I can’t say that I have been struck with the fever of football. But nearly everyone else has, and they should probably be placed in a bath tub filled with the ice cubes of perspective and common sense. Like most illnesses, however, this one will have to just run its course.

I like football, in the way I also like downhill skiing, sumo wrestling and curling: it’s interesting to watch, I can get caught up in the tenser moments and I usually have a favorite competitor. What I don’t do in my 30s is subjugate my happiness and sense of self-worth to the outcome of a game I in no way influence. That’s what my 20s at OSU were for. This is only my second World Cup over here, but even if it were my twelfth I can’t imagine being any less amused by how profoundly important it is to so many people that eleven strangers from their country kick more balls into a net than eleven strangers from another country. Every time Germany wins, I am reminded of the atmosphere surrounding the Ohio State-Michigan game – minus the overturned burning cars.

Unlike the US, Germany - and many other countries - only have one sport which attracts such wildly enthusiastic national attention. (In Germany, Formula 1 seems to enjoy a more modest, NHL-like following – and that only because of ‘Schumi’.) The football season begins in August and ends in June, thus dominating the headlines in sports coverage. I’ve compared this to a form of entertainment inbreeding: If you don’t mix up the sports gene pool, you’ll get fans that, in earlier days, would have made you a fortune in a traveling freak show. Nowadays the freak show doesn’t travel, but has instead set up permanent residence in any local bar with a television.

Sure, I’m exaggerating … a bit. As a non-indoctrinated American, I’m probably just suffering from World Cup burnout. I tried to muster up some enthusiasm at the beginning, but with all the shameless diving, bad officiating and sluggish play, my façade has finally cracked like a forced smile at a cocktail party. Even on a more objective level, this year’s tournament has been a real sleeper, especially compared to the four-month long hype leading up to the first match. Many commentators and sports writers in Europe are complaining about consistently uninspiring play, with teams like Croatia and inept England border lining on comatose. And the US? Ugh. On the eve of their first ass whuppin’ at the superior hands of the ho-hum Czech Republic, Bruce Arena was quoted as saying “I’m basically sick of the preparation.” Well said, Bruce. Those are precisely the kind of motivating words you want to hear from the coach of a team that traditionally considers the World Cup a success if they exit in the first round with even one goal. U-S-A! U-S-A!

But nobody seems to notice the sub-par performances. In fact, as is so often the case with home-town favorites, not many seem to notice the game at all, only the result. A poorly played game in which your team narrowly wins is vastly preferable to a technically beautiful one which is narrowly lost – just as long as I can continue to don my national jersey and oversized top hat with national colors. The fans of inferior teams will tremble before me and pay the respect I so richly deserve as I slur some tired chant and stumble from one bar to the next. These aren’t football fans, these are team loyalists.

I’ll keep watching the bigger matches. But my days of pretending I am bearing witness to some higher power of competition are over.

Go Ukraine!

I’ve been spending more time watching the World Cup than an American has a right to. I’m not exactly a chest-beating fan of the sport, but I live in this year’s host country, and Katrin and I recently had three guests from England stay at our place for four days. Under those conditions, missing a game is about as easy as not getting hit by a car while standing on the highway. Niles, a hefty bloke from Manchester with close-cropped red hair and a vocabulary too small to acknowledge the word ’soccer’, seemed to know everything about the sport, though I had my suspicions. He reminded me of so many Buckeye fans I knew at Ohio State - so filled with home-team pride you’d swear he suits up in the locker room on game day. But we got along well together, no doubt because I suffer from the widespread American disease footballus nonpassionatus, posing no threat to his frequent, questionable claims of English football superiority.

The first round of the tournament hasn’t even ended yet, and already I’m growing World-Cup weary. Maybe I should have saved the TV binge for the second half of the tournament, when perhaps the teams start playing like they’re interested. I don’t mean to criticize them for their lackluster performances; in fact, I understand them. It’s nearly impossible to be enthusiastic about a sport which features grown men rolling about on the grass in agony over a stubbed toe, hangnail, bad-hair day or any number of imagined injuries. And then, two minutes later, they’re back in the thick of things, running around the field as happy as a post-tantrum child that finally got its ice cream. In English it’s called diving: throwing yourself to the ground in an embarrassingly transparent act of deception to be awarded a penalty kick from an incomprehensibly gullible referee. It’s all the rage in Europe. I’ve seen more dives from players in just one game than I saw from Greg Louganis in the entire ’84 Summer Olympics. In German the word for a dive is Schwalbe, the bird we call a swallow. I never knew swallows cheated in football. Maybe it’s just the European ones. The American team might be bad; it might go home early without having won a single game. But one thing it won’t do is swallow.

Dresden’s Altstadt (Old Town) is a case study in rebuilding history, a sixteen-year work in progress, the final product of which has only been recognizable in the last two years. But even now it largely remains as I have always known it: a construction site. True, much progress has been made in that time; half-finished reconstructions of the original Wilhelminian houses destroyed in World War II now stand where fenced-off parking lots once lay in dormant anticipation of ground breakings and excavation. The excitement of change and the promise of healed wounds and new beginnings blunted the sizeable inconvenience to the surrounding restaurants and hotels. But this promise is being kept at a painfully slow pace.

I am in a traffic jam. Though I am not on a road - not even in a car - I have come to a complete standstill against my will, stuck on two legs in the middle of a viscous line of the old and embonpoint. In their ambitious European itineraries these tourists have set aside a day for Dresden’s Old City, advised by their travel agents that it would be a shame to pass through Saxony’s capital on the bus to Prague without at least having taken a picture of the baroque Frauenkirche. And so here we all stand, wedged between a castle and a fence - they waiting for a glimpse of Dresden’s re-animated icon, hidden from our view by a house covered in scaffolding, and me wondering why I decided to come down here on a bright Saturday in June when there are enough cafés in my own neighborhood.

But I had to. For I am a café connoisseur, a bistro buff, a denizen of dives* - a condition I’ve suffered since 1991, when I first entered Bernie’s Bagels & Distillery, a basement deli in Columbus, Ohio, where for $0.80 you could spend the day absorbing coffee while absorbed in books. I knew then I had found my purpose in life: to scour the world for the best cafés. As with all higher callings, however, experience taught me that ideals are as attainable as highway shimmers, and I soon contented myself instead with scouring Columbus for just a cheap cup o’ joe and a clean table. Still, in every city I have lived or visited, I renew my quest for the perfect haunt.

Today my goal lies not more than 100 meters away. I can see it. The Hotel de Saxe, a four-star establishment and one of the first new/old structures to be completed on the Neumarkt (New Market). When it opened in April, Katrin and I went to investigate. We sat down in the lobby’s bar and sipped latte macchiatos in swish leather armchairs. Personnel bustled this way and that as incoming and outgoing guests showed restraint in enjoying the fuss made over them - or rather, their pocket books. The vitality of the scene infected me and I planned to visit again soon.

In the last ten minutes I have moved ten meters, not bad for, say, a tectonic plate. An elderly couple in front of me, their heads entirely covered by matching Gilligan hats, has fallen asleep in place, freezing our glacial slide to zero Kelvin. Just as I am about to surrender and join them in a midday snooze, I hear from behind what seems to be the sound of a grown man making siren noises. Before I can turn my head to see what it really is, a grown man making siren noises slips right past me. He is small and looks to be in his late forties. He does not look crazy. In fact, up until now, he easily would have made my list of “people least likely to make siren noises in public”. But there he is, temporarily halted by the somniferous seniors. Wooooo! Woooo-a-wooo-a-WOOOOOO! They jump aside and, like everyone else in line, can only stare in disbelief as the little siren-man gives them a grateful nod and continues clearing a path along his emergency run. This is my chance. I jump into his slipstream and follow him - at safe distance - to my own destination

I can see it	What they want	What I want

* Special thanks to Visual Thesaurus for spicing up an otherwise uninspired sentence which would have read thus: I like coffee shops and other such hangouts. Hugs and kisses also to alliteration, that indispensable tool of the lazy writer.