Super Bowl? In Sevilla?

Yes, that's right, I watched the Super Bowl. In Spain. At 12:30 in the morning. In an Irish pub with just about every other American in Sevilla. Even the bartenders spoke English (they were all from England or Ireland). We made friends with Peter, our Irish bartender. I tried to teach him about football. He said it was the first time he'd ever actually watched a football game all the way through. Sabriye and I got him cheering for the Packers! He thought Aaron Rodgers looked more like the quintessential quarterback than Ben Roethlisberger, and if anyone knows what a true quarterback should look like, it's an Irishman. We also enjoyed making fun of how they showed Bono with an American flag in his jacket as part of the pregame-patriotic-America-history-football-freedom show. In his words, "Not even Ireland likes Bono."

I was actually incredibly happy the whole time we were at the game. And we stayed the. whole. time. I got home at 4:40 AM and had to get up at 8:30 for class the next morning. It's like my mom said, I'm young, I can survive. And survive I did; I made it to class on time and I went to my first class at the university today! Success! But more about that later. This was one of the most American things I've ever done, made even more American because of the fact that I'm in Europe. We all came to realize that we're not very patriotic at all at home, but last night everyone was so pro-America. Everyone except Christina Aguilera, who apparently messed up the lyrics to the national anthem? I couldn't hear her over the noise in the bar, so I'm taking the internet's word for it. The deal we got at the pub was pretty good. There was a buffet included in the admission fee where they had wings, guacamole and chips, hot dogs, and french fries. Pretty much everyone was American and speaking English. It was probably bad, but considering it was the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl is essentially a national holiday I think it was warranted. I just kept saying how happy I was. I think it helped with homesickness; being around a bunch of Americans eating American food and watching American football was a nice break from the typical complete immersion. As I said, I was rooting for the Packers along with Sabriye, while Natalie and Leann were on the Steelers' side. Natalie's fandom was decided entirely based on colors--she had black and yellow she could wear, but no green. It was a fun little rivalry. None of us were so invested in the game that we would be upset either way. And it turned out to be a really good game, did it not? I'm just assuming everyone watched it because it's the Super Bowl. Even if it's just for the commercials.

Ah, the commercials. Fun fact: the US commercials do not get shown in Spain! And it's terrible! We ended up seeing the same 5 British commercials--all of which were dumb and not funny and not even trying to be funny and really annoying and some involved chipmunks--the entire time. It bummed me out a lot, everyone knows the commercials are super important. Well, everyone except Peter the Irish bartender. We had to explain that to him, too. Another downside was the halftime show. The Black Eyed Peas? I weep for my generation. The only plus side was Usher. I kind of love Usher, but as a joke (but not really), so seeing him do the splits kind of made up for that whole thing where the Black Eyed Peas were there and performed and wore strange light-up suits and had aliens as their backup dancers. At one point I pointed to the dancers on the field and proudly proclaimed, "My people!" Alien robot.

Overall, the European Super Bowl Experience was very fun, but I did miss eating spinach dip with my parents or chips, salsa, and sour cream with my roommates in Ann Arbor. And it made today a bit difficult. I got up at about 8:30 to get ready for class, which was at 9:30 but we had to leave at 9 because it takes almost a half hour to walk to the program center. (Usually I can go faster if it's just me because my normal walking speed is at least a power walk for most people, and when I'm walking with others I get yelled at to slow down a lot.) The class I had first was creative writing, and I'm quite excited about it. Since I love creative writing in English, doing it in Spanish will be both challenging and really fun, I think/hope. Later I had my first class at the Universidad de Sevilla: Spanish theater from the Golden Age, specifically by the author Lope de Vega. I really enjoyed this one, too. The professor is really nice and seems to want to help out students. She isn't the original professor of the class, because apparently the other professor is sick and not going to teach this semester, so she's filling in. She told us she took this class and when she did there were too many readings, so she cut down on some of them from the original syllabus. A professor who wants us to do less reading? Sign me up. A lot of the people in the class are with Erasmus, the main Europe study abroad program. Three other girls from my program went to this class too, and there were two other Americans as well. My guess is there were fewer Spaniards because it's an optional class for their degree, so not as many people take it. The way picking classes works for us is we go to more than we'll need to check them out and see if we like them, then give a list of our preferences to the program director and hope there's space for us to take all of the ones we want. I have 3 backups at the university, none of which I actually want to take, so hopefully some combination of my primary 7 will work (we take 5 total). This Lope class seems good, though; I took a class last year on Golden Age literature in which we read a Lope work, so I have a little bit of background in the course material. And I'm choosing between this class and History of the US, which I think would be really interesting to take in a foreign country, but apparently the professor is boring, so I might just opt for this one. I'll have a lot of literature, but hey, I'm used to it.

Tomorrow I have six classes I want to visit, so it'll be a really full day. Here's hoping they all go as well as the first one! (They won't, but I've accepted that.)