Superbowl is coming up to the excitement of everybody, pic: cartoonaday.com
THE annual event is coming up. No it is not Christmas and I certainly don’t mean Valentine’s Day either. I mean Superbowl, one of the most holy and revered sporting events in the US. There are others, but I don’t now anything about baseball and World Championships and basketball and whatever very important events they have. But I know a thing or two about American football and I have been to a Superbowl party for 10 years straight. That makes me an expert – at least for an expat from Germany.
Every year through some mysterious process which I don’t tend to follow, 2 teams end up playing the Superbowl. Whoever wins is the champ. I am sure they get something cute to put on the mantel and tons of money. This year a catastrophe was narrowly avoided: the home team, the San Francisco 49ers, qualified and the Patriots (the Boston team) was a hot contender to play the 49ers. Now that would have thrown me into a big conflict over whom to root for as I also spent two extremely educational and very pleasurable years in Boston. Alas, the Patriots lost to the Ravens (Baltimore) and so I won’t have to face this conflict. Go 9ers!
If you want to know about the football rules, there are better sources than this blog to educate you. I can follow the game, yell “interference” with the best of them or say something like “3rd and 8” with a grave face if it pertains to “my team” but the subtleties are lost on me, sort of like off-side in soccer.
The point, though, is that Superbowl is an excuse to party. And by that I mean drinking beer during the day and eating food that would generally not pass the “healthy, whole-grain, gluten-free” test but will score high on fat, carbs, spices, and preservatives – and lots of it. It’s also the day where the man cave turns into the center of the house and the poor schmucks who don’t have a man cave dust off all sorts of comfy reclining chairs that have been banned to the basement by wives with a finer taste in interior design . Wives/girl-friend pass platters with nacho chips and salsa during the game, chat among themselves and wait for their moments: the abundant ads. Superbowl ads are super expensive and legendary and anticipated as eagerly as the game. A classical radio show host question has become: “what do you look forward to most? The game, the ads or the snacks.” In recent years companies have started to leak sneak previews of their anticipated ads a couple of weeks before the Superbowl – as if these things were big movies. This years anticipated ads include VW and Mercedes Benz, Coke, Best Buy and a bunch of others to be found here.
I do enjoy these events, they are so quintessentially American (although, where I live the majority of the Superbowl party attendees are of Indian or Chinese origin) – and a perfect excuse to eat junk food. Go, 9ers, go!
