The air is thick with humidity that turns your skin moist and your hair frizzy, the type of humidity that leaves beads running down your forehead in minutes and makes clothes stick to your back like glue.
In the summer of Houston, air conditioning and water are the two most valuable resources and sometimes it’s not water that is atop the list. The humidity and heat of Houston summer hits you right in the face like the right hook of a top heavyweight. It’s humidity that makes your glasses fog up early in the morning when you walk out of the hotel and makes you wonder just how anybody gets through the day without three meals and three showers.
Have you caught on to the idea of humidity yet? OK, enough for now.
This year’s World Cup adventure for my fiancée, Johanna, and me extends to five of the 16 host cities, four in the U.S. and one in Canada. Throughout the next few weeks, I’ll be taking readers behind the scenes at what it was like not as a member of the media, but as a fan in each city and each stadium — what the city was like and what the stadium experience was like to make the fan experience as seamless as possible.
Our first stop was Houston, a place I’ve visited multiple times. This time, it was to find out the fan experience and cheer on my ancestral homeland, Germany, as it made its 2026 World Cup debut against Curaçao, the first-time qualifiers.
