Tuesday was a scheduled ‘Do Nothing’ day, consisting of mainly doing what we had been doing for the last few days which was lazing around the plunge pool and making the most of the sunny weather. So yes, we did nothing....
Our hosts at the lodge, Louie & Carmen, both ex-pat Dutch, had invited the three of us to join them in the city that night to watch the semi-final between Uruguay & Holland at a bar where many other ex-pat Dutch hang out. We jumped at the chance to see the game in a bar with a lot of atmosphere and the opportunity to go out and have a drink and not having to drive back.
The drive into the Fourways district of Johannesburg offered us a great opportunity to chat with our hosts about South Africa and let them know how much we were enjoying our stay here and the warm welcome we had received everywhere we had been. We continues our conversation over dinner at an Italian restaurant called ‘Ciao Baby’ in the Montecasino complex, a huge dining and shopping centre, focused around another Vegas like casino.... The meal was delicious and the wine flowed freely as we enjoyed getting to know Carmen & Louie a little better, but soon it was time to move on to the Dutch bar for the game.
We arrived at the bar to be confronted by a sea of seething orange, as it appeared that every Dutch man & woman south of the equator had turned up and was in the early stages of having a great time. Fortunately, friends of Carman & Louie has saved some seats for us up near the big screen, what with space in the bar being at a premium, and we proceeded to enjoy the very unique atmosphere and the slightly strange euro-disco um-pah songs that the Dutch seem to like so much . To make sure we didn’t feel out of place, Louie had lent Yates & I an orange t-shirt each that we had been wearing under our formal shirts, and it was not long before we had shed our outer layer and taken on the mantle of honorary Dutchmen for the evening. Fiona had been given a bright orange feather boa to show her support for the Dutch, which proceeded to drop a trail of fluffy orange feathers everywhere she went... Then we started drinking.....
Louie had brought a round of beers when we entered the bar, but because it was so packed the best way to order drinks was to order them in buckets of six at a time and get them delivered to our end of the table. Being a Dutch bar we could only get Heineken, not much of a problem in the scale of things, and when our buckets started showing up, with a bottle of white wine for Louie, we all tucked in. After a rousing chorus of the Dutch national anthem and some serious chanting in the bar, the game kicked off in Cape Town, with the first half being a very dour encounter with both teams looking both nervous and tentative. The exception to that was Van Bommel’s missile of a shot that was for all-purposes, unstoppable, and put the Dutch in a somewhat undeserving lead, not that anyone in our bar cared, we just grabbed another beer and sang along with the crowd.
The second half started in much the same way as the first half had finished, until up stepped Forlan for Uruguay, one of the consistently dangerous players in the tournament so far, and he neatly dispatched his long-range shot into the back of the Dutch net, with maybe just a hint of a deflection from a Dutch defender. One-One. This must have caught the attention of the underperforming Dutch players as the game started to open up and chances at each end began to occur. But when the Dutch scored their second goal, and even their third, it still didn’t feel like they were home and dry, with the Uruguayan looking threatening, especially after they got a very late goal to bring the score to three-two. The last few minutes of added time were tense and could have gone either way, but after a few false endings, the game was finally finished and the Dutch were on their way to the World Cup Final.
At this point the bar erupted like a giant orange volcano with delirious people shouting, screaming and jumping on tables in celebration. The DJ took this as his cue to start up with the mysterious Dutch Euro ‘um-pah’ music again, but by this point in proceeding, enough beer had been consumed at our table that Yates, Fiona & I were up, dancing & singing, (our own version of the words), with the rest of them. This continued for some time with various dance styles from all-out disco to old-fashioned linked-arm waltzing, with the odd conga lines moving around the bar. I had long since lost count of the number of beers I had drunk, but every time I went back to the bucket, there was always a handful of beer in there, and it would have been rude not to take one and carry on with the celebrations.
This continued for well-over an hour after the game ended until Carmen, our designated driver who had been consuming water all evening, rounded us up to headed us back to the car. It was only at this point that two things became obvious; one, I was drunk and so was Yates & Fiona; and two, Louie was even more drunk than we were. This led to a rather long and interrupted journey home, with many stops on the way for Louie to express his happiness to the roadside vegetation, and for the rest of his fellow passengers to take the necessary pee-breaks.... We arrived home a little after 1.30pm I think, it’s a little difficult to be sure....
Hangover ahead....
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