Although I’m not too interested in the American footbal, the Super Bowl is The Event in the US, and so today I absolutely had to go somewhere to watch the match between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons (obviously I ignored the names of the two participating teams until the beginning of the match). You might have heard that the match was really exciting, with an incredible comeback by the Patriots which led them to a last-second draw and hence to the overtime, when they eventually triumphed.

However, I must say that I was a bit “disappointed” in noticing that here in Berkeley the event didn’t generate a huge enthusiasm: I saw many people around during the match and bars were not full. So the expression “America stops for the Super Bowl” doesn’t really apply here. Indeed, I should not be surprised: I know that California, and in particular the Bay Area, and in particular Berkeley are quite peculiar in the US, from many points of view. Basically “it’s not really America here”, just to use an expression that I have heard more than once. Maybe I will give more details about this aspect in one of my future posts: for the moment it is sufficient to say that this is probably a good thing for a European 🙂