Football

 

Being an American expat in Europe is easier, I suspect, than being an expat from say, Korea or Venezuela. For while Koreans and Venezuelans themselves may be most welcome and treated with hospitality in their adopted countries, it is unlikely that they would be able to come across the same amount of cultural influences from their respective homelands as would an American.

To test this hypothesis, I took a walk through my hometown of Halle, Germany last weekend with an eye out for the English language and a side order of American influence. My stroll yielded the following results:

Up the street from a nearby English language school is the newly-opened bistro “American Food”, which serves a selection of hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries and ice cream.
Big Daddy’s USA Sportwear is a new hip-hop/sporting apparel store.
There are three skateboard shops within a five minute walk of each other.
We have both McDonald’s AND Burger King.
There is a Subway sandwich shop on the market square.
There are several upscale bowling alleys around town.
There are various newsstands which sell National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and many other English language periodicals.

And lastly, if my tastebuds ever get a real hankering for American fare, I can shop in the pricey supermarket on the Market square. A little investigation revealed this partial list of yummies: Newman’s Own salad dressing, Hellman’s REAL Mayonaisse, Strawberry Fluff, Peter Pan and Snicker’s peanut butters, respectively, Heinz tomato soup, Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, Frank’s Red Hot sauce, Bisquik, maple syrup, Dorito’s tortilla chips, more than a few types of barbecue sauces, and, praise be, original Oreo cookies.

As far as entertainment goes, around the corner from our flat is the local video rental store, which has an ample and ever-growing supply of the latest Hollywood releases on DVD. We may be two months behind in release dates, but they get here eventually. Just last week, for example, Wedding Crashers became available.

Television is another area in which the American influence is noticeable, and not always for the good. Among the bright spots for me are Hogan’s Heroes re-runs (in Germany, mind you!) which I watch, and Desperate Housewives re-runs, which I do not. These are all dubbed in German, by the way. All German television is, which I find a bit sad. Because when I was in Copenhagen awhile back, I noticed that Danish television showed the English language version – with subtitles – of the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, National Geographic and even the Cartoon Network (How better to teach kids a foreign language?).

So as you can see, being an American expat in Halle isn’t the most difficult of things, and what I’m about to say shouldn’t be considered complaining.

It’s just that life here would be so much better if only more American sports were shown on television. American sports aren’t shown here because there are just too many other fascinating sporting events going on all the time: the Eurosport channel frequently devotes prime time to ski jumping, the biathalon, snooker, horse jumping and other equally gripping sports.

DSF, the very German version of ESPN, occasionally devotes time to soccer matches, which for lack of an option I have come to grudgingly enjoy, but otherwise they show random crap like poker or dart throwing or handball.

Now, I could shell out 150 Euro for a contract, another 100 for the equipment, and then 60 Euro per month thereafter for the premium satellite TV packages that include North American sports, but there we run into problems with length of contract. That is, if we leave the country before the contract finishes, we would be obliged to pay them anyway, which could end up gouging us for more than 700 Euro if we bolt early.

<Sigh>

So with these options, I have to very much rely upon the finicky Internet to keep up to speed. Which works for the most part: If I want to listen to NFL games, for example, there are several outlets, including nfl.com, which has live broadcasts as well as some really neat game ticker graphics. But while I have been able to find many video highlight shows - after the fact - for my favorite ball games, live broadcasting seems to be a thing of the future.

So as one who relies on the Internet for my American sports Jones, my vote for the best innovation of the year goes out to the iTunes people, who were clever enough to come up what they call “Bowl Blasts.” Essentially highlight reels of the four Bowl Championship Series games, bowl blasts are downloadable for 1.99 each and run between 15 and 25 minutes. And since I couldn’t see any of the live action, believe me, it was well worth it to see that loser from Florida State shanking kicks.

But stop the data stream! I recently learned that - praise be to the Terrible and Benevolent God of Football Majesty - a pub in town will be showing the Super Bowl this weekend. And with my hometown Steelers playing, what could be finer?

I suppose the answer to that is a kickoff time earlier than 12:30 in the morning…