My impressions from my first few days here: the dreaded vuvuzelas droning everywhere – and the myths about these plastic horns being “tradition” persist. People defend them even when it’s clear they’re not good for their health. Danny Jordaan, head of the local World Cup organizing committee, at a press briefing previewing the opening game between South Africa and Mexico in Johannesburg, had this to say about the vuvuzelas: “We can guarantee the noisiest World Cup ever.” That would be fine if people around the world were hearing our football songs, but instead they’ll hear buzzing plastic horns. I can’t.

I couldn’t help noticing the flags on cars. No surprises that the South African flag dominates, from the suburbs to the townships. England—largely because of the popularity of the English Premier League and the affinity and admiration by local South Africans for anything that comes from the music (celebrity, music, TV, etcetera), and their sense of cultural inferiority to things from there—gets a lot of support.

There’s also a large Portuguese community, mostly descendants of immigrants who left newly independent Mozambique and Angola for apartheid South Africa in the 1970s; many run small businesses serving the townships, so Portuguese flags pop up as well. That, and the fact that Deco, Carvalho, and Ricardo Pereira all play at Chelsea Football Club—again, English football.

Then there are the fans who’ve done the smart thing and fly two flags: South Africa and Argentina or Brazil (which, by the way, stands in as the team representing the “Black World” or the “Third World”). And then there’s Italy, for a generation that remembers 1982 and was brought up on Serie A of the late 1980s and early 1990s. These people are also just realistic in their quest to back a winner.

Tonight I watched the Kickoff Concert on TV. I was expecting the worst. Shakira wore a grass skirt—for the African World Cup, get it—and tried speaking a bit of Zulu (“Ngiyabonga mZantsi”—thank you, South Africa—though it came out as “my zansi”), then shook her hips.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, essentially the country’s priest, seemed excited to be out this late and said something about South Africa being the “butterfly nation.”

The best part of watching the World Cup here is the commercials (it’s the stuff I research for a book I’m trying to write on post-apartheid media politics, so I am technically working).

The commercials for Vodacom—one of the two cell phone companies that have a monopoly on the local market—are clever and funny, built around local TV characters. They all play off the dances in the music video for the breakout hit “Show Dem (Make the Circle Bigger)” and involve members of the national team, Bafana Bafana, doing the dance moves at every opportunity they get.

There’s also a ridiculous tv commercial playing on the imagined success of Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE. If you remember, that’s the policy framework through which President Thabo Mbeki and his cabinet aim to undo South Africa’s racial inequality (i.e., via aspirant racial capitalism). It’s for the local beer Hansa.

Remember the Castle Lite ad with Vanilla Ice? Now it’s MC Hammer’s turn. By the way, South African beer commercials have become a lucrative side gig for aging American entertainers. Remember Lou Gossett Jr.?

Meanwhile, my friend Herman Wasserman captures perfectly how the South African media debates anything the postapartheid government does and what eventually makes them believers: “You see the headlines: ‘Race war,’ ‘Bloodshed,’ ‘Chaos,’ ‘Plan B,’ ‘Don’t do it,’ ‘It’s not going to happen.’ And then . . . the celebration after. South Africans are late believers, but once they believe, they are fanatical believers.” Amen.