Tour de France, Tour de France, Tour de France!

And with that title, I hope I have saddled all of you with the endlessly repetitive 1983 Kraftwerk song of the same name. Incidentally, 'Kraftwerk' in German means 'power station' which is interesting if only because their electro-pop inspired a lot of what became the New Romantic movement in music in the early 1980s. And Duran Duran members John and Andy Taylor were both in a side project called The Power Station (also featuring noted Renaissance man and women's lib proponent Robert Palmer on lead vocals, no less.) Coincedence? Probably. I doubt any of those guys were consulting a German-English dictionary too often, to be honest.

In any event, the reference to Kraut electro-pop does have a purpose, which is that yesterday, after spending the morning and early afternoon reading most of Carol Shields's "Unless" -- a very good read so far -- I met up with a few friends from Brussels for a trip to Charleroi, where the first stage of the Tour de France was finishing. I was a bit surprised, after the train ride of 45 minutes, to find the town so empty. There were people about, certainly, but I really expected their to be big crowds to see such a massive sporting event. I guess Belgians are tough to impress.

Acting on Web research that suggested the "first group" would arrive in Charleroi at around 4:30, we got there shortly before 4 and walked to where the race's final stretch was. And, at 4:30, we did indeed get some riders. But they were mostly on motorcycles and in ridiculous parade-like floats advertising the sponsors of the race. Many of these floats contained young volunteers (I presume) who were distributing various tchotchkes and the like -- keychains, candy, etc. By tossing them into the crowd. To say there was a bit of a mob scene over some of these little trinkets would be to undersell it. I actually managed to snag a hat for a supermarket chain, but only because it almost hit me in the face where I sat, on a railing above the fray.

This marketing blitz went on for at least half an hour, if not longer. And all the trucks had megaphones and PA systems, all screaming about this product or that in French, and completely drowning out the race updates that were supposed to be telling us how far away the riders were.

So we waited and waited and waited, and then, after seemingly 1,000 cars and floats and motorcycles had passed us, suddenly there were riders coming down the hill, under the "1 km" sign a few hundred meters from us. (We were about 500m from the finish line.) And they got closer, and closer, and then blew by us, about 180 riders of the 189, all tightly packed in a peloton, as the French call it. And then they were gone.

Still, it was kind of neat to be there. Charleroi itself was pretty unremarkable. We went to a pizza joint for dinner -- it was the only place we could find that had vegetarian options, necessary for my friends -- and then took the train back to Brussels just in time to get to a very Anglo bar that had the Portugal-Greece Euro 2004 final. Greece scored about 10 minutes in to the second half, and despite Portugal's best efforts, made that lone goal hold up to become champions of Europe. Perhaps a good sign with the Olympics set for Athens later this year.