BEAR DOWN

I just got back, and my mind is completely on football. This is alternately known as "American Football" and "what?" here. Nobody really knows what it is, and it's impossible to watch on TV. Partly due to the time difference, no bars show it, and it doesn't show up at all in Indian TV guides. At our last hotel, in Delhi, Pete and I were able to follow Jeff Joniak and WBBM on a web feed, through is iphone, which was connected to the internet via our hotel's [thank God] wireless. The hotel actually had extensive cable TV, which multiple sports stations. They were showing, among other things, a China-Uzbekistan soccer match and the semi-finals of women's table tennis at last year's Asian Games. No NFL. But yeah, Pete and I got the radio feed, which was good enough.

We'd been in Agra all day that day, so we were beat when the game started at 11:30PM here. We'd taken the 6:15AM express train, had a really long day fighting the hellhole that is Agra, and then taken a late express train home. When we left, we actually didn't even know the outcome of the first game, just figuring we'd find out when we returned. But that night, with the Bears up 21-0 early, we both passed out. However, when I got Maharaja's Revenge in the middle of the night, I multitasked with the iPhone to find that not only the Bears had won, but the Jets too. I woke up Pete, and he thought he had to be dreaming. He has several Pats fans friends who were dicks about sports and would deserve to be gloated over. Don't we all?

For the wild card games, we were in Jaisalmer, the least touristy and most out-of-the-way town we went to. There was no wifi in that town. Normally we'd see plenty of restaurants in the touristy areas advertising free wifi, but there was none of that in Jaisalmer. There were only two ATMs in that town, and one was anything but 24-hr. So we didn't find out that Seattle had stunned New Orleans until the afternoon of that Tuesday, when we miraculously got free wifi at a coffee stand inside Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur. Via the iphone, we also got to watch Marshawn Lynch's ridiculous run to cap the game, a clip which the old barista watched over our shoulders just to check out the iphone. Pete, as always overestimating English fluency of Indians, attempted to explain it all to him to no avail. I also got to email my parents at this point to inform them that we were alive and not being held hostage across the border. Both miracles of technology.

So staying in touch with football has been somewhat difficult. No TV, not even public, and at the mercy of internet radio feeds. As if I'm perpetually on a Sunday road trip. However, tThe guy who ran the Santha Pub Crawl had lived in Chicago for a while, and he mentioned some sort of Super Bowl Party. That'd start at like 5:00AM here, but I'll have to go. Obviously I'll find some way to watch it if the Bears are in it. And if they aren't, that means I'll have to root against the Packers. Either way I'll have an interest.


One thing to note: on our last day in Delhi, I lost my camera to a pickpocket, losing all of my photos of the trip. This is the biggest of several enormous kicks in the junk that I've experienced in India. The saving grace on this is that Pete took tons of photos, many of which were better than I took (although I DID take quite a few totally rocking photos). So the photography on this will be provided by Pete and his feed. I'm also soliciting recommendations for a new camera.