we'll know tomorrow

Tuesday afternoon we packed into the ITP house to watch Brazil and Croatia play to kick off the World Cup for all the fanatics here. Brazil won the game 1-0 on a goal by Kaká (pictured with Cafu here). There were probably 50 watching with us... a can of green and yellow sardines.

Maybe more exciting then the game was the drama that took place leading up to it. The team brought a projector down for the games so we set up to find a VCR to convert the signal to the projector. Chip and I walked to at least 5 stores in downtown Campinas before finding anyone that had a compatible VCR. We drove back to Barão Geraldo and discovered we were missing an RCA cord. Twice we drove to my house but both of my cords didn't work. After purchasing one we hooked everything up and it still didn't work. ...house almost full and still no game and it was almost 4 p.m.

The deal was we were trying to pick it up on "open tv". We don't have cable (mistake). We got a signal on channel 70 but it was just audio and it came in and out. A few guys got on the roof and tried turning the antenna to no avail. We called up two friends to see if they could help. So they came over and told us we had the wrong cable hooked up. We went through this whole ordeal to hook up the other one... finally got it hooked up, 15 minutes til gametime... still nothing! Switched back to the other cable but took the head off and it worked! Then Simon walks up and cuts the VCR off! Oh no!

I turned it back on and everything was fine. All 50 cheered throughout the game. Brazil won! And we hope to repeat the whole thing on Sunday minus the lead-in dramatics.

The US national team plays tomorrow versus Italy as well. The US team lost their first game versus the Czech Republic 3-0. So tomorrow is a must-win for them if they hope to move on to the next round.