Super Bowl and Mardi Gras

After 5 straight days of sunny, warm, and overall very nice weather I guess we should have known that this was coming, but today had to have been one of the worst days I've experienced in Brussels. The fog has been so think all day that you'd think you were in London (although maybe not even that, as you'll see) and the cold temperature and bitter wind was not helped one bit by the dampness. I think a woman on my tram home tonight described it best when I overheard her say it was a "dense cold". I also heard her say that she was from London and this was far worse than anything she has seen there, in terms of the fog and the cold, so that might give you an idea of what its like right now.



Oh, and my commute home took nearly 45 minutes because after 7pm they start pulling all the trams off the tracks, even though there are still alot of people trying to use them to get home. The result: only a few trams running, and all of them are packed with people. Not fun at all.



I havent been updating this as often as I would have liked, but I'm going to try to spend the next few days and catch up on the things that have been happening in February. Lets start with the Super Bowl - which I had to watch in French (and with no commercials, probably the only time I'd ever complain about that). I'm still not sure where that game should rank on the all-time list of Super Bowls (definently not #1 because it was such a boring game until the last 5 minutes), but it has got to be in the Top 5 because of 3 things:

#1 - the over-confident Patriots (who spurned the football gods all season long by running up the score, cheating, and basically asking for Karma to smack them upside the head) being unable to establish anything on offense with the exception of that last drive in the fourth quarter to briefly give them the lead. If there was one team in the league who should know not to be over-confident when you have the best offense, it should have been them. Remember how the Patriot dynasty began? Super Bowl XXXVI against the Rams (the greatest show on turf), in which the heavily underdog Pats stopped the Rams offense for 3 quarters, then let them back into the game in the 4th before Brady drove them down for the winning FG. The game was exactly like that one, except the Patriots were now the Rams. Need one more sign of the overconfidence? During media week, Brady scuffed at Plaxico Burress' prediction that the Giants would win 23-17. Said Brady, "He thinks we're only going to score 17 points?" Now he wishes he could have had 17 points. AND he could have had 17 points if Belicheck hadnt been an overconfident idiot in the 3rd quarter and gone for it on 4th and forever.

#2 - the ugliest game winning drive in Super Bowl history, but one that has to go down next to Montana's drive vs. the Bengals as the best ever. Seriously, Manning threw 2 good passes the entire way down the field, threw 2 others that should have been picked off, and got a TD pass because the Patriots CB fell down (although it was a great move by Burress). Yet somehow he took them 87 yards in 3 minutes to win the game. Moral of the story - we knew the Pats defense was weak all season and this proved it.

#3 - The Play. ESPN's Sports Guy is trying to come up with a name for it. I think it should simply be "the play". I'm still not sure how it happened, and I only know one thing for sure: that pass would have been incomplete (or maybe never even thrown, had Manning been sacked) if the Pats hadnt been tempting Karma to come and get them all season long. In terms of sheer impossibility, that has to be the greatest play in Super Bowl history. Nothing else comes. Furthermore, I think it's the greatest football play I've ever seen - just ahead of McNabb's scramble/60 yard bomb to Mitchell and McNabb to Mitchell on 4th and 26.

So thats the thoughts on the Super Bowl.






Last Tuesday we took a CIEE-sponcered trip to Binche, a small town in southern Belgium that is really only known for one thing - a huge Mardi Gras party (lasts for 3 days). The culmination of the party is a huge parade in which nearly all the men ever born in the town march while dressed in costumes designed to mimic native Americans. Thats right, the Belgians are imitating native Americans. The tradition began when the first pictures of "indians" were arriving in Europe, and after seeing them with feathers on their heads, the Belgians tried to do the same, which resulted in costumes like this:

Those giant cotton balls they are wearing are feathers - Ostrich feathers.

So all those guys come down the main street throwing oranges by the hundreds into the crowd. That tradition began around the same time, when oranges in the middle of winter were a really special treat. Now, there are so many that you dont really know what to do with all of them. This is what the street looked like after the parade was over:

And thats just the ones that people didnt catch and eat. They're really good too. So thats about all for now. I'll update again before the week is over with info and pictures from this past weekend's trip to Antwerp, so stay tuned.