WC2006: Franz Is Following Me

MAINZ (4:22 local time) -- My traveling companions having left in the middle of the night for Cologne, I'm once again on the road by myself. This time, I was the one explaining how the trains worked to people in the wrong seats - what a difference two weeks makes.

I found my Mainz host in the train station and we went back to his family's apartment - a fantasticnew condo looking out over the city. It seems a little bit post-modern in a decidedly German way, particularly in the repetitiveness of design of the entry level, which confounds me almost every time I look for the correct elevator. After getting settled, we drive to another town along the Rhein to see an exhibition on Andy Warhol. On the landing of the staircase between floors of the hall is a painting of Franz Beckenbauer from the eighties. You simply can't get away from this guy.

Back in Nuremberg, we started trying to predict when the camera would find him, as he is supposedly attending around 56 or 57 of the 64 matches.

But finding him in a painting in a smallish town outside a non-match city seems the very definition of ubiquitous.