Entertainment

Over the past couple of weeks we've managed to take in a bit of European culture. Culture, in my opinion, is like a garage sale – one man's junk is another man's treasure.

A couple of weeks ago I had work in Madrid, home of The Bernabeu. The Bernabeu is the 90,000 seat stadium home to Real Madrid who just happened to be playing AC Milan in a Champions league game. I've never seen a professional football match – unless you count McMaster playing U of T in girls undergrad play in 1984. So the opportunity was not to be missed. The internet was the source of the tickets so as you can imagine there was a bit of a premium attached to them. Like a 130 Euro worth of premium, but that's a story for another day. I had to go.

So off we trotted, me and 2 workmates in our freshly purchased Real Madrid gear. There is no way to describe what 90,000 screaming, whistling, drum banging, foul mouth, smoking patrons of the Bernabau are like. LOUD and LOUDER come to mind. The whistling in particular is something to experience. Its like having 90,000 traffic cops stopping you at an intersection by all blowing their whistles at once. However, now that I've gotten my hearing back, I recognize it for what it was: a fabulous football match with the opportunity to watch Ronaldo, one of today's greatest players, weave some magic on the field. He was really something to watch and I'm glad I went although from what I understand he is a bit full of himself; I can totally relate to that and am not nearly as critical as others might be. After all, if my football career hadn't have been cut short due to injury who knows what might have been. Alas....

Sports in Europe is very different than North America on very many levels. For example, in the Bernabeu spectators from the visiting team are limited to one tiny section of the stadium. There might have been 500 fans come in from Italy and they were all dressed in red and sitting away from everyone else in their own section. So what you have is 89,500 Real Madrid supporters dressed in white and 500 AC Milan supporters, dressed in red, all sitting together in their own little corner of the world. So you can imagine that they hardly stand out at all. And at the end of the game, regardless of who wins, the visiting team fans are made to sit in the stands for at least an hour while the home team fans clear away. Very wise me thinks.

Also different is that almost everyone pulls out a sandwich wrapped in foil at half time and sits in the stands and politely eats their snack. No popcorn or ice cream or nachos. Just a sandwich from home. The NFL and all their tailgaiters wouldn't know what to do.

And then there are the super fans. They sit behind a goal and create their own equivalent of a sports mosh pit. They spend the whole game, and I mean the whole game chanting God Bless Real Madrid, etc... all the while banging a thousand drums and tossing each other in the air. Again..very similar to the platinum seats at the Air Canada centre. Its uncanny really.

Also the same is the lineup in the mens and womens bathrooms. There was me in my bathroom. That was all. Just me. While next door, 5000 men did a happy dance in line while waiting for their turn.

Oh and as for the game, Real Madrid won. 2 – Nil. Yippee.

Now, while that was on Tuesday, Friday back in Prague we all went to watch the Czech Sparta hockey club take on their arch rivals from Pardubice. I'm not sure what the Pardubice team nickname is but the Czech dude beside me assured me that it was Scum Sucking Pig Dogs. Contrast the Tesla arena with the Bernabau: maybe 3000 people sitting in a barn, politely eating bad sausage and drinking beer. No foil wrapped sandwiches. And not nearly as noisy, although the people tried really hard. The only reason the kids agreed to go (other than the fact that we've told them that they need to experience stuff with us at least once and then if they don't like it, they don't have to go back) was for the food. But, OMG was it bad. The only thing recognizable were the chicken sandwiches from KFC and how bad is that when you are dining on KFC and thinking man, this is good.

However, the price was right. For 4 of us including parking, tickets and dinner...any guesses on the cost? Under $50. All in. And all for the privlidge of sitting on very very hard benches in a freezing cold arena and watching the home fans scream at the visiting fans. As for the bathrooms, again there wasn't any lineup but I did have to play, find the toilet paper. Looking for toilet paper after you sit down and start doing your thing is not a very good strategy. And it gets worse when you find out that there is one common toilet paper dispenser for all stalls and its on the outside by the sinks. Of course it is – totally makes sense right??? It especially makes sense when you come out of your stall to find the other two stalls occupied with men who haven't bother to close the doors and are just standing there doing their thing with their back to you.

The kids, of course, were bored out of their minds once the food was gone but Stu and I enjoyed it.

Now onto Act III. Czech television. We finally broke down a bought a TV. We had not had one up until a few weeks ago and even when we finally bought it, we could only get bad english shows from the 80's dubbed in Czech or we had to watch straight up Czech television. This is a story from Czech TV and I didn't even see it but Stu assures me that it happened.

There is a version of America's Got Talent in every country that I visit and there is one called Czech's got Talent. Here is a sample (remember I am apparently not making this up):

Week 1: Czech lady in lovely red dress shaves her head on national TV. Thats it.

Week 2: Same Czech lady comes back. Different red dress. Very revealing. Slits all the way up the thighs. No bra. Low plunging neck line. Does a wrigley kinda dance thing and pulls off her panties. ON NATIONAL TV. 8:00PM. ON CZECH'S GOT TALENT.

She's not done.

All to stripper kinda music, she pulls a whistle out from between her boobs and THEN ... and I can't believe I'm writing this..she puts the whistle between her thighs, makes sure its, um, inserted all good and tight like into the netherreaches (cause I don't read harlequin novels, I'm not sure what the right term for netherreaches really is) and proceeds to blow the whistle 3 times. ON NATIONAL TV. 8:00PM. ON CZECH'S GOT TALENT. I don't know if she won or not, but I think Stu voted for her.

The moral of the story: we now have satellite with full Sky TV programming at a cost of $1500. Caroline is no longer allowed to select the programming and we only watch things with the Disney logo.