Surrounded by gigantic men in stretchy pants

The school year is now in full swing, the days are crisp and clear, and in Holland that can mean only one thing: Football season is upon us again.

By "us" I mean "me and the handfull of American tourists who stumbled across the Satellite Sports Cafe in Leidseplein." And by "upon" I mean "available provided you bike across town at strange times of day and purchase a beer and maybe also a strange object the Dutch call a 'hamburger' in order to sit in a smoky upstairs room surrounded by several sports games on dozens of screens."

It is much more fun than it sounds.

Watching three NFL games at once is an interesting challenge, especially when they turn on the sound for one game suddenly, causing me to wonder why the Pittsburgh announcers would be talking constantly about Joseph Addai; figuring out why any given table is cheering at any given moment is another fun test. The advantage to watching football amidst so much mayhem is that I never do the thing that I did embarassingly often while watching at home in Boston, which is: fall asleep during the third quarter. It's not that sports are boring, it's just that I had a very comfy couch.

So far, the slate of people I've met at the bar has consisted entirely of Scottish rugby (and, weirdly, baseball) fans and people from places I used to live. I watched last week's Steelers game with Brian (or Mike? maybe Dan? he was exceedingly generic), a National Guardsman from Riverside, CA; last night I chatted with Chad and Sean, from Costa Mesa and Boston, respectively, while waiting (in vain, as it turned out) for the bar to turn on the Cardinals game. All three of them embodied everything I hate about tourists—they plan a trip to Europe, then get here and complain about the prices and how everything is different than at home—but I enjoyed watching the growing unease on their faces as it became more and more clear that I knew far more about sports than they do.

What they didn't know is that I'm a sportswriter now. Sort of—check out www.newser.com and you'll see some of my stories; you won't be able to tell which are mine, but it's a good source for all types of news.