This is going to be a great summer. I'm writing this here in Accra, Ghana with three of my best friends sleeping in rooms around my family's house, and we're lucky enough to be at the beginning of an adventure of a lifetime. This blog will be our way to connect with all of our friends and family as we go along these three weeks in Ghana and five weeks in South Africa for the World Cup. After four years of on-and-off planning it's crazy that it all came together in the end. And I couldn't be happier. I hope you guys enjoy reading this blog, we figured it would be way more simple to read one then four. I wanted to start off with a post that I wrote for the music blog that Moose and I started back in September '09 (http://jamandahalf.com) about the Coca Cola Official World Cup song, which luckily was a jamandahalf. It's a helluva catchy song, and one that we've been singing/whistling for months now, as well as being the inspiration for this blog's name.
Stay tuned in the next 8 weeks for our musings starting in Ghana and ending in South Africa. We wish you all were here with us, but hopefully this will make it feel like yall are a little closer.
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Once every four years, the world comes together for an event like no other. A truly international spectacle, for one month the world stops what it is doing to watch skilled athletes battle for the right to say that they truly are the best in the world, forever etched in both history and in the minds of millions, if not billions, worldwide. And as much as I love curling, I'm not talking about the Winter Olympics.
The World Cup is arguably the greatest spectacle on earth. Hundreds of thousands of spectators come from every part of the world to watch soccer, cheer, get rowdy, and have the time of their lives. This summer, three of my closest friends and I are lucky enough to join the crowds and are headed to South Africa. Flights have been bought, we got lucky enough to get tickets to 5 games each, and all we need is a little face paint. We're going.
No World Cup is complete without an official song, and lucky for us, this year they picked a jamandahalf for millions to sing this summer. Somali-Canadian rapper K'naan's remix to a song, Wavin' Flag, off his most recent album Troubador was chosen out of thousands of applicants. Although some criticize picking K'naan, suggesting that an African artist living in Africa would have been more appropriate, K'naan has used his music and newfound fame to highlight the ills of his country as much as any artist out there (and the song is a helluva lot better than this haha). Incorporating lyrics about the game, the song is an uplifting and joyous celebration of people. Listening to this jam, it's hard not to get excited about this summer. And while the recent Copenhagen conference on global warming and the UN would seem to prove otherwise, the World Cup reaffirms that every now and then the world can figure it out.
I can almost see it now. A sea of flags waving. Individually celebrating their own country, but together, a celebration of humanity.
