World Cup

The World Cup is more than halfway done now, but it's still a big deal. Of course, the big disappointment here was Italy going out in the first round, after tying "lowly" Paraguay and New Zealand and then losing to Slovakia. People were certainly not expecting a repeat performance of 2006, and were heaping criticism on the coach even before the tournament started for picking the wrong players, but the final game was nevertheless a blow (although they had to admit that the Italian team really only started playing 15 minutes before the end). Since then, the number of Italian flags hanging on balconies has decreased somewhat, but the interest in the tournament has remained, at least from what I can tell at work.
Italy being Italy, it's of course more difficult to watch the games here than it should be. Since the state-funded RAI networks only bought the rights to some of the games (about one a day), the others being shown on subscription-only Sky, most games during the day are also not available for online streaming. So for some weekend games, we've gone to an Irish pub downtown (where we saw the glorious German victory over England this past weekend), otherwise we're reliant on some poor quality pirated streams of ESPN, BBC, or Chinese TV.