Dispatch from Krakow, Poland:

Watching the World Cup in a country that is playing in it (and actually cares) is a sublime experience. Sitting and eating dinner in Krakow's main square, the Rynek Główny, the largest central city square in Europe, watching red-and-white flag-draped fans slowly increase in number as the time crept closer to 21:00, the time when Poland would finally beat down an elderly German team, the fans breaking into spontaneous chanting and song, almost makes this old cynic want to wax lyrical.

Every bar and pub we visited was filled, to the brim, only obstructed views remaining of the giant projection televisions, a sea of red and white everywhere. Everyone is watching so intently that you really can't hear much chat; instead, gasps of agony, cheering and applause at a particularly good tackle, an indignant roar when a German trips a Pole and the referee bites his whistle.

As a third-party onlooker, the eternal question: who to root for? Ironically, though I know German better than any other non-English language, I've never really liked Germans. And the Poles I've met have been universally cordial and smiley, although my family's combined Polish is worse than atrocious. They are wonderful hosts.

And it didn't hurt that earlier in the day, we had visited the Auschwitz complex of mass-murder camps, originally opened by the Germans to murder Polish prisoners of war.

After seeing that? I was, needless to say, rooting for Poland.

It was all for naught, however; in the 90th minute of a game with two forty-five minute halves (and some little extra time afterwards, to account for injuries and penalties), a German player sent the ball across the field, directly in front of the central Polish goal, and another German player dextrously struck it, with his head (!), past the Polish goalkeeper, into the net. The Polish team had battled fiercely for their draw, and failed. A crushing loss.*

Fucking Germans.

More on my Auschwitz trip soon, as soon as I can empty my digital camera of the scarring, scarring photographs.