Here it is not humanly possible not to know it is in Germany, unless you managed to skip all TV news and newspapers and magazines and occasional conversations with... anybody, since last Christmas.

Anyway, I am part of that even smaller minority of people who are completely uninterested in soccer, so I don't even play it

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy people have fun with soccer. It's just that I, persoanlly, find it mostly boring and irrelevant. During the world cup I feel like an alien in my own country , but that's not a bad feeling for all the reasons you listed before. Rome without traffic is just impossible to imagine!