The Journey to Joburg

It's been quite a few days here in sunny Johannesburg, complete with lots of traveling and soccer. The city is covered with World Cup stuff, with banners adorning every street post and flags draped on nearly every car. I'm really looking forward to Wednesday, when South Africa plays their next game. In the center of a shopping area near where we are staying, they've set up a massive video board where they show every game, and I'm sure it will be packed on Wednesday night. For sake of brevity I'll hit a few of the highlights thus far and add more later once I get to a computer, as writing via blackberry is proving to be quite challenging.
A bit of a scary moment before we had even gotten off the ground in New York. We had a bulkhead seats, and thus a few valuable extra inches of leg room, and were settling in when a man sitting next to us asked us if we could move back a row so his wife and his son could sit with him. Normally I wouldn't care, but it was a 13 hour flight, so we both said no. It was at this point that he got up, grabbed a second kid from his wife, this one a baby. As he sat back down next to us, we quickly realized that this guy was playing hardball when he woke the baby up and it promptly began screaming. He let it simmer for a moment, then turned to me and coldly said "I guess you're just going to have to deal with it." Well, we didn't; moving became a necessity when shortly after takeoff this same demon child, acting out its father's will, began screaming directly into my ear. At that point, the cramped legs and inability to move out of the row seemed like very pleasant alternative.
The Dubai airport is absurd. There's simply no other way to put it. It looks like a shopping mall which happens to have airplanes coming in and out. The abundance of fluorescent lighting causes you to lose track of what time it is, almost like a casino. My personal highlight was seeing two men hovering over a suitcase, into which they were carefully packing carton upon carton of cigarettes, presumably to resell somewhere else. Hooray capitalism!
Coming up later: USA vs. England, a visit to a game park, and Netherlands vs. Denmark. For now, dinner and Italy vs. Paraguay on the TV. There are hopefully some pictures attached to this, all taken via cell phone, so I can't promise quality.