What's so incredible? Why is she so awesome? How does she do it?

Do not for one moment try to tell me that football (or soccer for some of us) is anything but the world’s best sport. It’s a game with enough big names to constantly draw a crowd and enough community-originated clubs to spark serious competition. As it was once said to me, “Rugby is an animal’s sport played by gentlemen, while football is a gentlemen’s sport played by animals.” Players ears may not be ripped off during play, but man will a footballer take a hit for the team. It’s fun to play, fun to watch, fun to follow; with sentiments such as these it’s no wonder my favourite feel-good movie is Goal! the Dream Begins. I think it’s the best sport in the world.

World Cup Allianz Arena

I suppose you could say I’m something of a football nut, though I pale in comparison to, say the Screaming Eagles or the Gunner Hooligans, but it’s the one sport unathletic me actually participated in willfully during my youth, I’m competent enough to argue the merits of a foul with any Brit, and I do piously follow Manchester United, even when it involved getting up at 6:00 on a Saturday morning when I lived in LA, or if it meant watching the game in Spanish, as I had to in my last apartment, or waiting until tea time to take my lunch break and surreptitiously setting my browser to auto-refresh ESPN Soccer Net every 15 seconds. While I’d never care to even check the scores for the World Series, I check the EPL, MLS, and UEFA standings daily, and though I may politely decline an invitation to watch ice hockey, I’ve yet to turn down a ticket to a football match.

Americans tend to only have one or two things to say on the subject of football, namely that the US’s entry for the World Cup is always embarrassing, and that it isn’t a fast enough game. There have been numerous lobbies to change the rules so that we might better get behind the league; among the more preposterous suggestions have been to widen the goals, to disallow a draw as the final score, to incorporate instant replay, to abolish overtime, and other such stabs in the dark that fight a simple truth. Football hasn’t caught on in the US.

F.C. Bayern fans swarming the metro station post-game

Oh the American clubs have fans, they have lots of fans, and in fact the four largest fan bases are the Seattle Sounders, the Houston Dynamo, the Chicago Fire, and DC United in the MLS, who tend to pull consistent attendance at their home matches. The difference is scale. Look a little closer and it will come as no surprise that the fanbase of all four teams is predominately of latin descent. There’s nothing wrong if the majority of American soccer fans are hispanic-Americans, but it does suggest there’s something about the game that the rest of the population is missing. The Superbowl is our biggest television event of the year, and yet the world’s biggest, grandest, toughest, and most universal sport is all but outright ignored. Even here on the east coast, where Chelsea fans have their own satellite radio channel and AC Milan fans get discounts at certain clubs, it’s often hard to find a broadcast of whatever team you follow during the World Cup qualifiers. The world’s most famous footballer, David Beckham himself, still couldn’t draw a crowd playing for the LA Galaxy, and I know several Australians who would have sold their kidneys to see him play for thirty seconds, over the hill or not. All this can be maddening to us big fans of the game, leaving us only the Big Four and a few other international powerhouses to follow while teams like Hull CIty might as well be fictional for all the recognition they inspire.

D.C. United at the US Open Cup

But you go to a game, and much the same way being in the stadium transforms painfully dull baseball into an exciting sport, being at an MLS game can make you feel okay about America’s humble take on the age-old sport. Of course there are more empty seats, and our team cheers may be piecemeal from Latin America, England, and Italy, but there are still a few hooligans and a few ruffians and a few glorious moments when the crowd unites in horror or in honour alike. That’s what the sport is all about, isn’t it? We form these rivalries, and pay these deathmatches, but it’s really about uniting under the sport. In the olden days, so I am informed, football was a way for racial tension and economic rifts to be played out, making it one of the most aggressive and at times socially charges sports out there. Patrick Kluivert makes an offhand comment about an all-black dutch team and the league goes haywire because we’re still trying to wrestle our social problems into submission on the pitch.

Practicing in Parca de la Ciutadella in Barcelona

It’s not an inferior game here in America, it’s just a different one. Sure the players have less stamina (as was apparent watching DC United take on Real Madrid earlier this summer), and probably worse handling, but the technique and the strategy are entirely different. They should be, because to play in an MLS bracket like you’re in the Champion’s League or Serie A would be as unwise as it would be ridiculous. So stop depreciating American football as a failure of a great institution and start accepting it as a new take on an old protocol. Sure in the Bundasliga and the Premiere League you get large bank accounts and at least 6 million viewers tuning in every week, but then you also get some players that get the large bank account and the 6 million fans an start playing for them instead of for their team. American footballers aren’t heroes over here, and while they’re underrated, they also play a different game. We may not have any Jermain Defoes or Cristiano Ronaldos or Adrian Mutus, but we’re in our own league, which is in so many ways just as close to the park pickup game and to the crosstown mining town rivalries as the lesser leagues in the European game.

A Hanover fan waits intently for a goal

I’m a fan. A football fan. I’m a die-hard fan of the Red Devils, but after a few games cheering along with the Barra Brava I think I might become a respectful DC United fan too. I’ve always found it trying, following Man U from over here, knowing that I’m missing a much-needed dimension of sport by sufficing games via 1D radio or web update, and the occasional 2D TV cast when available, and having a home team to root for and a stadium to call home, colours to wear, chants to shout, it’s a nice feeling. I’m tired of everyone turning their nose up at American soccer. It’s time to stop denying us the pleasure of the only true universal sport and time to start cheering us on!

A cup of coffee is a marvelous thing with its luxurious taste, equalising aura, and built-in performance boosts. Whether you’re sipping a cafe au lait, making your way through a flat white, savouring a cappucino, or waiting for a double shot half-caff mocha latte with soy milk, the thousands of different coffee permutations make it the stuff of legends that offer instant inspiration. Without such coffee innovation we wouldn’t get the espresso, or the mint mocha chip ice cream variety, or the tiramisu. It seems to me quite fitting then that such an incredible substance warrants its own, separate location for consumption.

Given the seemingly universal appeal of coffee, it comes as no surprise that coffee shops are also magical places. Every time I find myself amongst old friends, we always meet up at one of the numerous local coffee shops for half price cake night and a bottomless cup of the house blend. I’ve met up with business partners and employers at several corner coffee spots and often failed to keep my poor tongue unburnt in my attempts to keep up. I cannot tell you how many of my first dates have been for a multi-hour cup of coffee and perhaps slice of pie or how many times I’ve gone there to get some work done by my lonesome. Nowadays coffee shops are becoming synonymous with internet access, clean bathrooms, cheap refills, free outlets, and indie hipster lounge music. Yet the spirit of the coffee shop remains untarnished.

There a few universal givens in a coffee shop anywhere, anytime. The longer it takes to prepare, the better it usually tastes. There will be comfy chairs for you to sprawl all over, and though you may have to fight for it, enough casual courtesy to imply you can safely use the toilet without worrying about someone usurping your seat. Maybe the beverage menu is large, maybe it’s small. Maybe there’re fancy drinks on it or discerning descriptions about where each blend is from and what its defining Charactersitics are. Perhaps it’s just a four-item list handwritten and slightly smeared on a chalkboard reading “Coffee, Decaf, Espresso, Hot Chocolate, 2.50/e.” Maybe your coffee house has some quirks, say a series of beat-up bookshelves filled with take-one-leave-one used classics, or a stack of old-school board games you haven’t played since Timmy Borden’s 11th birthday party. But it will always have a strong cup of coffee waiting for you, and if you’re lucky a spot in the shade and a barista that knows your name and favourite orders by heart.

Regardless of your agenda when you walk into the coffee shop, the characters are the same everywhere. There’s always some guy on his mobile or laptop talking loudly enough to annoy everyone who hasn’t already tripped over his power cable. The homeless guy in the corner who refuses to give up his table is inevitable, as is the seemingly endless and grating laugh of the girl on an awkward date. Somehow, the place still manages to feel serene. Maybe it’s the anonymity granted by holding a book or newspaper, or the obliging space you receive the moment you put on your headphones and open your notebook You could call it social etiquette, or you could call it self-involvement, but I think coffee houses have their own entirely separate set of rules of engagement.

It’s quite remarkable when you think about it, how thirty or so people gather at one place at one time, yet rarely acknowledge one another in this space. Coffee houses thrive on the assumption that everyone has something else to do and somewhere else to be. Whether you’re that guy on his bluetooth headset yammering away in line or if you’re that girl smoking and talking about why Hemmingway was a fascist and you’ll show the world just as soon as you finish your novel, if you’re that mum who’s just stopped in for a morning beverage before going about her day, or if you’re that intern that just popped down the street to take a brake from all the interoffice politics forced on him. We’re all in transition.

So the coffee house, the protector of the bohemian and the facilitator of the businessman alike, is nothing more than a halfway house, a layover for fuel in a world of thesis deadlines, skype calls, reading lists, and chatty mates. It’s an empty space for us to fill with our beverage orders yes, but with our plans for the future as well. With our word, our aspirations, our next ten-minute action plan. It’s a break from space and time where we focus on old-world values: genuine relationships with other people, creative development, intellectual debate and curiosity, hard work that results in progress instead of procrastination. So it’s a halfway house for cultural values too, a meeting point of the old and the new, of the traditional practices and the new models. After all, coffee shops have been around for what seems like eons, and when we’re told that democracy was forged in a coffee shop, that masterpieces were penned among a smattering of empty cups, that revolutions were born on the kinds of fourtops and twotops I use every week, I have no problem picturing it. Coffee shops are blank canvases, which is where they get their power, but they’re also meeting points and by nature turnpikes that can either turn you around or spit you right back out the way you came. They’re trickier than we give them credit for.

I spent my first afternoon wandering aimlessly around Adams Morgan this past weekend, and after browsing the menus of the scores of coffee shops the neighbourhood has to offer, it occurred to me that the loss of adequate coffee shop culture — the dearth of oversized armchairs, the wrong kind of music, and no idiosyncrasies in sight — was a larger factor in how lost I felt in Los Angeles than I’d given credit to. I was lucky enough to come of age in a land abundant with choice coffee spots: Artiste by the grassy Millenium Park where we played oh so many games of Ultimate Frisbee and perused the Menil Collection, Empire with its gourmet brunches and “customer of the week” competition to win free coffee, Brazil’s patio imbued with so much ambiance it was hard not to spend hours at a time there, Agora and her smoky second floor that was well worth braving for the free live jazz on Fridays and bluegrass on Tuesdays. I had no shortage of coffee houses, tea shoppes, and boba/juice bars just down the street from me, and until I was deprived of the space, I came to see how a vegetarian sandwich option or mismatching cups and saucers could repurpose my work with more zeal than hacking at it anywhere else ever could. When the conditions are right, I am unstoppable.

I don’t need much; I don’t need ultra-fancy furniture or uber-hip lighting. I need a good cup of hot coffee or tea and a decent place to sit. I was instantly comforted by the volume of such places as I walked just a few blocks into the district. The mere presence of such establishments tells me worlds about the surrounding residents, namely their values. Tryst cafe and coffee shop was packed at 15:00 on a Saturday, and now matter how long I had to search for a seat, I was pleased that having this halfway house, this meeting place, this space to let your social relationships and private aspirations blossom is not just important, it’s culturally vital. It’s not only having the space to reflect, discuss, and nourish our stomachs and souls alike, but it’s how many people used this space, in Tryst and elsewhere down the block. The magic of coffee shops is here, and it is indeed universal, making the coffee house culture just one more reason why I fit so well in the DC Metro area.

On my plate: kitchen shelves in my new apartment

Today was a good day. I had great, strong coffee for breakfast and fresh bilberries on top of my maple-wheat cereal. I had red cherry-currant yoghurt and vegetable barley soup with a sandwich of swiss cheese, baby bella mushrooms, and perfectly ripe avacado for lunch and a fresh fruit salad of green grapes, plum, nectarine, and strawberry for dessert. Dinner was a masterpiece of pasta dressed in homemade basil pesto along side a beetroot salad with fresh spring onion dotted with segmented orange. When the fruit is this good, you’ll never even hear me utter the word chocolate.

In fact, one word I can’t seem to stop saying is ‘fresh;’ from the produce alone it’s taken over as the single most-used adjective in my dictionary. How did this happen?

My herb garden

It started with a tiny herb garden. I needed a summer pet project, and possibly something green to nurture, something that could plant my roots in this new territory on my behalf. So my mum and I made it to the local farmer’s market (which is a half mile away, I might add) and bought some herbs from a helpful farmer, stopping by Home Depot on the way home for some potting soil. A few holes dug, a few holes filled, and I just let the little guys do their thing.

Fresh-picked lemon thyme and lemon verbena

They’re really good at their thing. We’ve had both rain and sunshine in abundance and what started as a small little garden is rapidly becoming something successful. So successful, I’ve had to start rearranging my thinking to start accommodating fresh herbs in my suppers. This is a good thing.

In fact, I’ve had to start rethinking my dinners in general. There’s so much divine produce here; I’ve had brussel sprouts, string beans, cabbage, kale, asparagus, onions, beetroot, tomatoes, corn, not to mention peaches, pineapple, and every berry under the sun out of my one tiny neighbourhood farmer’s market. I’d forgotten what summer produce really was. To speak of the taste! They need little more than a dash of salt and a touch of heat to make even the heartiest of green sing like a sweet potatoe. I’m astounded, truly.

Mojitos with fresh mint

Roasted asparagus with garlic chives and parmesan

It’s not just the fertile Virginia soil that’s got me reeling. When I think about it, I was supposed to be living in the land of plenty back on the west coast. The climate lets anything prosper, and we grow all of it year-round. Great wines at the grocer’s, they told me. Soft and green avocados, I was promised. California cuties by the dozen. More pineapple than you’ll know what to do with. Grow-your-own tomatoes. It all amounted to just another in the stack of things LA fell short on. The reality is: all the avocados I bought in four years tasted like mush, pineapples were as rare as they were expensive, the nearest farmer’s market was a forty-five minute ordeal, and while the wine was good, there was no ground to grow-your-own anything.

Is northern Virginia the promised land? No. But unlike California, which gives off the illusion of being close to the land with surfer tans and Napa Valley, Virginia has a seasonality southern California will never have, and when you keep your eye on the calendar like you watch the thermometer, you can’t help but have a better head for the soil you’re living on. In the peak of summer here I’m enjoying the bounty and the variety of eatables and the livery of the lush green lining the roads, and the just plain freshness of it all.

Corn, tomatoes, asparagus, clover-leaf rolls, and arugula salad with greek oregano and curly basil

So really, it’s not the elaborate vegetable dinners, or the great leftovers I have to take to work, or the bunches of fresh herbs that tickle my taste buds. Nor is it the fireflies at dusk and the crushed mint mojitos on the patio and the great restaurants in the area that are feeding my soul. It’s the fresh produce, the fresh start, and the fresh perspective that are reminding me every day that Virginia isn’t going to let me down.