kabul and baseball

i've been learning much about american culture through talking to people, attending classes filled with all-american students, listening to professors lecture, and wandering bridgewater and boston. two very important things have been revealed to me recently.

1. kabul: since an anthropology class where the professor asked "who knows where kabul is?" and not a soul knew, i have made it my personal task to poll the general student body at bridgewater to find out if this is a fluke or a representative sample. and many questions later, i have to say that it is unfortunately the latter. of all the people i have questioned, only two knew where kabul was, and these two are both japanese transfer students. i was at first shocked to find that afghanistan has so faded from the news that students would be unaware of this city; however, the professor who posed the question theorizes that students have a lack of exposure to the news at all: in their home lives, in high school, and now here. i guess to be fair, i should ask people where baghdad is, since it is more prominently in the news these days, and hopefully more talked about in classrooms. i also have an urge to return to a glendon or york classroom or travel to harvard and ask the same question.

2. baseball: it is a big deal. for a city that has four strong sports teams (as i have yet heard), baseball rallies a huge amount of support. since the beginning of the school year, people walk about wearing red sox paraphernalia (a lot of people and a lot of paraphernalia), watch every game, and talk about the red sox possessively ("our team", "us", "when we sold so and so", "we don't like the yankees", etc). if you hadn't heard, the red sox won the world series this week, and this campus went crazy...or should i say, wicked crazy. as soon as it was over, students came flooding out of the dorms, whooping and hollering, and all headed toward miles and dinardo's quad, where a crowd chanted, threw each other up and down, and generally rocked out to sweet caroline until it was too late and too cold to stay out any longer. the huge celebration parade, the red sox rally, happened two days later on a tuesday, to the chagrin of many students with midterms (mind you, some professors rescheduled important tests and deadlines for the benefit of die-hard red sox fans).