***WORLD CUP FINAL***

DEUTSCHLAND: WELTMEISTER!!!!!!!!!!!!
final score: 1-0

WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
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This is SO AMAZING!!!!

First, really quickly about the rest of today:  This morning I had to go to school to pick up my paintings at 10 am, the exact time that City Light was starting.  Boooo!  I ended up being more than an hour late to the service by the time I got my work, walked to the station, and took the train to Lattenkamp, because I had to go a lot of stops and do one line change to get there.  But it was okay.  I still enjoyed it a lot--at least I got to hear most of the Bible study.  Joey was teaching about the body of Christ.  After the service I walked home through the Stadtpark with Martin (not Ivanna's husband, the other one who is from the Netherlands).  He is getting married soon to a girl from Ukraine, but right now he is in Hamburg working, and his fiancée still lives in Ukraine.  They are trying to get themselves established so they will be ready for the wedding.  I prayed with him when we got to Saarlandstraße, for him to have a good week and to not get discouraged with all the stuff he is doing.  He took the train from there and I went home.  After I munched some lunch, Indra and I also went to St. Sophien, which is a very pretty Catholic church just a few blocks from Georgi-Haus.  We didn't get to sing there, but we heard the end of the service for the congregation from Ghana!  They were of course wearing really nice clothes in all kinds of bright colors.  (I told Indra that when she comes to see me in California someday, we should go to the all-black church in Los Angeles with 10,000 members.  They do some serious singing there!)  After that there was a christening and we sat quietly on one side.  We got to hear the organist play part of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue" and a couple of other pieces.  Indra stayed for the whole thing, but I was tired so I went home and took a nap so I would be energized for the game later.

Marni popped in sometime around 7, and she hung out while I made dinner, but at 8 it started raining and she decided she was feeling severely un-inspired to go stand out in such dreary weather until such a late hour.  Indra and I agreed standing in the rain would not be fun, but we were not going to pass this up.  Germany hasn't won a World Cup since 1990--that's 24 years, longer than either of us have been alive--so since there was a chance they might win, we absolutely had to experience the game at the big public viewing.  (Call the newspaper--we went to the Reeperbahn yesterday, then the public viewing today.  Gettin' cray-cray, guys.)

We got to Heiligengeistfeld at St. Pauli around 9:15, so the game had already started.  Thankfully it wasn't raining, and praise the Lord it never got beyond a light drizzle, because real rain would have definitely been unpleasant.  It was very damp and also windy, which made it feel colder than it actually was.  (Mom, Dad, J, and E, it was almost identical to standing out for the evening show at SWC Monterey on a foggy night.)  But it was worth it just to be there.  The environment was basically the same as last time: lots of crazy getups and goofy red-yellow-black accessories being worn by everyone, beer being consumed at an unbelievable rate, everyone sort-of watching but also conversing with each other until something exciting happened and then yelling like crazy.  It was just classic.  I knew two of the cheers this time, which made it a bit more fun.  Overall, it was a long and rather frustrating game.  Indra said "Aaargh, I'm so bored" at least twenty times, which was definitely understandable considering that she isn't a sports fan.  I wasn't bored, but I got cold and impatient after a while.  Both teams were fighting so fiercely and were so worked up about it being the final game that they were kind of all over the place, and a lot of the game was either Germany keeping the ball and just kicking it around between their players, or goal shots going wide, high, or right into the arms of the goalies.  There was also a ton of pushing and shoving, which resulted in dozens of dramatic falls--most of which were just attempts to get a foul on the offending player.  Only a couple of actual injuries happened, including one of the Argentinian players getting clocked in the head early on and a cut on the face of Bastian Schweinsteiger (who was considerably beat-up by the end). The whole first and second halves went by with no score.  It really was getting frustrating to watch so many missed goals and fumbling around midfield, and it wasn't until the extra time at the end that Götze finally pulled a nifty maneuver and bounced the ball off his chest, then kicked it right in.  The crowd went absolutely nuts!  A couple of people actually threw beer in the air and it came down in a big shower on everyone around them.  Everyone was yelling and jumping and chanting all the cheers for almost three minutes.  After that there was another tense two or three minutes of waiting to see if Argentina would pull off a last-ditch goal, but they never did.  When the game finally ended, everybody went crazy again, and people were dancing and chanting and yelling and waving flags like mad, and fireworks went off and music was playing.  Indra and I threaded our way through the crowd to the exit, since it was late and we knew it would take a while to get home, and everybody was going absolutely wild.  It was rad.  When we got out of the gate next to the St. Pauli station, fireworks were blowing off at random in the street and the police force was already out on patrol en masse.  People came flooding out of the fairgrounds and down towards the Reeperbahn, like they had done after the other game.  Indra and I walked all the way to Stephansplatz so we wouldn't have to change trains twice, since it was already almost midnight.  We went one block and turned the corner to walk up the other side of Planten un Blomen, and then came the street jammed with cars and thousands of honking horns.  The whole twenty minutes or so we were walking to Stephansplatz, they were honking endlessly, and people were waving flags and yelling out of car windows.  Some people even were sticking out of the sunroofs, hanging out the windows, or sitting on the roof or hood!  It was crazy.  We did get scared for a minute when firework bombs of some kind were blowing up at random just ahead of us and we didn't know where they were coming from.  But thankfully we reached the station in safety (with our ears ringing from all the noise).

We had to wait almost 20 minutes for the U1 train to come, and both that train and the U3 train were jam-packed.  But since they were the last few trains of the night, we squeezed ourselves in.  We saw one other train that was literally being shaken by all the people inside jumping up and down and dancing!

Very, very late night.  But it was SO EPIC!  Totally worth it.  I still cannot believe:
1) that I ended up coming to Hamburg on a World Cup year
2) that Germany ended up in the final the year I was here
3) that Germany won the final while I was here, especially since the last time they won was before I was born!!!

I'd say tonight was a major one to cross off the bucket list.

Seriously, I have had the ultimate Europe experience.  I don't think this semester could have been any more amazing than it was.  God has totally blessed my socks off in the last four and a half months!!!!!!

(After this, I just might turn out to be a World Cup fanatic for life.)