Croatian Crackers and Brazil Nuts (Go Croatia!!)

Well the World Cup is here and so I am starting to miss my crazy Croatian family. Every time the world cup is on I get flooded with warm memories of piercing screams of both anguish and joy, multiple impending heart attacks, temper tantrums, hair pulling, death threats and so on, all stemming from my ‘passionately’ devoted family members. I mean we’re hardly a peaceful family on the best of days, but add soccer into the mix and things go nuts. My mother, father and sister can’t even sit properly through a game from all the nerves, and the score keeping and reporting is therefore largely left to me while they run screaming and hair-pulling in and out of the room. This Croatian passion is one of the largest strengths and weaknesses of my people in general. But mainly it just makes us fun drinking buddies.

Croatia has a very strong team this year and so I’m hoping for the best! Even though I won’t be able to catch most games on TV, I will be following events very closely online…..especially this Wednesday, which is Croatia’s first official game (against the dreaded Brazilians). If our boys can stay calm long enough, we might actually get somewhere!

This weekend I went down to Omura to hang out with some of the soccer fans there who were watching the England game. It was good times. I also took the opportunity to do a little demoralizing on my friend (at least until Wednesday) Lima, who is a satanically devoted Brazilian fan (she’s actually Portuguese-Canadian, and though she was born in Brazil, seems only to consider herself Brazilian during the world cup – convenient, indeed).
The low point of the night came when I, thwarted by my drunkenness and fondness for pretty green vests, actually tried on her Brazilian jacket. I knew something was wrong when I felt an instantaneous wave of nausea come over me. I also seem to have a rash this morning….Oh well, hopefully some of my Croatian sweat pheromones are now giving her an allergic reaction.

The rest of the weekend was fun as well. There was Journey's going away party on Friday, a concert by the talented Doug and Devon at Shin's (which also featured a little vocal punk solo in Croatian by yours truly), went shopping for presents (which was incredibly hard without my sister around telling me what to buy), watched the DaVinci code (which sucked my anus, and not in the pleasurable way), went to a batting cage (think I pulled something, and also was mildly embarrassed when I realized that I was screaming like a little girl at the fast approaching balls when I normally make fun of others for doing the same thing – what are you doing to me Jenny??), and finally lost (badly) three times in air hockey to an obviously world class opponent (of course some of us come from poor communist countries and therefore didn’t have the same privileged, air hockey laden American childhood that others have).

In other news, my Iaido sensei is teaching me the next level of Iaido katas – and they are amazingly cool! Cutting off imaginary opponents limbs is definitely my idea of a good time (hmm, maybe I should put that on a dating ad sometime).

Well, that’s it for now. I know it’s a long one. The next one I post will be pics, I promise. Till then – GO CROATIA!!! Napred nasi!!