March Sadness

So my two favorite days of the year are the opening Thursday and Friday of March Madness. My bracket almost always gets busted, but I love following four games at a time for two whole days. It's pretty rough for me to be so far removed from the tournament this year, and to not really know anything about any of the teams. And tomorrow I leave for Poland, and by the time I get back I think there might only be 8 teams left.

I've continued to follow politics in the US very closely while I'm here, which is pretty easy to do with CNN and all the blogs. But I'd never realized how much human interaction has to do with following sports. It's really all about talking to people and watching games with other fans. I read ESPN.com and I watch Eurosport, but I still feel like I don't know what's going on.

I think I'm going to go to Jaromir Jagr's sports bar here on baseball's Opening Day to watch a few games, but I feel like no one else in the bar will care. And the A's might actually be good this year. Hopefully I'll find people in my program to talk baseball with, but they might also have trouble following what's going on back home.

It's hard adjusting to a country of hockey and soccer, but I'm going to try to make it to a few soccer games while I'm here and see if maybe I can get into that.

But really, I just miss the madness.