news. While many other kids my age were watching cartoons or playing Super Mario, I more than likely was watching Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and the like. It explains why today, I tend to know so much about what's going on in the world, much to the astonishment and confusion of others (Did you know an iceberg is on a collision course with Australia?)

Anyways, at that age, Journalists were the gold standard. I trusted them. They were on TV, so they must be respectable, right? Possibly even heroes.

Of course, at that age, I also believed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were heroes. Silly Josh.

Today, I know better. The media by and large, is a complete joke, more in line with the William Randolph Hearst-era of "Yellow Journalism" than any respectable journalism. The "innovation" of 24 hour news in the U.S. has, I think, essentially turned major news outlets like NBC, CBS, Fox News, and CNN into Tabloid Media. No different in alot of ways than The National Enquirer. In today's media world, stories about Britney Spear's shaving her head and smashing a car with an umbrella get more coverage than the two wars and crap economy were currently dealing with. Although I will say Britney seems to have a natural swing. Perhaps Cricket is in her future.

The reason I bring this all up, of course, is that I sit here and chuckle at the Tiger Woods debacle that is unfolding before our very eyes. So big in fact that it is making top headlines in Germany, where I'm sure Golf ranks somewhere between Rock-Skipping and Midget-Hurling in terms of being a followed sport.

Tiger Wood's face is on every newspaper, magazine, tv show, and internet page from here to Bangkok. Everything (and everyone) he's done over the past 2 weeks has made headlines. So right now, Im going to go ahead and say this:

I completely support Tiger Woods.

Why? Why would I support someone who's cheated on his wife with, at last count, 10 women? Who did it while having two kids, one of which is 10 months old?

It's simple, really. It's none of our business.

Now before I get into it a bit, let me first say that Tiger Woods is a god damn idiot. I don't understand people who cheat on their significant others. It's pretty low. It ruins lives. If you're that unhappy, how hard is it to simply get a divorce or break up with them? Naturally, there are other reasons for people to cheat beyond unhappiness. Thinking you're hot shit and can get away with it is one. One in which it sounds like Tiger has used as his excuse.

But, tell me this? Why exactly is this any of our business? The media has reported incessantly about this. How many other people have had marriage infidelity? Why is it so damn important?

Here we are, as a nation, getting out of arguably the most controversial war since Vietnam (Iraq), escalating another one in Afghanistan (Ask the Russians how that went for them) and enduring perhaps the worst recession the 21st century will ever see. On top of all of these, 20,000 delegates are meeting in Copenhagen at the moment, struggling perhaps in vain to come up with an agreement that will make an attempt to put a curb on greenhouse gases which are causing the entire planet's climate to radically change (another topic for another time). All of this is happening, and all we can talk about is Tiger Woods?

Get a life, people.

Tiger Woods is guilty of one thing. Possibly destroying his family. That's it. Not your family. Not my family, and not the family of millions of others. Now, because of constant media scrutiny, he's had corporate sponsors drop him, his kids and wife are now under more scrutiny than ever, and he's been essentially forced to stay away from the game that makes his living. Did he bring it on himself? Yes. Does it need to go to this far? Certainly not.

What laws has he broken? Is it against the law to cheat on your wife? No, it isn't. The only person he needs to answer to is his wife, not the media. He doesn't owe the media everything. I was on Yahoo! Sports the other day and came across a headline from a Yahoo 'Columnist" saying "Tiger Woods needs to open up and discuss his infidelity". It made me laugh. Really? Why? Because if he doesn't, you won't have anything to write about?

For all the negative comments you hear about Tiger from the media, let me show you something that gets ignored from just about everyone. Below is a list, courtesy of Wikipedia of the number of charities Tiger has either founded or is currently involved in.

-Tiger Woods Foundation
-In the City Golf Clinics and Festivals
-Tiger Woods Learning Center.
-Tiger Jam
-Chevron World Challenge
-Tiger Woods Foundation National Junior Golf Team

That is 6 different charities and events. Most athletes don't even have one. Woods has done much to give back to the community and help young, underpriviledged people, yet the media focuses on how evil he is because he cheated on his wife.

Coincide how he's treated and what he's done (charity-wise) with the NFL:

"According to Benedict and Yaeger, 21 percent of NFL players -- more than one in five -- have been charged with at least one serious crime, including two murder arrests, seven rape charges, 45 counts of domestic violence and 42 charges of assault and battery."


See a double standard? Where's the media focus on this?


What's the moral of my story. People aren't perfect. People make stupid decisions. The heroes of our country, the JFK's, FDR's, George Washington's and Martin Luther King's, weren't perfect. They had their flaws. Some of them larger than others. But they are remembered for the good that they did and the acceptance that people can be respected, even if they have personal flaws. Hopefully, Tiger learns his lesson. Hopefully, the media can focus on more pressing issues than a man's infidelity.

Although, I have to admit. It does make for a good joke or two.

"What's the Difference between a car and a golf ball? Tiger can drive a ball 400 yards...."

USA vs. England: Loser has to claim Madonna as their own

I'll have to keep this one brief. Watched the World Cup draw today with nervous anticipation. The U.S. could not have asked for a better draw. Before the draw began, all I could think about is the 2006 cup, where we drew Italy, Czech Republic and Ghana. Group of Death and a 1st round exit ensued.

Would it be the same in 2010. Fortunately not. The U.S. got paired with England, Slovenia, and Algeria. Not a bad group. Not a bad group at all.

What are our chances? Decent. At least to make it out of the group stage. Slovenia and Algeria are very winnable. Two wins the U.S. will more than likely need to advance.

As far as England? We'll see. It depends on what U.S. team shows up. The side that shocked Spain and came within 20 minutes of beating Brazil, or the side that lost 5-0 to Mexico. (In all fairness, that was our B-squad)

The Brits are already invoking the spirit of 1966. The Yanks are already invoking the spirit of 1950. Maybe I need to throw on a Continental Army uniform and invoke the spirit of 1776.

Finally, whose decision was it to have Charlize Theron host? I love Charlize Theron. Great actress. Absolutely stunning. But having her host a football draw is like getting Rod Blagojevich to teach a class on political ethics. She looked absolutely clueless up there. More cringe-worthy moments than I care to mention.

That was one big dumb blonde joke waiting to happen.

Denmark: It isn't a suburb of Sweden

"You're just a suburb of Sweden!"

That was the chant yelled out by about 20 or so U.S. fans who made the trek to the city of Aarhus to see the U.S. Men's National Soccer Team take on Denmark in an international friendly. Funny enough to prompt a chuckle? Perhaps. Original? Probably not. Being clever and original when it comes to songs and chants isn't a strongpoint for Americans, but yet again, Football isn't exactly our sport either.

I am fortunate enough to have met some great people while I've been in Berlin. A few of them had been planning on attending the match for weeks. I, on the other hand, had not been planning on going at all. A poor (literally) soul with about .16 euro cents to his name who couldn't afford to go.

Of course, said great friends decided it would be a travesty on the level with if I didn't go, and as a birthday present, bought me a ticket as well as taking care of my housing and transportation. For that, I'm definitely grateful, as it would turn out to be one of the craziest nights I've had here in Europe.

We left for Denmark the day of the game, with 7 guys crammed in a van. Beside me were a few buddies from the ICD, (Colin and Ben). A few buddies from Hairy Mary's, (Travis and Morton), and a two guys who I vaguely knew. (Tim and Rob) Also accompanying us on the trip were 63 mutual friends who went by the collective name "Berliner Pilsner".

The ride over was great. We joked around. Drank some beers.(not the driver)and bullshitted about what Danish girls must be like. Of the group, Morton was the only Dane (despite the deceiving British accent) surrounded by 6 other obnoxious Americans.

We arrived at Aarhus at about 6:30, drank some more beers and stumbled our way to the game, where we celebrated our arrival at the stadium by....drinking more beer. We stood in an entirely empty Away section, with about 14 other U.S. fans making the trip, along with 2 possibly deranged Danish fans who were rooting for the U.S. for no other reason other than that Benny Feilhaber played for the Aarhus club. These guys seemed to already be 8 beers deep by the time we met them, so for all I know, they probably thought magic elephants were parading around the field.

The U.S. started the game strong, scoring a nifty goal on a mistake by the Danish keeper in the 27th minute. Jeff Cunningham, who had just been called to the U.S. squad to possibly replace Charlie Davies, got the goal. Ironically enough, the game aired live on ESPN and when Cunningham scored, cameras immediately fixed on us, which you can see below. (I'm with the black flat cap at the :30 mark)




The U.S. went into the half at 1-0, and we were all happy...and drunk.


Of course, by the second half, things fell apart, as they often do for the U.S. side. 3 quick goals by Denmark pretty much nullified whatever good play had come out of the first half, and at one point, you started to wonder whether the U.S. team forgot they were playing a game at all. A complete lackluster effort through most of the second half. Although Edgar Castillo did make it into the game.

In the end, was a 3-1 defeat. Down, but not out. We all left and decided to hit up what we all thought must certainly had to be a crazy downtown Aarhus nightlife. I mean small town, the Danish, sheer insanity right?

An hour later, we stood outside one of the two open bars in the entire city, ironically called Sherlock Holmes because I'm sure it would have even taken Holmes hours to find a clue as to why the nightlife in this town was nearly non-existent.

We walked in and after a few hours and several beers were enjoying ourselves and partaking in horrible renditions of karaoke songs like "Piano Man". The single guys in our group did their best to hit on just about everything that moved, and the relationship guys just watched, laughed, and got more drunk.

At some point, I noticed that most of my friends had left the bar, so I went to walk outside to see where they were. Outside, I found Ben and Colin talking to someone who I didn't even bother to look at.

Me: "Hey, guy's what you up to?"

Ben: "Hey man, just talking to Frankie Hedjuk here"

Me: "Stop the bullsh....hey, you're Frankie Heyduk"

The man they were talking to was Frankie Heyduk, current left back for both the Columbus Crew and U.S. national team.

Holy shit.

It turns out that the U.S. national team decided they wanted to enjoy the Aarhus nightlife, just like us. And, much like us, they discovered it came down to 2 open bars.

As I started talking to Heyduk, I look over and see other players start making their way to the bar. Jozy Altidore, Ricardo Clark, Jeff Cunningham, Carlos Bocanegra. About a half hour later, I am standing in the bar, having a beer while the ENTIRE U.S. team is in the bar, singing Karoake (to sum up their singing: great on the field terrible on the mic), getting drunk, and having every single Danish girl in Aarhus hitting on them.

My condolences to my single friends. Whatever game they had at their disposal that night was torched the minute the team walked through those doors.

I got the chance to chat with quite a few of them. Heyduk is probably about the most laid back guy on the team. Nice guy. I've heard he's an avid surfer and he's definitely got that surfer style to him. Also managed to have a few conversations with both Jeff Cunningham and Carlos Bocanegra. Both were polite and very gracious. Cunningham in particular. I think he was still beaming over scoring a goal on his call-up. So we ended up chatting for about 10 minutes about things like the game, his season in MLS, and what kind of free shit he gets hooked up with.

Eventually, we stumbled home around 6:30, only to wake up at 9:30 to get back home. A good nap on the bus and a McDonald's Mexican Burger value meal made up for the nausea I felt for much of the morning.

So..in closing, I went from not expecting to attend the game at all, to watching the game and drinking with the U.S. team afterwards. Not a bad gig. My luck in partying with celebrities apparently knows no bounds:

-Have an NFL Quarterback crash on your couch (Check)
-Drink with the entire U.S. National Soccer team (Check).

Who knows. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to run into Obama and we can have a beer summit together.

Krakow Update

So updating you on what I had mentioned about Krakow being mildly offensive. Here's the transportation schedule for a tour guide company for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps...which back then, the primary way to get there was...um...by train.