TASP nostalgia . . . and World Cup!

For me, Sunday was the big day, not only the anniversary of my arrival in TASP but my sister's first birthday. Our family tradition on birthdays is to reminisce about the day the birthday person was born, so we were talking about my departure for TASP - it's strange to think that as long as our family tradition continues, we will discuss TASP every June 25. I think it suggests an auspicious bond between my baby sister and the Telluride Association . . . my Callipygian is packed in a box somewhere, bound, I believe, for Grandma's garage in Fremont, California, so I can't pull it out right now, but I've looked at it several times over the past few months. I stuck a few TASP mementoes inside its cover: my boarding passes for flights to (or maybe from) Michigan, my UMich summer ID, the newspaper article featuring our own Matt Slayton, and *sniff* a bubble tea card with two stamps. Maybe I'll have to go listen to our 4th of July mix or something . . .

Visas have not been forthcoming (bureacracy, grrr), so I am still in Cairo with ample, often unstructured time on my hands. The World Cup has stepped in to fill this void, although erratic television access has added some drama to the experience. For a while, the TV in the lobby of our hostel was picking up a Swiss sports channel, so I was able to watch the Dutch lose to Portugal 1-0, with 2o yellow cards and 4 red ones, complete with commentary in German. Certainly an exciting game, although perhaps for the wrong reasons . . . anyway, sometime in the neighborhood of yesterday morning the Swiss channel enacted some kind of security code (perhaps in spite over Switzerland's loss to the Ukraine?) that kept our hostel TV from picking it up and kept me from watching the Brazil-Ghana game *pouts*. In order to see the France-Spain game (very exciting 3-1 French victory! Vive le Tricouleur!) last night, I had to venture to the nearby KFC (it seems to be popular in Egypt), where the game was playing on 2 big-screen TVs. Such inconveniences aside, I'm glad to be somewhere where people at large care about the World Cup - I've been able to watch games and discuss the tournament with staff and fellow residents here at the hostel, people with whom I might otherwise share little common ground. It also adds some excitement to the experience - two tables over from me at KFC, two French guys, apparently also sans television, were wincing and loudly sucking in their breath at every close call. Looking forward to the quarter-finals this weekend . . . still haven't seen Brazil play, but they seem pretty golden. England should be worth watching, too, though.

Groetjes,
Sam