Travel Journal:

As a Postgrad in Edinburgh... - American Baseball, or how the...


American Baseball, or how the British conned... 25/10/2007
 
Ah the World Series. Never has their been an event of such enduring American Pride. Baseball is one of the most profound and misunderstood symbols of the United States. To us, baseball is hot dogs and beer and cheering and booing and sunny summer days and singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and cheering for Japanese pitchers with funny names. To Al-e Ahmad, an secular Iranian intellectual and revolutionary writer from the 1950s and 60s, baseball is an orgy of thighs and groins which represents all that is evil about Western imperialism. And the fact that we eat roasted dogs just adds to the shame.

To each his own.

But the fact remains that the first game of the World Series was on Wednesday night, or Thursday morning for those of us Across the Pond. Boston Red Sox and the Colorado Rockies. I, personally, was rotting for the Rockies as an underdog team. Never did they think they would make it to the World Series in such a short amount of time (as they are a fairly new extension team). Regardless, Jonmikel and I vowed to watch the first game, which started at 8:30ish EST, which is about 1:30am Torry Time. We went out hat afternoon and searched high and low for typical baseball food: hot dogs, buns, and cheap beer. We found the cheap beer easy enough (Grolsch, for about 50 pence a pop), but figured we'd have to settle for sausages instead of hot dogs. Not that that would be a great compromise; polish sausages at baseball games are about as an American of a tradition as hot dogs. So we loaded up with sausages and were looking for anything akin to buns. In Germany, I can remember getting hotdog type things in round crusty rolls, which made the sausage stick out awkwardly from either end. But the taste was the same. Compromise. But instead, we found packages of real "hotdog" buns! Excited and encourages, we figured that where there are hotdog buns, there MUST be hotdogs. Searching high and low, we found (drum roll please) hotdogs IN A CAN. Seriously. 6 little dogs in a can of liquid goo. Oh, we just had to try. And we bought sausages as well, just in case.

Turns out, the hotdogs-in-a-can are less than stellar. Try horrid. The taste was ok, but the texture was that of soggy McDonald's chicken nuggets, which I found less than palatable. It didn't help that I'm not sure we cooked them well enough. But whatever might have been lurking in the depths of the uncooked meat was not enough to compete with our giarddia (from our famous river-water-in-beer let's-drink-it-anyway canoeing incident this summer) so we feel all the better for it. Builds character. But the beer was perfect. So were the buns. And that's saying something. Oh, and before I get off topic, English mustard burns your sinuses to a crisp.

At any rate, I take a nap before hand and wake up at 1ish to prepare food. I have class the next day, but they are all forewarned of my possible state. We stay up to watch most of the game (much to our neighbors' chagrin, I'm sure), but the Rockies were playing so much like a minor-league team (not that there's anything wrong with that, but this was the World Series, after all) that we cut out early when we realized that 13-1 wasn't looking good. They did end up loosing, but it was the show of patriotism (ahem) that counted, right? Actually, it was just an excuse for hotdogs and beer. And the tradition we started last year of watching the World Series (seeing as we actually WENT to it last year, though doing so this time around was even less practical this year as it was last year). But it was actually a lot of fun, and many of the disenchanted American in my program got a kick out of it. We can still like baseball, even if we think America has gone down hill.
 
Map and Photos for As a Postgrad in Edinburgh...
View Map
Edinburgh Journal : As a Postgrad in Edinburgh... - American Baseball, or how the British conned us into buying canned hot dogs Travel Photos
Tip: Use arrow keys to flip through the slideshow.