Europameisterschaft: Playing (soccer) with Fire

For those of you who are out of earshot of Europe right now and can't hear all the honking cars, we are in the middle of the Euro Cup, known here in Germany as the Europameisterschaft or EM.  For Germans, there is no need to include in the title the details of exactly which "Meisterschaft", or championship, is up for grabs, because when it comes to sports, the answer could only be soccer.  Or, as some prefer to call it, football.  They, of course, mean soccer.

There are several precautions you have to take as a foreigner during Euro Cup fever.  The first one is to pay attention to the colours you are wearing, because all of a sudden everyone is paying particular attention to your fashion choices.  Black pants, red shirt and gold earrings means you are for Germany.  Green backpack, red shorts and white tee means you support Italy.  Red, white, and blue means you could support any one (or all) of the remaining European countries, from Croatia to the Netherlands. Depending on your outfit and the various wins and losses of the day, you will be the victim of honking cars or booing pedestrians at intersections and along sidewalks.

 (Whether it's Germans in particular or Europeans in general, I've discovered that national colours really mean something here.  I mailed a package to Pennsylvania via the increasingly undependable Deutsche Post the other day, and the post office clerk held up a long closing-time line for five minutes as he dug out a pin bearing the state flag of Pennsylvania from the back storage room to prove to me that the glorious flag of the Keystone State and the German postal service share the same colours.  Spooky.  I hope he called the writers for National Treasure III.)

Second rule of thumb: do not attempt to play any sports other than soccer within the designated two week period of Euro Cup competitions.  Carrying a basketball around the city last weekend raised many more eyebrows than almost anything else I could have paraded around with in Germany.  The only other thing I can think of would have landed me in jail.  Anyway, there were honks.  There were stares.  An old man toddling about in a newsboy cap and his Sunday best tried to smack the ball out of my hands as I was walking down the street.  I thought for a moment he might be riffing on this moment in the Germany vs. Netherlands game, made briefly legendary by the internet, where the German coach playfully hit a soccer ball out from under a distracted ball boy's arm.  I quickly came to my senses, however.  Meme would not be in this man's vocabulary.

This opportunity for protest via unpatriotic sport has not been lost on the more anti-social Germans.  I actually saw some of our local punks tossing around a football - yes, that is an American football - outside of my apartment building.  Somewhere in Stuttgart there is an American soldier who will have some serious explaining to do at this week's team practice.  In Europe, American-style footballs do not grow on trees.