TOUCHDOWN!!!
So this morning (Monday) at 4:30 am, about 25 Americans gathered at my friends' apartment to watch Super Bowl XL. My roomie and I spent Sunday night at their house so we could just wake up and watch the game, and everybody else came over at varying times throughout the morning. We attempted to be quiet for the neighbors' sake, but with more than 10 kids running around and the rest of us going between talking and cheering, there wasn't much hope for a peaceful morning.
Right before the Super Bowl, ESPN airs "The Road to the Super Bowl." I admit, I have no idea what this is about because I didn't get up at 3:30 am to watch it, but I will tell you about our own road to the Super Bowl here in South Asia:
Sometime within the past year, our city stopped having ESPN on the cable system. Since we're not in America, this means no Super Bowl. There are some restaurants in town with ESPN (they have dishes), but most of them are closed at 4:30 am, so we knew we had a problem. The first 2 ideas we thought of seemed like a long shot: rent a hotel room at a place that says they have ESPN and hope they actually do OR check someone into the hospital (where we know they have ESPN) and all pile into their room. We also asked a restaurant with a big screen TV if we could rend their facility, but that fell through as well.
Finally, my friend decided to attempt to get a satellite dish installed in time for us to watch the game at his house. This may seem like a simple solution, but nothing is ever simple here. The dish was installed quickly, but ESPN didn't start working until Saturday night at midnight! It was a close call, but fortunately it all worked out.
We had a great time this morning--hanging out, laughing, eating good food, catching up with people and enjoying a pretty good football game. I'll admit that I'm not the most knowledgeable football fan, but I enjoy a good game with good company, and I also think the Steelers quarterback, Big Ben, is really cute :) Overall, it was definitely worth getting up for. Hopefully I'll be able to stay away until a decent time this evening, watch the Super Bowl commercials I'm currently downloading (they don't play here during the game--we did see the halftime show, though), and then crash. Have a good one :)