Amongst My Fellow Pacific North-westerners in Buenos Aires
For what (at the time) promised to be a fabulous round of pigskin tossing by men in tight pants, Aristo and I plied ourselves with many a beer and trekked up to Palermo for a Superbowl party at a local bar. While football may not always be my game of choice, Seattle is my home city and I never miss an opportunity to shove its obvious superiority in everyone’s face.
True to form, every American within a 50 mile radius is glued to the tv by the time we arrive, decked out in an alarming amount of gear. I am wishing I had brought along my jersey or perhaps a spandex blue/green suit to really demonstrate my spirit. My worst fear is that my fellow Seahawk fans will not be able to recognise me in my summer dress. This simply will not do. I attempt to make up for it by being the loudest person in the bar whenever anything remotely Seattle-related comes across the screen, and it soon works: the older couple behind us asks where we are from and I get to reveal that I am from the soon-to-be champions’ city. They are from Oregon, which, as we all know, is a state cast woefully in Washington’s looming shadow. Our friends shower us in beer and we, in turn, shower them in the classic American staple, buffalo wings.
It’s a day where almost no one makes fun of me for being American (Aristo still does, but I know he’s only lashing out to mask the embarrassment of not knowing what football is). And it’s also a day where I feel like the star of the party amongst a sea of Olympians and Oregonians and the occasional Idaho-resident, all of whom are silently wishing they were from somewhere less boring/ with less potatoes. I am so proud to be a Seattlite today that I drink myself into a stuppour and have to take a second-quarter siesta (aka spew) before rejoining the team for half-time festivities. Amusingly enough, our friends from LA do, at this time, take literal siestas in the corner of the bar, waking up only for Katy Perry’s performance of California Girls. I can’t make this up.
All in all, it’s a day of great friendship and camaraderie for the PNW. Obviously, a Patriot victory did not play in to our day, but we rally together and stay for a few more drinks before sullenly crawling off to cry in our respective hotels. Aristo seems altogether oblivious as to why a grey cloud of sadness has descended over the city, but luckily, by the next day, Buenos Aires is back up to its usual tricks and we have all but forgotten the haunting defeat.
Until next year, sea birds.
