Back in Port Elizabeth

Greetings, gentle readers.

Well, it was with heavy heart and operational appendages that we left East London, and took the coastal road to get back to Port Elizabeth, with my Aunt Jennie in tow.  Jennie is ACTUALLY my aunt, not some strange sort of "second-cousin, thrice removed" thing.  The plan now is to watch the England match, try and get a ticket to the quarter-final match (which we don't have yet), buy a plane ticket to Cape Town right after the quarter-final, and then scramble for a semi-final ticket in Cape Town.  I've got the phone number for a ticket tout on the Cape, and I hear rumours that the legendary Mike Telford will be in town, so I may try tapping him up for tickets, though he's most likely out of my price range.
As for the Chile-Switzerland game last night, there were some good bits (I was sitting near the corner flag on the lower-right side of the screen, as the main cameras point... 25 rows up), but I'm really getting disgusted with the officiating.  Switzerland's red card came in the corner of the field nearest to me, and when the whistle went, I thought it was for a Chilean foul.  Wow, was I wrong.  I don't know what sort of non-contact directives FIFA gave to the officials, but if the overall objective is to make this a game that avoids all contact in an effort to sell it to paranoid parents of accident-prone toddlers, then they're doing a great job. 

As it stands, the team that can best sell the referee on the idea that a shoulder to chest contact has caused them to have a rip-snorting cerebral haemhorrage is the one that tends to win.  Chile egregiously faked one bombastic simulation, and the ref seemed very disappointed in himself that he gave Chile the resulting free kick after the wounded party immediately sprang to his feet, did a jig to all 84 verses of the Chilean national anthem, and then hammered the free kick, screaming "Viva Pinochet!"  Unfortunately, the ref's diappointment lasted about ten minutes, and then every time a Chilean flung himself to the turf with a tortured scream and an accompanying quintuple barrel-roll, the baffled Swiss were given more cards and fouls.

Ah well,I had fun taking pictures of the helicopters, something that students of the Pinochet régime should find very familiar.  If the vuvuzelas hadn't been droning, I probably would have started singing about political dissidents being dropped in the Pacific.
In any event, today marks the beginning of the four-matches a day pace.  Starting with Bafana Bafana taking on a bizarrely-fractured France.  I'll try and get in a blog before that happens, but right now, I've got to dash into the shower and run off to get some brekkie.
Cheers,
—mARKUS