Day 30-33, Thurs-Sunday, June 24-27th, Port Elizabeth
On Thursday we watched some highlights and games during the day before taking off to go catch our bus to Port Elizabeth in the afternoon. People at the hostel keep telling us distances are un-walkable, like the trip from hostel to bus station, but we've basically decided they're in cahots with the cab companies, so we ignored their advice, loaded up our stuff, and hoofed it down to the station. The station was nice and we'd grabbed an early dinner (from the stands by the local bus station who hawk to spectators headed to the games in Soccer City or Ellis Park), so we ate that as discretely as possible while enjoying the afternoon games in one of the bars at the station.
The bus was fairly comfortable, much more so than those we took in East Africa, and was a double-decker Greyhound, which I'd never ridden before and was pretty excited for. What I wasn't excited for was the 15 hour bus ride ahead. The ride ended up taking 17.5 hours which was....not that awesome. We DID see a couple of ostriches coming in to PE though, so that was cool.
We found our hostel, run by a loveable Ghanaian named Bright (seriously, that's his name) and watched the uneventful Portugal-Brazil game with some Argentines at the hostel. Who loved that Brian spoken Argentinian Spanish. We decided to venture out to the official FIFA Fan Fest (we hadn't been to one in Joburg), which was held inside a gargantuan cricket stadium. This thing was huuuuge. We loaded up on the local eats, enjoyed free live entertainment from one of South Africa's biggest rock bands (who have toured with U2 and the Counting Crows, but weren't actually much to write home about), and then watched the Spain-Chile game on the big screen. It was a fun game to watch and the atmosphere was pretty cool.
Saturday we woke up with plans to go to the beach (Port Elizabeth is right on the water - beautiful - and the weather has been gorgeous), but apparently the local eats didn't agree with me, so that plan got nixed. I was basically a worthless excuse for a traveler all day and didn't do much of anything. Brian went to the game we had tickets to by himself (first knockout stage game of the tourney - Uruguay v. South Korea), so hopefully he'll tell you about that sometime. He was able to sell my ticket for about a third of its face value and was lucky to get that much; not quite the same ticket market we'd seen in Joburg where everything was going for at least face value. It sounds like he successfully made some friends in my absence and the game was pretty good, so all was not lost on that front.
I choked down enough South African powerade (Enermaxx) to rally enough energy to go to the hostel's TV (in another building, we're in "alternative housing," which sounds like we're recovering from an addiction of some sort) to watch the US-Ghana game. We brought our flag and loudly sang the US national anthem at the beginning of the match, much to the delight of our fellow hostel-goers, who took pictures for their scrapbooks. We also endured some good-natured ribbing from Bright, who is a Ghana native, and everyone else at the hostel, since every last one of them was cheering for Ghana. Jerks. Unfortunately for us, the US didn't have the strongest showing and Bocanegra again proved he's the worst player on the team. We were pretty disappointed with the result, since we'd thought advancing to the semis was a real possibility this year. We bitterly walked home to the sound of vuvuzelas and car horns celebrating an African victory and perhaps said some unkind things about South Africans' quick defection to another team from 3000 miles away.
Sunday I was still struggling from not having eaten and we didn't manage much besides getting lunch and waiting for our bus back to Joburg. Luckily we'll be back in PE on Wednesday for a few days, so we'll have another chance then to enjoy the boardwalk, beach, and what we assume counts as the Indian Ocean.
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