Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame…
Notre Dame Football this year has been a great joy – adding spice to my Sunday mornings as our Shanghai Club met at a bar to cheer on the Irish. We were in luck that Notre Dame had an unprecedented number of night games this year which made watching possible. The last game of the season was against USC and we had a monumental turn out at Camel Bar to cheer them on.
I’ve met lots of interesting people through the club here – my first week in Shanghai I met the then club president and since he and his wife have remained close friends. Other ND alumni have popped up at different times over the last five years and I know that it’s a community that I can always count on.
This game was different in that people brought their families and we had lots of kids running around. Normally 9am on a Sunday morning doesn’t lend itself to family time, but for such a momentous occasion ND fans were all out in spades. It is ironic that even though I lived in Chicago for over 5 years, I was never connected to the club there, but now, halfway around the world it is one of my touchstones.
Go Irish! I’ll be cheering them on at the beginning of January to hope for the final win in this already great season.
Our world no longer seems impossibly large when you make connections…across many lands and oceans…and sometimes in your own backyard. I found it so in my travels….
I know, it is amazing how connected we are today!
How fun to have a group like that to connect with! When I lived in Seoul, I was at a bar and ran into a guy that I went to college with. Even though we shared many similar friends in college and our paths often crossed, we were never great friends back then. But somehow being on the other side of the world – far from family and friends – made us both feel like we had run into a long lost friend and we became close friends quickly. I love how living in a foreign country, outside of your comfort zone, makes you consider friendships you may given a second thought before
I agree – when I was teaching English especially I went through a period looking at my close friends and thinking how under no other circumstances would we have anything in common. But today, I still keep up with a handful of them, which goes to show how wrong I was!