Beer and Football

Football
--------
It's possible to watch live English football in Asmara even if, like us, you don't own a television. It's shown at bars and cinemas - the problem comes when you're looking for coverage of a game which doesn't involve the "big four" (Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool in descending order of popularity).

For example the Champion's League final was available but not the FA cup final and (most definitely) not the most important game of the season - the league one playoff final between The Mighty Leeds and Doncaster Rovers (maybe missing that was a blessing, though).

Last Wednesday, for Man U vs Chelsea, the Cinema Roma was packed to the rafters and rocking even though the game didn't finish until gone half-past midnight Eri-time. Whooping, cheering, shirts coming off and people leaping in front of the screen when the goals went in. But ... no animosity between rival groups and no drunken behaviour. Of course the majority (just) of the people were pleased with the result ... for me, the final was my worst case scenario. Very difficult to pick whom I wanted to lose the most!

The combination of Saudi pictures and English commentary (resulting in a good 10 seconds out of synch action versus voice "Lampard turns, hits the crossbar" - when the ball's already up-field) didn't help much - but great fun all the same.

Beer
----
From talking to a guy who works for an Italian NGO with Eritrean Trade Unionists we now know exactly why there's no beer (it didn't make the hoped-for return over independence weekend) and, as we suspected, it's all due to record grain prices meaning that Eritrea can't afford to buy barley on world markets.

One thing this does show is that, whatever you want to say about the way Eritrea is run in its drive for self-reliance, it seems to have its priorities right, if beer and other grain-based alcohol are the first to go when prices rise, however much we volunteers may complain. The problem is that wheat and rice have to be purchased as well and bread and pasta have already partially disappeared though they can still be obtained at higher prices. So far, rice still seems to be readily available but how long will that situation last?

A note of disagreement with one former VSO volunteer, though - Justin Hill author of Ciao Asmara! who was here in the 90's and who (harshly in our opinion) described Asmara (formerly Melotti) beer as "the worst beer in the world" - well not when it's not there any more it's not!

P