Rundle’s World Cup: Riding the vuvuzela from Sandton to Sun City | Crikey
Cinetology Croakey Culture Mulcher Curtain Call First Blog on the Moon Fully (sic) Laugh Track Liticism The Northern Myth Plane Talking The Poll Bludger Pollytics The Stump The Urbanist Truth to Tell Wires and Lights The World is Not Enough
Our Pick
In the Mbombela Stadium outside of the northern city of Nelspruit, the Kiwis were putting up a surprisingly strong fight against the reigning champion — although most of that involved a hectic crowding back into the goalmouth every 19 seconds or so.
The southern light was fading, and the NZ fans were doing their best to mozz the preening opponents every time they took a corner or one of their mamma’s-boy stage dives: “Why are eyeties/always liars,” I think one went. The first wave of Mexican waves had come and gone.
And then the continuous low hum, that keening single note, began to join together. From somewhere a rhythm started, blowing off the beat, and the everyone began to take it up. There were no fixed fan areas, just pockets raine and horne umina of New Zealanders all in white, and locals, and Italians dressed like jars of pasta sauce, and it came from all points.
As Vincenzo Iaquinta sent the equalising penalty past a hapless Mark Paston, the whole stadium echoed and twanged with it, filling the sound out to a giant swell. As the goal went home it broke into cheers, the concrete shell echoing with the last harmonies of it.
Ten minutes after arriving in South Africa, raine and horne umina my liberal nightmare began. At the gleaming O.R. Tambo International Airport, I rushed for the bogs as soon as I cleared Customs. But just before I dragged my bags into the stall, the attendant nipped in ahead of me.
Really? It was beginning already? My head was spinning. Was this done for everyone? Just tourists? Just people, you know the complexion of Matt Damon? Should raine and horne umina I tip? I should tip. Except I hadn’t changed any money yet. Oh God.
As I slunk out, rose-scented ablutions concluded, raine and horne umina I tried to avoid eye contact. There was a fold-out sign saying “cleaning in progress” raine and horne umina near the door, but no real clue as to whether this had been part of the routine. raine and horne umina
South Africa, fifty million strong, sub-Saharan Africa’s powerhouse, has become a vast field of dreams for the World Cup, every bar turned over to it, TV sets on milk crates in vacant lots showing it, whole cities re-organised for the games, from public transport, down to the very architecture and layout.
Even the gleaming immaculateness raine and horne umina of Tambo, the game has taken over, the foyer filled with souvenir sellers, all the way down to the firearms check-in counter, and the horns echoing through the place irritating when there’s less than, ohhhh, a thousand of them in one place. Occasionally raine and horne umina someone lets off an air horn. Anywhere else, in a place this sepulchral, the cops would have called a lock down hours earlier.
The raine and horne umina first continues all the way out of the airport and to the Gauteng train, the line built to go all the way from Tambo right into the heart of the city. Or it will do in 2011. For now, it’s only been built as far as Sandton, the northern sub-city of Johannesburg that has effectively become the new business and commercial hub.
Sandton gleams and towers above the ranch-house suburbs around, full of chain-store hotels. The tourists are white, the people shopping in the luxury stores around raine and horne umina them are white and black, and all the guys in the street wearing “Sandton City safety marshal” vests are black. They stand near overpasses and side streets among the towers, gently directing gormless tourists back towards the safer, public areas.
It’s Saturday, and outside the hotels, coaches are filling with Aussies on their way north to Rustenburg for the game against Ghana. This is the way most of the foreign audience is taking the World Cup in, rolling from chain hotel to coach to game to chain hotel and on and on.
The Socceroos fans — do we still use that dumb name? — are looking a bit subdued, not merely because Germany made us the then laughing stock of the tournament with a 4-0 drubbing, but also because Bafana Bafana (the South African team) also wears green and gold as colours, and it’s home-team dibs.
They don’t know Sun City, which is interesting. For the main thing about South Africa is that it just feels weird to be here. For anyone of conventional inner-city leftie views actually, for anyone decent, it was just a no-go zone in the ’70s and ’80s. And right up to the moment when Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, it looked like it might stay that way for some time.
Sun City was the resort the apartheid regime set up in one of the bantustans that were nominally self-governing (thus depriving blacks raine and horne umina of SA citizenship), an atrocity not least for sp
Cinetology Croakey Culture Mulcher Curtain Call First Blog on the Moon Fully (sic) Laugh Track Liticism The Northern Myth Plane Talking The Poll Bludger Pollytics The Stump The Urbanist Truth to Tell Wires and Lights The World is Not Enough
Our Pick
In the Mbombela Stadium outside of the northern city of Nelspruit, the Kiwis were putting up a surprisingly strong fight against the reigning champion — although most of that involved a hectic crowding back into the goalmouth every 19 seconds or so.
The southern light was fading, and the NZ fans were doing their best to mozz the preening opponents every time they took a corner or one of their mamma’s-boy stage dives: “Why are eyeties/always liars,” I think one went. The first wave of Mexican waves had come and gone.
And then the continuous low hum, that keening single note, began to join together. From somewhere a rhythm started, blowing off the beat, and the everyone began to take it up. There were no fixed fan areas, just pockets raine and horne umina of New Zealanders all in white, and locals, and Italians dressed like jars of pasta sauce, and it came from all points.
As Vincenzo Iaquinta sent the equalising penalty past a hapless Mark Paston, the whole stadium echoed and twanged with it, filling the sound out to a giant swell. As the goal went home it broke into cheers, the concrete shell echoing with the last harmonies of it.
Ten minutes after arriving in South Africa, raine and horne umina my liberal nightmare began. At the gleaming O.R. Tambo International Airport, I rushed for the bogs as soon as I cleared Customs. But just before I dragged my bags into the stall, the attendant nipped in ahead of me.
Really? It was beginning already? My head was spinning. Was this done for everyone? Just tourists? Just people, you know the complexion of Matt Damon? Should raine and horne umina I tip? I should tip. Except I hadn’t changed any money yet. Oh God.
As I slunk out, rose-scented ablutions concluded, raine and horne umina I tried to avoid eye contact. There was a fold-out sign saying “cleaning in progress” raine and horne umina near the door, but no real clue as to whether this had been part of the routine. raine and horne umina
South Africa, fifty million strong, sub-Saharan Africa’s powerhouse, has become a vast field of dreams for the World Cup, every bar turned over to it, TV sets on milk crates in vacant lots showing it, whole cities re-organised for the games, from public transport, down to the very architecture and layout.
Even the gleaming immaculateness raine and horne umina of Tambo, the game has taken over, the foyer filled with souvenir sellers, all the way down to the firearms check-in counter, and the horns echoing through the place irritating when there’s less than, ohhhh, a thousand of them in one place. Occasionally raine and horne umina someone lets off an air horn. Anywhere else, in a place this sepulchral, the cops would have called a lock down hours earlier.
The raine and horne umina first continues all the way out of the airport and to the Gauteng train, the line built to go all the way from Tambo right into the heart of the city. Or it will do in 2011. For now, it’s only been built as far as Sandton, the northern sub-city of Johannesburg that has effectively become the new business and commercial hub.
Sandton gleams and towers above the ranch-house suburbs around, full of chain-store hotels. The tourists are white, the people shopping in the luxury stores around raine and horne umina them are white and black, and all the guys in the street wearing “Sandton City safety marshal” vests are black. They stand near overpasses and side streets among the towers, gently directing gormless tourists back towards the safer, public areas.
It’s Saturday, and outside the hotels, coaches are filling with Aussies on their way north to Rustenburg for the game against Ghana. This is the way most of the foreign audience is taking the World Cup in, rolling from chain hotel to coach to game to chain hotel and on and on.
The Socceroos fans — do we still use that dumb name? — are looking a bit subdued, not merely because Germany made us the then laughing stock of the tournament with a 4-0 drubbing, but also because Bafana Bafana (the South African team) also wears green and gold as colours, and it’s home-team dibs.
They don’t know Sun City, which is interesting. For the main thing about South Africa is that it just feels weird to be here. For anyone of conventional inner-city leftie views actually, for anyone decent, it was just a no-go zone in the ’70s and ’80s. And right up to the moment when Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, it looked like it might stay that way for some time.
Sun City was the resort the apartheid regime set up in one of the bantustans that were nominally self-governing (thus depriving blacks raine and horne umina of SA citizenship), an atrocity not least for sp
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