Rotterdam
So we arrived in Rotterdam yesterday on a comfortable Veuling flight from Madid to Amsterdam Schiphol airport and picked up CK at the airport before jumping a train down to Rotterdam. After a brief walking tour of the city (note for future, write down the address and directions to the hotel Paul!), we got our junk together and headed into the centrum for a few warm-up beers with the rest of the Aussies then on to the game... the stadium was crazy. After taking a very very very packed tram to the stadium - both Aussies and Dutch singing at full flight along the way, we found our ticket pick-up point and maybe one or two specks of green and gold in an absolute sea of orange!
These dutch are crazy!! It is the morning (well, afternoon) after the game.. Socceroo's drew 1-1 with Holland and this little town went berserk! We were probbaly lucky to escape with the draw, Schwartzers work in goal saved our bums more than a few times! The Aussies were of course a loud and entertaining mob. We had a small slice of a very orange stadium - I think it was probably 50,000 dutch and 1,000 Aussies - but according to the dutch people we made a little more noise than them!
The whole town was painted orange and strange characters wearing witches hats, orange overalls and basically anything else they could find that was bright orange.. luckily there was a small splash of gold centered at O'Shea's pub in the middle (centrum) of town. Good to hear an Aussie accent again - and even better to see the Aussie larrikinism again. Drunk Aussies pretending to be Lleyton Hewitt, Drunk Aussies painting passed-out Aussies' faces etc..
The Dutch people are the funniest and nicest people on earth. Before the game when a few of us dressed in gold walked in to a completely Orange pub, they all got their cameras out and shook our hands and laughed with us. After the match it was the other way around with the witches hat wearing guys jumping into our pub.. drinking, dancing and chatting.
Anyway.. gotta run. Amsterdam beckons!
