Day Thirty-One: Team Oranje

Alright, so, first thing is first: Congratulations to Dave and Andrea! They got engaged in Cap Dáil, Nice, on the weekend! It's a very cute story but it's much better told in person so I won't get into it here. However, THIS is where they got engaged:


Not a bad location!

Tuesday was a leisurely day for me; I spent the morning working on some designs for Rob for his Design Thinking class. They have an assignment asking for a redesign of an audio guide for the Boijmans Museum. It's kind of a cool project, and I had no qualms with helping Rob "visualize" their redesign. I miss school projects sometimes.

Anyway, Rob then Skyped me to see if I was interested in coming to Rotterdam to see Holland vs. Finland in a European Championship Qualifying game at De Kuip Stadion. After a little discussion about how we'd buy tickets and so on, I agreed to meet Rob and three other people from his school at Rotterdam Blaak Station. We headed over to the stadium as early as we could and ran into a bunch of team Oranje supporters along the way (and more than a couple white-and-blue-clad Fins as well). We bought the tickets with surprising ease, and found a place to chow down some dinner.



Armed with our tickets and ready for a show to remember, we climbed up the 6 flights of stairs along with some 30,000 other Football enthusiasts into the De Kuip Stadion. And man was it impressive! I mean, I love the colour orange, and it was EVERYWHERE. And everyone was so jazzed. I've only ever been to one other sporting event in my life and that was a woman's soccer game at the Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto. It was Canada vs. USA, and we got nailed 4-0. And it was in NO WAY as exciting as this game.

I mean, the game itself was almost secondary. Of course it was cool to watch the Dutch national team play in Holland; how many times would we get that chance again? But the FANS... it was like being in a concert with die-hard fans that know all the words to every song... We were sitting behind the goal in the top row, and all the way around was a sea of Orange, accept for across the field exactly opposite to us. White and Blue Finland fans were chanting and singing and heckling the whole of the stadium, cheering on their team (even though they lost). Honestly, I like Finland as much as the next person; in fact, probably more. Some of my favourite music comes out of that country (Nightwish, HIM, Apocolyptica, Darude, to name a few), it's the home of the Air Guitar World Championships (this past August, Canadian Cole “Johnny Utah” Manson won third place, yay Canada!) and Nokia (that's right, those phones are made in Finland, man). And their capital city is Helsinki, which is probably one of the coolest names for any city that I know of, in my opinion. But let's face it: There was no way they were going to win against Holland.

That being said, they put up a decent fight (a 2-1 game is not exactly a trouncing) but the Dutch prevailed. Rob managed to catch the second Dutch goal on his IPhone. Check it, and for the record, the REALLY loud yelling guy was not Rob, it was totally someone else in the crowd.



As you can see by the video, it was pretty sweet being there. I can't even imagine what it must've been like at the World Cup games... wow.

We got back home and Jos and Anne had a little surprise for us. Rob and I were feeling a little sad that we didn't end up buying any team Holland paraphernalia to show our support, but when we got home we found two World Cup jerseys on our bed. Thanks Jos and Anne! Now we HAVE to go see Holland vs. Sweeden in October!

Oh, and by the way, our new jerseys perfectly match both my both awesome pair of glasses, and my AWESOMER pair of slippers that I bought in Delft a few weeks ago. that's right, I'm just that cool. In case it's hard to tell, those are plush, orange klompen slippers. Anyway, I'm off to sleep because we're off to Germany tomorrow afternoon. Not taking my laptop, so I'll write on Monday.