Super Bowl | nw3 to nyc

I still haven’t adjusted to living in a New York winter. I keep expecting it to just rain and be a bit cold. I’m sure it was like that last year, bar one snow episode. But this year, it’s all snow, freezing temperatures and a bit more snow. New York was on tenterhooks last week as the Super Bowl was due to be played at the Metlife Stadium across the Hudson in New Jersey. Jointly hosted between the states of New York and New Jersey, but mostly seemed to be about New York City, not New Jersey at all; in fact, I can’t remember the name of the town where the stadium is located.

Bitter weather hung on for a long time and I got used to saying, ‘oh yes, it’s minus 10 today’, like it’s normal. I have become a weather obsessive, frequently consulting the weather app on my iPhone. I get excited when the app tells me it’s going to be above 0 degrees Celsius, ‘that’s quite warm!’ I respond. So by yesterday afternoon, as New York bathed in 13 degree weather and it was sunny and really quite pleasant, I thought that’s it, we’ve turned the corner, no more snow.

Err, no. It appears that the Super Bowl was so powerful, mostly the advertising, that it got the weather to get warm enough to satisfy the players and the audience, melt all the residual snow and encourage me not to wear a hat yesterday. But all that lovely warmness stopped as soon as the game did last night. When I woke up this morning it was white outside. Snow, lots of it, falling fast. We are due 8 inches today. It hasn’t stopped. Time to hunker down, it may be some time before my hat comes off again.

This is the conversation of the day. No explanation needed, everyone is talking about the Super Bowl. I had never seen it before nor had any interest in its existence but you could not escape it here. Every bar, every cafe had some sign up encouraging people to watch it on the big screen, eat lots of junk food and drink beer. Even when I went for a run in Central Park early on Sunday morning there were reminders, as the fun run also going on in the park split a section of the road into the San Franciso 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens who were the competing teams. In honour of the great day, Animal Planet, a cable channel shows Puppy Bowl, which is in its 9th year. It is a mini American football field filled with puppies and goes on for two hours, over four quarters, just like the real Super Bowl. However after half an hour of ‘ahh, aren’t they cute’ it does get a bit samey. Although I did enjoy the hedgehog cheerleaders and the guinea pig commentators. I did watch the entire Super Bowl which started at 6.30 pm and went on until past 10.30, not helped by a power outage just after half time which the conspiracy theorists say gave the losing team time to recover and stage a come back. R explained the rules to me all the way through, quite how he knows all about this, I have no idea, but it did make a bit more sense that way. Because each play of American football is so short, it’s a great excuse to show lots and lots of adverts and because each break is variable in length, it’s hard to watch on time lapse, so I saw a lot. Beyonce strutted her stuff during the half time break and put on an impressive show, her legs seem to go on forever! Oh, and Baltimore won. I put it down to their kit, so much nicer than the San Francisco ensemble of red and brown.

nw3 to nyc

Observations on moving my family across the Atlantic

Tag Archives: Super Bowl

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