Sport

Lets talk about sports (if you don't like sports you can probably just skip this completely). Europeans love sports. Sadly they're not too fired up about baseball or American football, so I've had a hard time following the playoffs or the Seahawks. However, they love the "other" football. Last weekend my sister and I got tickets to FC Barcelona, one of the best football teams in the world. It's always been a goal of mine to watch a real football match in Europe and it was great to actually sit in the stadium, watching them play. Even though we were sitting at the very top of the stadium (the "cheap seats" still cost 50 Euros each), the view was great. And cheering along with 90,000 fans is always fun, no matter what sport you're watching. And since the fans here actually know how to play football, they actually cheer at things like a nice cross or a nice back pass.

My favorite sports-related discovery so far is that Europeans don't boo. Instead they whistle to voice displeasure. I've heard this on TV before (of course), but hearing 90,000 angry fans whistling at the ref is actually mush more deafening than a boo. More piercing, too. Sadly, though, I've discovered that I will probably never be huge football fan. The more I watch, the more I get upset by all the flopping and acting that the players do. My favorite sports bar (creatively called "SportsBar") has a lot of TVs and occasionally I'll get to see American football, football, and rugby all at the same time. Watching soccer players dive all over the field is really difficult to watch when you see guys slamming into each other on the other screens. And it's a problem the leagues can fix too! But that's a discussion for another time.

Of course, it's getting harder to watch American football, too. Everyone knows this, but the game is so, so slow. Rugby and football are 45 minutes of continuous action. American football is what, 10 seconds? Followed by 45 seconds of waiting? Followed by a commercial break? I was watching an American football game on BBC's station last weekend and it was actually pretty funny. The BBC station doesn't know how to deal with all the commercial breaks in our football games. They actually have a second set of commentators that they cut to during our breaks who then spend a minute or two analyzing the last 15 minutes of the game. They literally don't have enough commercials to play.

So that leaves rugby as my new sport of choice. Continuous action, lots of hard hits, no diving or acting... There's just one problem: I still have no idea what's going on. Well I have an idea, but I couldn't name a single rule. But it's fun to watch!

And speaking of fun things to watch, I also discovered that Barcelona hosted the Ping Pong World Championships last weekend! As a ping pong aficionado I wasted no time in securing a couple of tickets to watch that. I've never seen professional ping pong before (who has?), but it was a lot of fun. We went on day one (out of three). 10 Euros gets you table-side seats and 3 hours of ping pong. There isn't much to say, I guess: they're really good and I had a great time. Kelsey and I were the only two cheering for the Canadian player (representing North America), but he got killed in the one match we saw him play. I took some pictures (of course) and even managed to take a couple of short videos.