5 Feb

Superbowl day! Not that anyone really cares about it here, but they still watch it. We met for lunch around 12:30 and I gave my prediction that the Steelers would win 34-20. I completely made up those numbers, but I still had the Steelers winning. At first we thought the game wouldn’t come on here until 2 a.m. which made us quite sad (since many had class at 10 the next morning) until we heard that Sky Sports would be airing the game live at 23:30. Ah, what relief. I spent my afternoon before the game doing more reading/research for class and getting organized. I think I napped a little bit too. We had dinner around 6 as usual and I started having misgivings about watching the whole game. I needed to visit the Spanish Rail Office in the morning to book/find out about tickets and I didn’t want to stay up too late and then not get an early start.

When 23:00 finally rolled around Gregg and I headed over to the Sky TV room. We were surprised to see it deserted and it turned out that they did manage to get Sky TV in the Common Room (which we heard only got regular channels and thus the game at 2 a.m.) and so most people watched it there. We just assumed they went out to a sports bar or something. Anyway, some other Brits in there got the special card for the TV and turned on the game. It was weird to watch/hear British announcers for football and especially to watch them try to talk intelligently about the game with American former players and sportscasters. They even left out the commercials which are really the best part of the show. We saw ads for Peugeot and Enterprise instead. Yeehaw. So, the game started out pretty pathetically and by halftime Gregg and I had had enough. The prospect of the Rolling Stones performing during halftime wasn’t enough to keep us watching, and the fact that it was already past 1 meant the game would last until 3.

So instead of watching the Superbowl, I read some more Oscar Wilde and called it a night around 2.