04 June 2002 Five days after the lightning storm, the internet is still down in our building. Six or seven hubs fried across campus, I'm told, and replacements are, take your pick, "already here, and you will be fixed this afternoon," "due tomorrow," or "due this week." So I go to the internet cafe every morning, sit as far as possible from the smokers, bruise my fingers on the cheap, stiff keyboards, and read email and check cartoons. In the afternoon, I swing by the Foreign Affairs Office and commandeer a computer for an hour to read longer articles.

Li Xu left for England yesterday. All last week I kept asking him if he was excited to go to another country for the first time in his life, and he complained that he was not looking forward to the trip, because he would be a translator and have to make arrangements everywhere and yadda yadda. Last night as we waited by the van to the airport, he admitted he was excited.

Some students came over today to watch the first China World Cup game, against Costa Rica. The teams seemed fairly well-matched in the first half, except that several of the Chinese players had to be carried off on stretchers while none of the Costa Ricans seemed even to wince. In the second half, Costa Rica came out strong and China played lackadaisically, and two quick goals early in the second half were decisive against China.

After dinner I ambled over to the TV room and caught the last forty minutes of Japan-Belgium. At first I couldn't tell who was playing because both sides had light-brown-skinned players with a variety of hair colors, but after careful observation and consultation with the schedule I determined that essentially all of the Japanese players had dyed their hair, while the Belgians were simply very tan. My timing was perfect - it was zero-zero when I sat down, but within minutes Belgium scored a goal on a bicycle kick, horribly executed but improbably precise. Two minutes later, one of Japan's many brilliantly nimble and flashy forwards danced his way past three defenders and toed the ball past the goalkeeper, another implausibly accurate shot from a foot attached to a flailing leg attached to a body engaged in the business of falling to the ground in a heap. The Saitama crowd came alive and stayed loud throughout the rest of the half, which featured another goal from each side.

Perhaps I've been influenced by my stay here in China, but I found it far easier to root for Japan than China.