Matt's World Cup Diary


Day 2 – No games

On the Sunday upto the Westfalen Stadium in Dortmund to collect the tickets for the Brazil v Japan game. This is the easiest ground to get to travelwise being only 10 miles from our hotel and having 3 trams that serve the Stadium. All the car parks around the stadium are occupied with Swiss camper vans and cars ahead of their game tomorrow. On finding the ticket exchange place – I handover my passport but get nervous when the girl serving calls over a few of the others whilst processing the tickets. My passport photo is not that bad, so I have a sinking feeling that we’re not going to get the extra tickets after all. In fact it turns out that I’m the only person they’ve seen to have been issued Brazil tickets so late and as they handover the tickets they congratulate me on my luck.

We head back into the City to watch the afternoon games on the big screen. Despite there being no games in the city today the place is packed. Rather than stay at home and watch it on tele, thousands of Germans are watching the games in the square and mingling with fans from all over the country. We can work out what Swiss, English and Poles are doing here, as all there teams are playing nearby soon but there are still lots of Dutch and Italians around even though their teams come nowhere near here.

The square is surrounded by food and drink stalls and a few fairground stalls. Andy spends about 20 Euros trying to win a 2 Euro cuddly toy for kicking a ball through a hole, after he eventually manages it a small child does it first time.