World Cup Fever!

The World Cup in Germany has come and gone but many of the memories remain - there are still German flags on some cars, souvenir shops trying to clear their world cup souvenir stock, and the poster of the world cup draw is still on the office wall. For me, the world cup meant lots of Aussie visitors since our team qualified for this world cup, and therefore a lot more excitement than usual.

This also brought many friends from my high school (North Sydney Boys) over here, some that I have not spoken to for almost 9 years. It was fantastic to see them and hear their stories. Michael Wrathall stayed with me for a few days and it was great to have another Aussie to watch the matches with.

The second highlight was rather unplanned. I managed to get a ticket for the Australia vs. Italy match in the second round! My friends Hong and Marlene had just arrived in Germany after Australia's qualification by beating Croatia, and they called me to say that there were tickets on sale in Stuttgart the next day. Of course, I went and queued up, and we succeeded in purchasing our tickets, 2 days before the match! The match was held in Kaiserslautern, about 5 hours drive away from Munich. The match was so close - and then came to heartbreaking moment of the Italian dive, which was, of course, discussed on much of our trip home in the car. And look who we saw a few seats further along - Ken Sutcliffe.

After that I was supporting the German team and everybody who played against Italy. And you all know how it ended ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iasi, Romania

Image
In April 2008 I was sent to Iasi, Romania for one week, in order to work more closely together with our colleagues at that site. There is also offices of Continental there, although it is very much a developing location and as such the scale is completely different to what we had in Germany. As you can see, the office block is basically a 3 storey portable. Most of the workers are recent graduates out of the univerity in Iasi. Actually, I believe that is one of the attractions of setting up an office in Iasi - a company like Continental would attract a lot of interest from the uni graduates there, as it would be one of the few options to stay at home and have a technical engineering career. Iasi is actually quite a small city, but it appears much smaller if you only consider the airport. It is an international airport because it has ONE daily flight back to Vienna. Work aside, we had a little time on some of the weeknights to look around the city and experience a bit of Romanian cultu...
Read more

Formula Student Germany

Image
The weekend after the Formula 1 race at the Hockenheimring, another motorsport event was held there which interested me. This was the inaugural Formula Student event in Germany, equivalent to the Formula SAE competition in Australia. Basically, students design and race small cars in a once a year event. My old team from UNSW was invited here, so I had to go and cheer them on! Note, that is NOT how Germans usually spell Sydney. The quality of the competition was fantastic, there were so many technical innovations considering that this is the first German competition. Beautifully made carbon fibre monocoques, a CVT, carbon fibre steering wheels with digital readouts, well styled bodywork, and what appears to be lots of sponsorship money. The winning team from Austria, TU Graz, had a redbull logo on the front of their car - just like the Formula 1 team! The UNSW team did an excellent job, and made it to the design final, which consisted of the 6 most well designed cars. When the endurance...
Read more

Koenigsee

Image
When my high school friend, Dzung Vo, said that he is coming to Munich with his new high spec camera, we decided that we would go to Koenigsee for the weekend. I learnt a few things from him about photography, and I took as many photos as my battery will allow. Which turned out to be about 210. I have posted a few photos here. You can find more on this Flickr set page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lokmanho/sets/72157594348965719/ On the Saturday we took the last electric boat cruise over the lake to St. Bartholomew, where there is a church, a hunting lodge of King Ludwig I, and an ice formation called the ice chapel (which I tried to reach but had to turn back due to shortage of light). When we arrived, we found out that the last boat trip back left almost immediately! Fortunately, we met another group on our boat that had a special booking to leave at 8:30 p.m. after dinner, and we had dinner and travelled back with them. They were quite an international group, and I wondered what kin...
Read more