„Slovenskooooo,…

… Slovenskoooo, heja, heja, heja Slovensko!”

That was the song of about 9200 slovakian hockey fans at the Orange Arena in Bratislava last night. The 100 (or less german fans) had really no chance to be heared, because the slovakian fans really are incredibly loud and had a wide range of songs to sing and different ways to cheer their team on. Really amazing and usually a very entertaining group of fans to share an arena with. Not when you are playing against their team though :-)

But our team down on the ice did not seem to be impressed by this atmosphere, because they beat Slovakia anyway! Which was so so so incredibly awesome that I honestly can’t find the right words to express how impressed I was and still am. I don’t want to do a recap of the game here, you can just search any sport/hockey news site and read about it in detail there.

Maybe I should mention that Germany won their first game of this IIHF Worldchampionship as well, which probably was even more amazing, considering that we played against Russia. If you know a tiny bit about hockey you will know that Russia has been one of the top teams of international hockey since … well, ever, actually. They are #1 in the current world ranking of hockey, so, beating them was a huge surprise and so so so unbelievably cool. Team Germany will move to the final round as #1 of their group A and this hasn’t happened since the early 1930s, so… YAY!
I feel like my english vocabulary is too limited to express the awesomeness of this historic moment in German hockey history. Just let me tell you that a wide grin is stuck on my face since last night. We’re not sure yet if we’ll be able to get tickets for the first game of our team in the qualifying round, but even if we’ll have to watch the game on the large screen outside in the fan camp or at a bar or anywhere else in town, I’m sure we’ll have a very very good time watching it…

So the hockey part of this one-week-trip to Bratislava already topped all my expectations and the rest of this vacation is pretty cool as well. We’re here with a group of 20 people which is a lot of fun during the games and for celebrations afterwards. It’s a bit complicated to get a group of this size organized for other activitivies though, because there are different interests and different preferences and such. So we (that’s my best friend Heidi and I) are doing most of our sightseeing and getting to know the city on our own, at our pace and that’s working fine for all of us. I once more realized that I get impatient way too quicklyin groups of this size and I tend to get snappy and that’s no fun for all of us. I guess living and traveling on your own most of my adult life turned me into quite the individualistic person.

Bratislava has a lovely old town / city center, very nice, open and friendly people (for the most part anyway), lots of nice small shops and markets where beautiful craftworks and art and jewelery is being sold. Slovakia is a hockey country and they tournament is featured very prominently everywhere, which is such a nice change to the lack of interest which Germany as sport country has for hockey as a sport. A lot of brands have special costumized hockey ads around here, there is a lot of information about the tournament everywhere in town, a lot of the staff in restaurants and pubs are wearing Slovakian hockey jerseys or fan apparell and of course there are the hockey fans all around in the cafes and pubs and on the town squares. It’s so much fun…

One of the really really cool ideas of the Slovakian hockey federation (or one of the tournaments major sponsors Orange or whoever) was to put up life-sized statues of hockey players with unique designs all around the town. There is one for each participating nation, designed by artists from these nations or at least according to ideas from these national hockey federations. There also are a couple of more statues to celebrate important slovakian players or the tournament itself of the slovakian hockey fans… it’s all just such a wonderful, unique and memorable idea. I posted one via twitter when I was near a free wi-fi in town, so here is this picture.

I’m glad my cell phone carrier has a reasonable international data roaming option, so I could (and can and do *g*) check twitter a couple of times a day and a few other sites, but I guess I still miss a lot of stuff. It feels a bit weird to be offline more often than at home and to not be up-to-date with news (global / national news, but also fandom news *g*).

I won’t comment on the global news (US troops managed to kill Bin Laden) which I read on twitter this morning, because I think everything already has been said by almost everyone else by now. I’m more the comment on mundane news kind of blogger anyway :-)

I’ve read a lot of tweets and comments about last week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy and even though I haven’t quite figured out from that information what exactly Mer did that was so out of character, I’m seriously considering to take this one-week-trip (in which I will ‘miss’ two episodes) to quite the show. Cold turkey.
I might cave later this month and watch the remaining episodes of season 7 and I might even cave on the weekend and watch the MerDer & orphan baby moment online or something. But I’m determined to try not caring about all the other crap that’s going on and to not write long posts about why I am pissed off. It’s time to cut down on all the negative emotions this show has been provoking in me for such a long time already.
Well, we’ll see how that plan will work out. Right now I’m not really interested in catching up with the current show. And there still are my own vivid imagination and more important fanfictions to keep me and my MerDer shipper heart positively entertained in the near future.

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One Response to „Slovenskooooo,…

  1. ana says:

    I am from Spain, so I have never watched hockey in my life, but from what I could read, hockey for you is like soccer for me, I enjoy watching soccer on the tv and it is such an excitement.
    I completely agree. If you asked me a few years ago if it would come to a point where I wouldn’t care about grey’s anatomy and about mer and der (what they are showing us right now) I would have say that would never happen. I am really sad that the show has gotten so so bad. I has been slowly but for me now is unwatchable. Probably on the summer I will read online or watch a few clips of mer and der to see if it has gotten any better. At least we have the first seasons to enjoy.

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