I had my first foray into the world of basketball this week – I walked past a court in the local playground and asked to shoot some baskets (I believe this is the local vernacular) with a team of youths. I have never held a basketball before and I am a cultural sponge with a blog to write - so with all the misplaced enthusiasm of ignorance I confidently strode out onto the pitch.
    I guess on any basic level sport can be reduced to a sentence of primitive benign throwaway words – my beloved soccer is no more than 90 minutes of trying to kick a pig’s bladder between two sticks, but I have to admit to not finding a great thrill in trying to place a ball through a hoop. I was not particularly adept, which may have hampered my overall satisfaction of the experience, although I think I must have gained some points on a couple of occasions by hitting the white thing at the back.
    It was then that I realized how American sports are designed to give more satisfaction and a greater chance of success and winning to the participants, than the sports I grew up with. For example, in basketball there is the white thingy to help aid the thrower to get the ball into the hoop; we play netball back home (it is the number one sport for high-school girls) - this game is similar to basketball, but the net or hoop sits alone at the top of a pole and is devilishly difficult to score in. I then thought of baseball, where the outfield players have a bucket on the end of one arm to catch the ball in; I was an accomplished cricketer back in my youth – cricket is a game played similarly with a bat and ball, and we had to catch the ball (close in size, speed, and weight to a baseball) with our bare hands. Then there is football, a sport where the participants wear all manner of protective clothing and a helmet; in rugby (a sport with as much physicality and contact) the most you might see is a gum shield - and even then you would be teased remorselessly by your team mates for it. My mind then turned to your oval NASCAR racing circuits, which I can compare to the demandingly, winding, undulating, curved, twisting, corner laden, testing, Formula 1 racing tracks back home. 
   This then perhaps differentiates between our mentalities as nations, could it be suggested that Americans like to experience the winning mentality more often, this is a culture where everyone who participates gets a trophy and with the Charlie Brown concept of if you are not winning or successful you fall outside of the framework of society - thus everyone is given more opportunity to be successful and the tools are provided in the sporting arena for you to be more successful. In Britain we have the self-deprecating mentality that it was the taking part that counts and we have a culture where finishing second is not so bad, because the best man won and we can all shake hands at the end and go and have a nice cup a tea and a slice of cake together and share in a common bemoaning of the weather - we applaud the Brit who broke his personal best time in the marathon at the Olympics, despite coming in 32nd (in any other country he would probably go home in shame). 
   Thus, after I had congratulated the opposition, I trudged off the court with the thought of a pot of hot earl grey tea and a large slab of sponge cake firmly implanted in my mind, as a handful of American teenagers whooped and did high fives behind me in the distance.

The Hotdog of Doom

As I was driving through the town of Redwood Falls I noticed the very distinctive shiny, silver, stereotypical hotdog stall (why a hotdog stall needs to be silver and streamlined is a mystery - other than to suggest a distant design concept from the modernist era of the 1930s). The large line that snaked around the venue was the globally recognizable sign of good food - so I stopped to taste this piece of America.

The chalk board adorning the vehicle displayed many varieties and types of hotdog, but one in particular caught my eye – it was called the 2nd amendment. As I waited for my turn I wondered why a hotdog would be named after an amendment introduced on September 5, 1789, that prohibited (in peacetime or wartime) the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent. I then realized, as I mulled this question over, that I was getting confused with the 3rd amendment and that the 2nd was the right to keep and bear arms – subsequently the hotdog would be fully loaded (if one cannot decide on what to have on a menu then to have everything seems to be the preferred option).

This resulted in being presented with a hotdog that had every ingredient the hotdog vendor had in his possession. This was a culmination of onions, chilies, peppers, sauerkraut, cream cheese, bacon, sour cream, and all manner of other constituent parts that I did not recognize or care to dissect; buried underneath all of this somewhere was a sausage. It was if I had taken all the food I had eaten for the previous two weeks and gathered it together in one place to balance on a bun. As always with these culinary endeavors into the unknown, I fail to learn from the error of my previous ways, suffice to say that the resulting action of eating such a monument to American culture reminded me that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and without entering into all the details in such a public forum, it had the same disturbing result I once experienced after eating a watermelon on the west coast of India.

 As if one had not learnt from such a catapult into the outdoor fast-food transient cooking practices of Midwest America, I undertook all that the Clay County Fair had to offer the following day. The Clay County Fair is held every September in Spencer and is the largest county fair in the state of Iowa. It has the second largest agricultural exposition in North America, bringing in over 328,000 visitors a year – I now make that 328,001.

 Food was in abundance and I walked for an hour to find the perfect lunch; I decided upon trying a French-Canadian delicacy called poutine. It is a dish from Quebec made with French fries - topped with brown gravy and curd cheese. I have realized through time that it is a common practice to eat meals in the Americas that are solely made from different shades of brown – thus with barely a nod to any food groups other than starch and fat, I embraced the soggy fries. This is what an inebriated person would choose to eat late on a Friday night after a vast ingestion of alcoholic beverages – what could possible go wrong with cheese, gravy and fries, most people’s three favorite food stuffs together in one glorious cacophony. Why not make the whole thing into a smoothie and drink it, this could save valuable chewing time for those about to pass out.

 My three favorite foods would be curry, sushi and ice-cream, but I do not wish to see all three melded together and placed in a plastic cup, with a wooden fork for company.