The Superbowl, Vienna Style

I have watched the Superbowl every year of my life. This past Sunday was the first time ever that missing the Superbowl was even a remote possibility. Luckily, a number of bars in Vienna were showing the big game via ESPN America, thus the streak continues.

A bunch of students from my dorm were going to a bar in the first district called 1516 to watch the game. My roommate and I decided to go, but left a little later than everyone else and with only a rough estimate of where we were supposed to end up. We wrote down directions using the U-bahn, only to leave our dorm and realize it was after 12:00 and the U-bahn would be shutting down soon. Rather than risk getting stuck somehwere along the way, we decided to walk. We hadn't walked to the city center yet, but knew it wasn't too far and figured we could find our way with the map in my purse and the address we had written down. It was a nice, quiet walk, with almost no one on the streets at midnight on a Sunday, and in about 15 minutes we were on the Ringstrasse, the loop road that replaced the wall around the old town many years ago. We knew we were close, and started to let "instinct" take over for actual navigation, resulting in us very quickly getting lost.

We probably would have made it to the bar a lot easier if we could have resisted wandering and stuck to the roads we knew, but it was a nice night and the city was nearly deserted, presenting a unique opportunity for sightseeing. We took pictures with statues and walked by the palace, and before we knew it we had no idea where we were. We walked in what we thought to be the right direction, and ran into some Irish students who were going to watch the game at the Irish bar right across the street from 1516, so we followed them the rest of the way.

We got there a little late, but still in the first quarter. We watched the game in the upstairs of the bar, where there was a huge projector screen and multiple flat screen TV's. The place was mostly filled with Americans, many from our school, but there were also fans from a variety of other countries. It was a fun atmosphere, with fans of both teams (I wore a yellow shirt with a green scarf in support of the Packers). The only disappointing part was that, since we weren't watching on the normal American network, we missed out on the commercials.

The game didn't end until about 4:30 am Vienna time. Some students from our dorm left early, but I couldn't bring myself to miss the end. Everyone that stayed ended up just walking back (no one has really figured out the night bus system yet), and we didn't get home until after 5:00 am. My first (:30 am German class came early the next morning, but the experience of waching the Superbowl in a foreign country was worth it.

Go Pack!