German TV Sucks

As many of you know, we haven't watched much TV here because all we get is German Cable. We could have spent a decent amount of money to buy a satellite dish and then Sky TV from the UK, but when we thought about "writing the check" it just didn't seem to make sense to spend all of that money just to watch TV.

This means we are relegated to watching only two English speaking channels, BBC and CNN. We occasionally watch Eurosport and other channels that sometimes carry sports because you don't really need to understand the commentators to get the enjoyment out of the game. Then there is the occasional Bloopers show, again, you don't need to understand the host to laugh at a guy getting whacked by his kid with a wiffle ball bat.

Today it got worse. The World Championship for Road Racing is being hosted in Stuttgart, Germany today. It is only a 1 day race, but all of the big names come out for it to win the honor of being the World Champion and wear the rainbow jersey all next year. According to the TV listings, it was supposed to be on two channels, RTL and Eurosport. Well, RTL had the Formula 1 race from Japan on. The race must have been seriously delayed from rain. When it was supposed to end, it was just at lap 7 of 67. Cycling was pre-empted. So off to Eurosport. YES! They had the race - live!

So here I am having lunch, doing some work on the computer, listening to the iPod and watching the race. After the 7th lap ended, the TV goes to commercial. Time to get up to get a drink. I come back to find Eurosport has changed their programming in the middle of the race to the Women's World Cup Final between Germany and Brazil! What happened to the race? I flipped through all 30 channels and found the soccer match on twice, F1 still going strong and some other auto race as well. But no cycling. Oi!

UPDATE: After RTL finished the F1 race, they did not go to Cycling, instead a dubbed version of the A-Team - Go Mr. T!