This July, I broke down and bought an air conditioner for my bedroom, even though I’m moving in August. It’s been too hot most days to spend time outside; there’s no enjoyment even in going to the park, much less in strolling through the city.

I used to hate the cold more than anything, but I think I’m being persuaded that heat is worse. If you learn to dress appropriately for cold, you can be out all day in it (unless it’s really awful, of course, but we don’t live in the arctic). Cold takes away from the enjoyment of the outdoors somewhat — you don’t want to sit on a park bench — but at least in New York, winter is still perfectly navigable. The subways are a pleasant temperature, the streets don’t smell like urine and garbage, and there’s plenty to do indoors.

The sort of nasty heat we’ve had this month is impossible to accommodate with clothing, short of maybe walking around in a bikini while being spritzed by servants. Subway platforms are their own special hell; sometimes easily as hot as an E-Z Bake Oven. And plenty of indoor spaces, including most of my apartment, aren’t air conditioned adequately or at all. Even more than in winter, living with nasty summer weather is a drastically curtailed existence of scurrying from habitable microclimate to habitable microclimate, screwing up one’s face against the awfulness of what’s in between.

Well, if you recall, France went all the way to the final that year, and it turned out that the World Cup became a huge part of our trip We watched so many publically televised matches that in the end I was dismayed to learn that our flight home was during the final; we missed Zidane’s head-butt and France’s defeat by Italy.

Up until that point, though, we were able to experience, if not completely share in, the mounting excitement as France advanced further and further. It started with an early France-Togo match in a tiny pub on the one-street town of Chaumont, where the end of the game found us doing shots of pear cognac with the locals and pogoing in the streets with delight.

We saw France beat Brazil in a small pub in Arles — rather surreally, the innkeeper started blaring Van Halen’s “Jump” from the speakers the second the game was called.

Our World Cup experience ended on what was arguably an even more exciting victory than the final would have been: the qualifying match. We were in Aix-en-Provence, where every restaurant in the entire city was restructured around a giant TV and where we were lucky to grab the last two seats in one bar to watch the game against Portugal. After France won, the entire city, from yobboes to grannies, made a run for a big fountain in the center of town where singing and much fire ensued.

It was thrilling and slightly scary to see such a whipped-up mob, but the joy was definitely contagious. Nationalism was high, and the French were reveling in their Frenchiosity with unashamed pride and delight.

Again out of complete oblivion with regards to all things sporting (at least on my part), this year we decided to make that trip to Germany after all, and wouldn’t you know it, that little soccer tournament was going on at the same time. And this time, it wasn’t France but Germany who looked to be going all the way. What are the odds??

We watched in the square of a huge Bratwursthaus in Nurnberg as Ghana beat the USA, which resulted in some surprisingly loud celebrations late into the night. Who knew Nurnberg had a Ghanan contingent? We then returned the next afternoon (two hours early to get a seat) to see Germany v. England.

To avoid our being taken for Brits due to the language we spoke, Scott displayed his new loyalty:

When the Germans took England down 4-1, the results were thunderous. The car horns started immediately and didn’t stop—and by didn’t stop, I mean not one second of silence–for several hours. We walked out to the main street in front of the Hauptbahnhof where the street had been partially blocked off and a parade of cars full of celebrating Germans was slowly circling around and around.

What struck me most was how rare it felt to see so many German flags. Though I’ve lived in Germany twice and traveled there extensively, I realized that the flag has never been a common sight.

In the next few days I asked my German friends a lot of questions about this. It turns out that Germans never, NEVER display the flag—it’s considered to be in poor taste. Although the current black, red, and gold German flag (actually the flag of the original Weimar Republic) has been a national symbol for more than a hundred years, and although the Nazis disparaged it and even outlawed it in favor of the older black, white, and red flag (oh yeah, and that companion flag with the swastika), most Germans still feel deep discomfort about the implied nationalism that flying a flag symbolizes. It’s not officially illegal to fly a flag (as it is to change your name unless it’s Hitler, for example, or to deny the Holocaust), but it’s “unüblich”—it’s just “not done” (as it is to name your child Adolf). Totally taboo. The national shame that most Germans feel has made such a gesture almost impossible for about 60 years.

The first time this changed, apparently, was in 2006, when the World Cup was in Berlin. The presence of so many people waving so many different national flags on German soil loosened something in the Germans, and there was some sort of unspoken agreement that maybe it wouldn’t be in poor taste to fly the flag as long as it was ONLY during the World Cup. And fly it they do—much like most other really invested countries, I imagine, you can buy just about anything with a German flag on it during the Cup. Between 2006 and 2010, such patriotic paraphernalia, or “Fanartikel” as they’re called, became somewhat scarce again, but a little crack had been made in the wall of shame that prevented such displays.

This year, according to my friends, the availability of “Fanartikel” was even greater. We saw German flags everywhere, including several cars whose hoods had been repainted in those colors. The frenzy was intense.

I even saw the Bundesdienstflagge, which is normally only used by the government; this has even sketchier connotations because of the “iron eagle.”

However, it’s really just the flag that the DDR used between the war and the reunification, at which time the old Weimar flag (sans the eagle) was chosen for the country as a whole.

I mean, it’s not like the Spanish were restricting themselves to a patter of polite applause on Sunday—pretty much everyone but the US goes bananas for the World Cup, and I imagine by 2014 our already shamelessly jingoistic nation will be close behind in this trend—but I couldn’t help wondering whether the repression of any sort of display of national pride, the almost formally enforced guilt and anti-patriotism with which many Germans live, had created a climate in which during this one short period when it’s okay to wave the flag, they really blow it out with all they have before they have to fold up the colors and cloak their national identities in their historic shame.

For a long time, I’ve been somewhat bitter about this. I was a Spanish major in college, and had opportunities to study in Spain, but was repeatedly talked out of it by my mom, who said I’m a lonely person who needs people; without my friends, what if I just retreated into myself and never came out? I thought that I was a strong enough person to speak back to my mother, but I wasn’t. It made me worried. What if I did just retreat into myself?

Well, having retreated into myself plenty in the intervening years, I’ve learned that I do get sick of being alone and go to pretty extreme measures not to be, if necessary. But by then I’d entered a lifestyle of cyclic poverty and constant work in my doctoral program. We’re not funded appropriately (or at least my entering class wasn’t—new students get benefits, and older students weren’t thought of), so I’ve been teaching between 6 and 10 classes a year to be able to afford my apartment and conference travel, all while trying to study and write a dissertation. A few thousand bucks and a month off of work were things out of my most insane fantasies.

Meanwhile, I developed a bad attitude about the sort of people who talk about traveling all the time. If you read personals ads, you quickly learn that men in NYC define themselves primarily through how often they have “traveled.” Going places is all the personality they have. Thinking art and food is better somewhere else is all the taste they have. Listening to people speak foreign language in the streets is all the intelligence they have. You can buy all this, if you have time and money.

It also gives you the right to think some lower-middle-class girl from Kansas must be ignorant and tasteless because she’s only studied the languages and cuisines you’ve encountered in their native habitat. I’m in the midst of some drama trying to get my passport, and let me tell you, if I hear the sentence, “You don’t have a passport?!” one more time, I’ll punch someone in the nuts. I live and teach in New York. I am not ignorant of the existence of the world.

So I’ve still got this chip on my shoulder, class-wise, about traveling.

Some of my friends, including some from Europe, have a romantic vision of how I’ll be changed by going there, how it will make me see things differently and recalibrate my life. I am not sure this will happen, exactly, in that I think they mean something about my political perspective, but if I get any more leftist I’ll come around the other side. If it happened that in my travels, I discovered a magical place where I am universally regarded as sexy and cool, I don’t think I’d come back at all. I’d just stay there and be worshiped as a god. Maybe there’s something I’m not getting.

I’m looking forward to my trip because I will be doing an interesting program of study with some people I think I will enjoy, and I get to see my friends abroad. I look forward to taking my German out for a spin, though everyone tells me I won’t get to use it much, and walking around some old streets I’ve read about. I don’t expect to come home and write a personals ad that starts: WELL-TRAVELED, WORLDLY ISO SAME.

This could mean something as mundane as my view out the window:

Escalator shots:

Attempts to capture my image among the grime:

Observations regarding grand and modern train stations:

Lots and lots of train and bus interiors:

Simple objects that seemed staggeringly beautiful to me:

Schedule signs:

Fellow travelers:

Finally, there were the combination shots, which captured several of the other elements: