Super Bowl Monday

Yes, you read that correctly: Super Bowl Monday.  The Super Bowl started at 12:30am here in France during the wee hours of Monday February 6, 2012.  But, that’s not to say that Sunday the 5^th was a calm day for me.  After arriving home from a fun day in Paris late on Saturday I realized that the running water in my flat had stopped working.  I went to bed hoping a pipe was temporarily frozen but when I woke up there was no change: no kitchen sink, bathroom sink, toilet, or shower water.  I called my landlady and she advised me to ask around the complex and see if it was just my flat or the entire building.  After speaking to a few neighbors it became quite clear that it was just my flat with a water problem.  My landlady decided it would be too expensive/difficult to find a plumber who would come to my flat on a Sunday (remember, everything closes here) so she offered to put me in a hotel for the night.

The hotel room

Now, the plan had been to have some friends come over to my flat to watch the Super Bowl and luckily because the hotel room was big enough we could still have a “Super Bowl party” à Dijon.  An added perk was that my hotel room had a TV so we were able able to watch the Super Bowl on a French channel.  After settling into my hotel room, I met Jamie and Jim to have a coffee late in the afternoon (to ensure we’d be able to stay up until 4am!) and we planned what to get for Super Bowl snacks.  This is what we came up with:

Coke, biscuits & jam/nutella, cookies, chips,  candy,
peanuts and of course, coffee! ;)

We even bought red, white, and blue candies in honor of Pats colors:

Red Tagada candy and Blue and White Smurfs candy

After shopping we just had to wait for 12:30am to finally get here!  In the meantime I used MacDo’s WiFi (my hotel room didn’t have WiFi) to Skype briefly with my Mom and Dad.  I told them I didn’t have a good feeling about the game – I couldn’t explain why but my gut was just leaning toward a loss.  This feeling was further strengthened when I left MacDo and saw two different people drop their baguettes. TWO! I’ve never seen one person drop a baguette and then to see two people, in one day, withtin 5 minutes of each other?  Bad omen.

Finally, midnight rolled around and friends came over to cheer on the Pats!  It was bizarre to watch a NFL game with French announcers but amusing nonetheless!  Of course the announcers were pro-New York because the French have an obsession with NYC but we put up some decorations hoping our Patriots support would go all the way to Indy:

Signs courtesy of Jim!

Me, Jim, Charlotte, Clementine, and Jamie

But it was not enough.  I'm fairly certain that if you’re reading this blog you know all too well how the Super Bowl ended.  Ugh.  Needless to say we were a sad, tired, broken hearted bunch at 4:30am.

After sleeping for a few hours after the game (I went to bed at 5am!), I woke up, checked out of the hotel, and headed back to my flat to contact a plumber.  The plumber came promptly and fixed the water problem pretty quickly so I was thankful for that!  Throughout the day I continuously attempted to process how the Patriots crumbled for a second time but to be honest a majority of the day was spent in a sleepy-state listening to Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” and eating Nutella.  (Hey, we all mourn in different ways.)

It should be known that there were two positives to come from Super Bowl XLVI, though.  The first is that Jim (from England) proclaimed he is now a “Patriots fan for life”.  (Nice to see 'Old' England and New England come together via American football- haha!)  And the second is that Madonna’s lyrics from her song "Give me all your lovin", which was performed at halftime, gave Burgundy wine some press.  As reported in Le Bien Public, a local Dijon paper, the lyrics state: "we can drink some wine, Burgundy is fine, let’s drink the bottle every drop".  (The Madonna article was one of the few post-Super Bowl news pieces I could handle reading.)

No matter how much I love France, American sports are a constant reminder of how I could never live in Europe permanently: you can take the girl out of Massachusetts but you can’t take the Massachusetts out of the girl.

Word of the Post: la Nouvelle-Angleterre -- New England