I promised you, that I will tell you about my visit in the Veltins-Arena against Freiburg last week. Here I am.
It was a successful journey. We stayed at the Marriott-Courtyard Hotel near the Stadium and even nearer to the training centre. The game and the atmosphere in the stadium were great, Raul played very well, but I preferred the time after the game. He leads on his team-mates to celebrate the victory with the fans. He waves his hands to every person in the round who would celebrate this with him, in spite of the great effort that we could see. He’s running like an old man after the game. We think, people must carry him on the playing field and then re runs 90 minutes without having a brake and then someone must carry him away again….hihi…
The entrance to the hotel is located 20 metres beside the entrance to the dressing room of the training centre, but we first discovered this on Sunday morning looking out of our hotel-room window. There were many people and we immediately knew that there was training. But the team mates playing the day before weren’t there. They preferred to make a cross country run, but a hardcore Schalke Fan told us, were there cars were parking. Unhappily we didn’t saw Raul, but any other player and the trainer, thus we took photos and spoke a little bit with them. Raul was definitely there, too, because we saw his car. While we have waited, we met people from all parts of Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark and spoke with a Japanese Woman. We believed she is about Atsudo Uchida in Gelsenkirchen, but she came especially to see Raul and talk with him. He took a long time to take a shower, or had any other appointment inside and we couldn’t wait longer. What a pity! The Japanese woman had a lot of time and we hope she met him, after we had gone. It’s amazing how scattered his fans are all over the world.
Finally we must say it was crazy how close we get to the players and how patient they are.