The Best Cheering Section

Alcohol of the Day: Carlsberg (I know, I'm being unoriginal but there were limited choices)

It's the penultimate day for us here in London.  We're running out of time, energy, and money (sort of).  But, we press forward.  As the British say, keep calm and carry on.

I've been having issues getting to the events on time.  This mostly has to do with me having no idea how long it will take to get from here to anywhere, especially on the Tube, and even more especially after getting off the Tube.  A lot of the venues, particularly ExCel, are a fair jaunt from the station.  It's really well marked with both signs and people, but it's discouraging when you've been walking for ten minutes and you come across a sign or a person that says you're ten minutes away and your event started fifteen minutes ago.

When we got to the table tennis arena, we heard a loud cheer and then people started walking in the opposite direction.  It turns out that we had missed the first quarterfinal of the session.  That was unbelievable, given that we were about 25-30 minutes late.  The second match was an amazingly close one, with the German guy leading 2-0 and the Danish guy coming back and winning 2 sets in a row, and then winning the fifth.  We thought it was over, but then we found out that it's best out of 7, which means that in the first match, one of the guys must have crushed the other (and he did: I looked it up later, and the guy from Chinese Taipei, AKA Taiwan, demolished the Romanian guy).  The German took the 6th set, so it was down to the last which the German won.

The most interesting part of the match was the audience.  The Danish guy, Michael Maze, had the loudest cheering section up front.  They would sing and clap between most of the points.  And they were really coordinated, singing one song and then a different one.  They had a relatively large repertoire, and the reason why I remember the guy's name is because they repeated it over and over and over again.  I think it got to the point where the German's fans tried to chime in but they were less impressive.  Not to mention the fact that I had no idea what either of them were saying.

"I had a way then losing it all on my own"