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The Great Expat Super Bowl Challenge

The Super Bowl is the biggest American holiday of the year. Furthermore, it's the one event of the year that we American expats can all get together and overindulge in our American culture - our spectacle, our tradition, and our competition. In short, our hard-hitting, meatheaded, Americanism.

But it's not so easy to be an American abroad during football season. Being abroad has made following the NFL very difficult. Games are on Sunday and Monday nights, which for us translates to ridiculous hours of the morning. So we feel a bit more detached from the tradition of American sports.

Then on the ONE night of the year, the night of the big event, the Super Bowl, the tables turn. The NFL season we've had such a tough time following all fall and winter, all culminates in the single championship game. It's the one event of world sport that all of a sudden the whole world chooses to watch, report about, talk about, Facebook about, tweet about, Gmail chat about, email about, fart about, etc.

And I'm simply too old to want to start watching a three hour game at midnight on a school night. So tomorrow night, I'm hosting some friends at my place to watch a re-airing of the Super Bowl in HD on Viasat Sports. We will have guacamole, pizza, chips, beer, etc. etc. etc. And we will be Americans. And it will be great.

But tonight begins the Great Expat Super Bowl Challenge.

When I wake up in the morning, I will need to avoid, at all costs, any connection to the world, until 6pm tomorrow night.

I will need to:

• Not turn on the television.
• Not check email.
• Not access Facebook.
• Not access Twitter.
• Not read the news.
• Not look at my iPhone.
• Not talk to any American friends.

In other words, I need to not do ANYTHING wherein there's even the slightest inkling of a chance that I may find out the score of the game before we start watching it tomorrow.

I was successful last year, but to stay completely disconnected from the world, in such a connected world is an EPIC challenge and just gets tougher year after year.