American Journal: The Homecoming Game

  I don’t really like watching sports most of the time. I tried football for a while when I was 10; my dad and I would watch Liverpool games back when they were good. But aside from spending time with my dad, I quickly realised I didn’t enjoy it all that much.

  In the past couple of years though, largely in part to the Superbowl screenings hosted at the union bar at UEA, I’ve discovered that I really do enjoy watching American Football. So when people were talking seeing the opening game that our college team was playing, I was definitely interested in going. Of course, college sports are actually a big deal here, it’s not anything like going to see a sports match between university students back home. Rather than standing of the side lines of one of the many courts in your university’s gymnasium, you’re going to a giant stadium that will be accommodating not only you and people from your college, but regular people from all over the state too.

  Sports are religions in America, and for whatever reason, none inspires more devotion than American Football. People travel hours for it, plan their schedules around it, fight over it, and create rituals and ceremonies surrounding it.

  On our approach to the stadium, even a good half mile before we were at the gates, we could see throngs of people lining the streets, all deeply engaged in the pre-game worship ritual known as tailgating. This activity, borne from trying to drink before the game to avoid paying stadium prices for beer, has since turned into an animal of its own. The basic idea is to pick a few square feet of land somewhere outside the stadium, and then claim it as yours; setting up barbeques and lawn chairs, blankets, maybe even small tents, and of course, crates upon crates of beer.

  It goes deeper than that though. To pass the time people play all those old style games you might have found at a school fair or something, like horseshoes, beanbags etc. People even bring their children, in fact it’s pretty common actually. These events end up being a family day out, a binge drinking session, and a sports match all rolled into one. In some circles in fact, the tailgate is more important than the game itself, with some people never even setting foot inside the stadium, but continuing to tailgate throughout the match.

  We saw our first tailgaters whilst we were still a good half mile from the stadium, and it wasn’t long after that until the horizon became a haze of barbeques, pick-up trucks, and fold-up lawn chairs. This mass prayer circle served as sort of yellow-brick road to the stadium for us, albeit one draped in the school colours of orange and blue.

  We arrived at the stadium just as the day was starting to lose its light. The sky, now tinged with the beginnings of darkness, was adding a hint of the dramatic to the mood as we made our approach. The stadium itself stood tall over the masses of people beneath it; the fans rushing to get inside, the vendors selling snow cones and hot dogs from their vans, the ticket collectors, the local band playing to them all, and of course, the tents full of tailgaters in the background, all found themselves clothed in its shadow as the sun disappeared behind it.

  This was on a scale I wasn’t prepared for, you could fit my local football stadium into here multiple times over, and the amount of people that turn up for the games there into here many more than that. I’m not from a place in England where something this size is even possible; there aren’t many where it would be, truth be told. But the crazy thing is this, this isn’t a crazy thing here. This is normal, this is how it is everywhere here. Hell, Illinois aren’t even that good of a team, but this is still what happens when they play a game, people flock here by the thousands so that they may fall on their knees and worship.

  The opening game had been big, but it wasn’t until a few weeks later that I witnessed this phenomenon at its fullest. Homecoming weekend is when all the Alumni come back to visit their Alma Mater. Former frat and sorority members get hosted in their old homes, parties are thrown in their honour and celebrations last all weekend. But the crown jewel of the proceedings is the football game held that weekend. The stadium gets filled, roads are closed, the marching band parades through the streets, people adorn themselves in orange and blue, and most importantly, everyone gets very, very drunk.

  The game was at 2:30pm in the afternoon, so we started "preparing ourselves" considerably before that. As none of us, insufferably, are legal drinkers, we had to first, earlier in the week, get people’s brothers and the like to get our alcohol for us. Then when we did start drinking, we had to do it covertly; behind closed doors in someone’s room, trying our best to keep the noise down as we continued to get drunker and drunker. When we actually headed out to the game too, we each took bottles of Gatorade with us that were also, in large part, filled with vodka.

  I don’t really know if the alcohol helped us cope when we started losing, or whether it just made it that much worse, but I definitely know it spurred our decision to leave early and get food once we realised Illinois weren’t going to win. I’ve always valued the part of the night where everyone gets food quite highly, and at this point, I’ve been thoroughly convinced that America does it better than the UK. This is simply because, as with everything here, if you want to go extreme with it, you really can.

  There’s a place on campus called Fat Sandwich, a name that possibly does more to paint a picture of it for you than I ever could. The gist is, all the drunk food you could ever think of, shoved into a sandwich all at once. I mean, cheesesteak, bacon, eggs, fried chicken, mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, fries, and all manner of other deep fried items, all stuffed between two pieces of bread. I’ve only been once so far, but it may be the most glorious, heart-clogging, disgusting, delicious, monstrosity I’ve ever eaten in my life. It is America in a sandwich, and it beats a Donner Kebab to a bloody pulp.

  On the occasion in question though, we went to a Mexican place that was also excellent, and got back to our dorms and passed out before dark. I woke up at 10:00pm with a hangover, but despite that, would still have to call the event a huge success. Definitely better than a frat party, for sure.

  As for school itself, the semester was now properly underway. Introductions were over and it was time to start getting into the meat of things. After reaching the end of the first week and receiving my first round of homework, the differences in the approach to education between here and the UK made themselves immediately apparent. Unlike in the UK, where I get 10 pieces that actually count towards my grade a semester, all of which will challenge my understanding of what I’ve learnt significantly, here the system doesn’t differ a ton from the way it worked in high school; homework in every class every week, all of which is more a test of comprehension rather than an actual challenge. To balance all this out though, the kicker is that they expect you to get a much higher percentage of it all correct; 93% is the minimum for an A, for example. With adjusting to life here, continuing to get to know people, and now all this, I quickly found myself very busy all at once.

  In fact, before I even knew what was happening to me, I soon found myself working around 12 hours a day, every day. There were homework assignments, readings, and even essays to be done, which as a math student, was not something I was prepared to deal with at all. One course forced me to write a full page on my opinions about straight lines; I was not impressed.

  That aside, it became rapidly obvious that even with the different approach here, this amount of work was not normal; no one I knew was in the same situation as me. At the time I attributed it to me being in final year and them being freshman, but it wasn’t until a few days later, when I went to go get my schedule signed off on for study abroad purposes, that I was informed of the truth.

  "This schedule looks insane!" said the math advisor as I sat down.

  I was confused, I was taking roughly the same amount of hours as everyone else I knew. "How so?" I enquired.

  "You’re taking 4 top level math courses right now, most math majors only take 2 a semester" she said. "The courses are quite intensive for you to be taking this much at once."

  "…Oh." I replied. Suddenly things were becoming a lot clearer than they had been previously.

  "I can’t believe no one told you you’re not supposed to do this!"

  Neither could I. Not a single person I had talked to so far during the academic side of the process so far had said anything about this, so I had just assumed it was normal to take that much. This was yet another example I had encountered of no one in study abroad really knowing anything about anything at all. Now safe in the knowledge that it was okay to do so, I dropped the course that had dared make me write an essay without another second’s thought.

Dropping a class was excellent news as far as my wallet was concerned too, as that meant I had one less textbook to buy from the bookstore. Unlike at UEA, where lecture notes are put up online after classes, universities over here just make you buy textbooks for everything instead. These books can cost anywhere upwards of $100, and so a lot of classes can mean a lot of expenses too. In fact, to help soften the financial blow, you can actually rent some textbooks for a lower price than outright buying them. I tried to do this with some of the stuff I needed, but the woman at the kiosk told me I had to show my state ID first. As I explained to her the exact reason that I didn’t have one, I discovered that she was actually surprised to find that I wasn’t American, my voice apparently hadn’t given me away.

  As the weeks have gone on, I’ve found this experience to be considerably more common than you might initially imagine. An overwhelming majority of people when I first meet them either don’t realise I’m not American, or at the very least don’t realise I’m British. I think my voice is different enough from the British accents people have in films, that they don’t always place it for a few minutes.

  Either way it always catches people off-guard, even if they don’t always realise I’m from somewhere else, it doesn’t stop me from having trouble being understood when I first meet someone. Talking to people working retail is always a challenge; I’m never loud enough for them, for starters. As well as accent troubles, I’ve discovered there’s also a difference in volume between our two cultures that’s very hard for me to break through.

  My name gets messed up a lot in particular; after the fourth or fifth time of having someone at a fast food place shout “Selmen” or “Salmon” or something like that to notify me of my food being ready, I’ve since started telling them that my name is Frank. No matter what accent you say it in, nobody’s going to get Frank wrong.

  Even amongst the people that I live with, I sometimes see things getting lost in translation. I’ve had to change some of my speech patterns and phrases since being here. I talk a little bit slower now, I enunciate a bit more than I would at home, and I cut out what little British slang I did use. Even stuff like saying “High school” instead of “Secondary school” for example, just saves a 30 second detour from the conversation where I have to explain the difference between the two. Sometimes it can feel a little bit galling doing stuff like that, like I’m casting off the place that I came from in a way, but it’s the difference between an easy conversation and one where I have to double back on myself and explain my meaning every few seconds.

  Even ignoring cultural differences though, it can be hard to feel like I belong here sometimes (Not to go too depressive here, but I don’t want to shy away from anything this year entails.). The temporal nature of this year makes me kind of an outsider by definition. The people I’m with are going to continue getting to know each other for another four years, but I’ll be nothing but a memory to them soon. Sometimes I feel more like an extended visitor than someone that actually lives here. Who knows? Maybe that’s what I am.

  Understandably, I think about home a lot. Obviously I like where I am now, but sometimes I think about the year I could have had with the friends I already knew, and mourn its loss. Once, someone back home sent me pictures of my old flat together for someone’s birthday. It was a nice thought to include me, but ultimately it just made me sad that I wasn’t there with them, that I had chosen to abandon them in favour of adding yet more strangers to my life.

  I never used to think I’d get homesick, because I didn’t really used to in Norwich. But I also never accounted for the isolation you can feel when there’s just nobody around you that has quite the same reference points as you. I miss knowing people with the same views as me, I miss knowing people with the same upbringing as me, I miss simply knowing that I’ll be understood when I say something.

  Maybe I should have just made friends with international people, that’s what most other internationals do. That way, you’re not the only one that doesn’t always fit in; you all don’t fit in together. My view on that in the beginning though was that it was cheating; I wanted the real American experience. Now though, more and more I’m discovering that maybe not all those doors are open to me.

  Overall though, I find I’m still more than happy with my decisions. The people I know here are great, despite our differences, and my old life will be there in a few months; it’s not going anywhere. Meanwhile, my time here is limited, and there’s still so much more to do. In fact, I should probably get doing it.

  Until next time.
  Simon Flower