The entire city of Da Nang is world cup bananas. I tend to stay home

Sorry to pee pee on everyone's parade but the World Cup doesn't really affect me much. If a game is on and I am going to that place that it is on at anyway, fine. I'll glance at it every now and then and I enjoy how excited other people get about it but for me, this is just another sporting event. I'm afraid I'm not as passionate about sports as other people are and this is actually one of the things that I appreciate about not being in my home country of USA.

The World Cup is kind of a big deal there but even when the USA hosted the thing, there wasn't this insane level of commitment to seeing all of the games.

Here in Vietnam it seems like every single business has their screens tuned into the World Cup and even places that don't normally have televisions or projectors have apparently rented them and set them up.

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I'm not one of those Americans that are going to denounce anyone's love for any sport. Do I like soccer? Not really. I have been offered free tickets to go see the local professional team play here in Da Nang and decided I would rather not make the journey than go sit in the stands though. To me, I just don't really care for watching sports at all, it's not like I am dedicated to the NFL or anything. I don't want to watch that either.

It was funny to me that the other night I was walking down a road that has a Korean restaurant on the corner and normally this place would have 4 or 5 tables of patrons in it. Because Korea was playing in the World Cup this place was absolutely packed even though they only had a smallish 40 inch TV or something like that in the corner. The place was also filled with what appeared to be Koreans. I had no idea that so many of them lived here and I find it unlikely that all of them just happened to be traveling here when this is a very unpopular time of year to be traveling in Vietnam.

Further down the road every single business had TV's set up for the games as well and most of them had quite the assemblage of customers as well. Where did all of these people come from? I would imagine that it was the same throughout the rest of the city as well but I was surprised to see so many people out in our area that is dominated by tourism and has very little other industry.

There was of course one place on that street that apparently also doesn't give a damn about the World Cup and they were playing something that is infinitely more annoying to me than loud sports: They were playing karaoke at an absurd volume as is tradition in Vietnam. The song as I went by was "Careless Whisper" being sung by a Vietnamese person and if it had not been for the fact that it was about 10x as loud as it needed to be, I probably would have stuck around to listen since that is not an easy song to sing. But then again; the ability to actually sing a song doesn't seem to play into the decision making about whether or not someone is going to attempt it here in this country.

Most of my friends are heading out really late to watch games and I don't know how they get away with it since most of the people that I know have jobs that they have to be in attendance for by crazy-o-clock in the morning. They have more resilience than I do, that is for sure.

So for all of you people out there in Vietnam and elsewhere in the world that are rearranging their schedules to watch 2 hour matches several times a day.... I commend you. I admire your dedication.... and I will not be joining you even when my country's team is playing :)