Super Bowl Monday Morning

As most of you probably know, the largest American sporting event took place this past weekend with the widely despised and clearly superior New England Patriots defeating the Seattle Seahawks for their 4th Super Bowl title. It was a tremendous game that left most of us including myself on an emotional roller coaster and could go down as the best Super Bowl in history. I'm still in shock of what happened, and honestly haven't stopped smiling. While I probably would have preferred to be in the United States for the game, gouging myself on chicken wings and snack food, the experience of watching the game in Europe was different and still very enjoyable.



At home, I would spend Super Bowl Sunday not doing much, waking up late, lounging around, maybe do some homework, watch the puppy bowl as my warm up before finally getting together with others to watch the game. This year started off no different, but with kick off at 0:30, I had a lot more time to kill, which is why I made the spontaneous decision around 16:30 (look at me using that 24:00 clock) to travel to Ghent and visit the last day of its annual Lichtfestival (or Light Festival, if you couldn't figure it out). For a roundtrip ticket of 10 euros per person, a group of us were able to spend a couple of hours strolling the streets of Ghent and marveling at the gorgeous city and the ridiculous light instillations set up around the city. There must have been 40 or so different instillations around the city, and with only a couple of hours to work with, we maybe got see half. They were truly incredible displays, ranging from projections on buildings,

different uses of orbs and lightbulbs and other installations,

creepy musical shows featuring kids,

and something similar to one of those hammer strength games you see at carnivals. See for yourself:

Shoutout to Stephanie for thinking my phone was on camera. I swear I made it to the top.

It was a fantastic way to spend a Sunday night and I wish I had gotten there earlier to see more of the displays, which from what I have hear were just as cool. Ghent itself was a beautiful city with a nice walking area around downtown flanked by several enormous churches. I didn't get to see much of it in my short time there and am hoping to return at some point later semester.

Now on to the Super Bowl.

The group of friends I travelled to Ghent with and I went through the day wondering where we were going to watch the game that night. Our usual sports pub hangouts were charging cover fees and we found out during the day that they were overbooked and wouldn't be letting more people in so we needed to improvise. We decided on a smaller pub closer to my apartment and set out there only to discover it closed by 11. Sundays in Europe, man. We ended up going downtown to try our luck with whatever we found. We ended up at Celtica, a popular Irish pub/disco that we been to multiple times before. The place was relatively quiet when we arrived around 12 and had the game on. We grabbed a table in the back, and looked to enjoy the game.

This is when the experience got interesting. The bar had a deejay that night, and the dance floor happened to be right next to our table. They weren't playing the volume of the game, which was fine, we were just happy to watch the game without paying a cover. As the game started and fellow Pats fan Nick and I got heavily engaged in the game, we garnered the weird looks of the Europeans on the dance floor. We had several guys approach us and explain how weird they thought it was that we were so entranced with this game they couldn't understand while they were having fun on the dance floor. When I looked over at the dance floor and all I saw was a group of guys surrounding their 1 or 2 girl friends, I knew I wasn't missing much, and focused back on the game.

The rest of the night is history, and you probably don't need me to recount it for you, but i can assure you it included me yelling the name Tom Brady a lot and me making a fool of myself when Malcolm Butler intercepted that pass. The game ended about 4:00 our time, and we decided to wait it out until the metro started running again at 5:00. When the bar was closing down around 4:30, we got up to leave when i discovered that, despite there always being a member of our group keeping eye at our table, my coat was nowhere to be found. Unfortunately that jacket also contained my gloves, IPod Classic (which Apple doesn't even make anymore!) and a portable battery charger. I was heated, but the events I had just witnessed kept me calm enough to deal with the situation. It's tough, but these kinds of things happen here and I just need to be more careful. When I made it home that morning, I collapsed in my bed, and slept with pride and appreciation that I have been able to witness the Greatest Quarterback ever from the beginning of his career with the Greatest Coach in NFL history. You can argue that, but at this point there is no denying it. Go Pats! Cheers!