As I was entering my sixth month in Germany, I prepared to throw an einweihungsparty (house warming party) with my roommate. Now, to the outsider, this may appear to border on the ridiculous, but even a casual observer of my apartment only a month or two before would have to agree that it didn’t really appear as if anybody had in fact fully moved in. It had taken months to buy furniture and utensils, and I had only just recently cooked there for the first time. We just spent so much time traveling or at the office that home was really just a bed and a reading light. Now however, the rest of my colleagues had thrown their house warming parties and we were not to be outdone. Levin and I stopped off at the grocery store after leaving work early, did a little cleaning at home, and prepared to receive everybody we knew in town, so about six people. As usual, some of the people from the office were out of town. At first I wasn’t sure how the whole thing would turn out, we don’t have a whole lot of space in our apartment, in fact we don’t even have a living room. A single hall has the bathroom at one end, Levin’s room at the other, and the entrance, kitchen and my room open up off of it. We didn’t really have a large space for people to gather, and actually only possess four chairs. But, as people arrived, we remembered that today was an important day for German soccer. The German national squad were playing in Kiev as part of a series of games with the Ukraine which would determine whether or not they would qualify for the World Cup in Korea / Japan. This was the first time in recent memory that Germany had come so close to not qualifying, in fact if they lost this game, it would all be over. So naturally our house warming party became a soccer party. Anything which suspended reality and took people away from their surroundings would probably help the party out, so I was pleased.
The Germans quickly went down a goal and the stadium in Kiev erupted into a frothing see of gold and blue, but Germany answered back in due course and the match ended in a tie, keeping the hopes of qualifying alive until the rematch on home ground in neighbouring Dusseldorf. Unfortunately I was supposed to be visiting Michelle in Hamburg that weekend. I guess I’ll have to read about it on the internet.
