How do you know it's World Cup?
When you look out your window at the tiny sea of umbrellas: Ukranians huddles in the rain to watch a game on the flat screen (but covered) television of an outdoor beer garden. Seriously, tiny sea: people standing on the concrete banks of a fountain, on park benches, on tip toes trying to catch a glimps of the game.
How do you know when Ukraine scores a goal?
You could be in a closet, earphones on and music blaring, head wrapped in three blankets and you'd still hear the cheering.
NOTE: closet/earphones/blankets thing not actually tested.
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Camp news:
Black Diamond is sending posters and stickers and Mammut is sending stickers. Lots of stickers (email from Mammut: "would 200 be enough?").
The girls finally named the camp. It is now called Edelweiss. My fault; I gave them final call. Luckily they didn't use some earlier things they came up with, like "Cliff of Friendship". I can live with Edelweiss, even though it's a German word for a camp run by Ukranians and conceived of and supported by Americans. Still, I understand the intent: I mean, it's a flower that grows in the mountains and you have to climb to go get it (even though I think of Sound of Music every time they say it). But getting to the flower represents goal setting, teamwork, and, of course, climbing. In true Ukranian tradition, the slogan they came up with is: "Together to the top". And Edelweiss does originally mean "nobel" (it also means "white", but we have enough skinheads around without worrying about that), so I can live with it.
Both the name and the slogan will now be on 50 tee-shirts. I'm about to leave the internet center now to go approve the final design. We'll see what the tee-shirt people came up with. My sketch of the Superman "S" symbol with a climber doing a roof move on the underside of top of the "S", reaching for a flower, being belayed by a person standing on the bottom part of the "S" was deemed to complex by the tee-shirt people. They said come back today and they'd have some options.
So we'll see.