Last night, I caught a few hours of the Ashes at an expat bar with a friend. That's right, I have friends (my parents are just as surprised as you are). The bar was filled with Australians quietly watching the poorly streaming video feed from SkySports. For those unfamiliar with cricket, the Ashes is the semi-annual meeting of the English and Australian International Cricket Teams. One website yesterday referred to the event as the greatest rivalry in sports that won't end in a nuclear exchange (I think this is a reference to India and Pakistan, and a quite good one at that). As a general sports fan, I love going to things like this. Learning about the game is half the fun of going. That is especially true for a sport as unique as cricket. It resembles baseball in both its game play and the cult-of-the-game that surrounds the sport. The match was played at Lord's (the birth place of cricket) and I have actually been lucky enough to attend a match there myself. To the uninitiated, cricket probably looks like a bunch of foreign people, hitting a ball and running pointlessly back and forth, and this is pretty much true. Sometimes, they even break for tea to further reinforce cultural stereotypes (not a joke). The most noise the bar crowd generated was when the video feed from the shady website the bar was streaming the game from inexplicably cutout. The strange atmosphere of the bar mirrored the slow pace of the play on the pitch. We eventually left (I don't think my friend cares much for cricket, or sports in general for that matter), but seeing expats so far from their home nations support their national side made me oddly homesick. All the more reason to check out the American baseball games tomorrow morning when the all-star break ends.
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