Joga Bonito... Play Beautiful

If you want to go somewhere and converse with the people, you could learn their language. OR, you could just pick up football (soccer as we know it). Seriously, just about anywhere you go in the world outside of the US you can usually find a couple of makeshift goals, a ball, and a mass of kids with shins of steel trying to show off their moves on the pitch (soccer field).

Seriously though, international soccer is great. If its on, I tend to watch it... way too much of it.There's so much national pride behind the teams its hard for it not to be infectious. The rivalries are some of the best in all of sports (check Brazil v. Argentina... or Germany vs. the Netherlands... or the USA vs. Mexico). For most of the world the World Cup rivals, if not overtakes, the Olympics in regards to national sporting events. You look forward to it for years... especially if your team qualifies. Its like having the top all star teams in the world compete against each other for a month. Today Germany beat Poland 2:0 in round 1 of EuroCup2008, and the USA held the number 1 rated Argentina to a 0:0 tie in an international "friendly." Today was a good day; my two teams did well (America, much better than was expected) so I'm happy.

I've embedded a video that was part of a soccer ad-campaign Nike put on a couple of years ago... so you can get just a little taste of the flavor of international soccer. The slogan was Joga Bonito, Portuguese for "Play Beautiful" (Andrew can correct me if I've translated incorrectly). Most of the commercials were pretty good... and some were even pretty funny. I think you still should be able to find most of them on YouTube if you look.