Not only are we in St. Petersburg, populated with 5 million Russians, we are here with tens of thousands of people from all over the world. On the day we arrived, St. Petersburg hosted the Morocco versus Iran game. Many of them are still here and we have ran into large groups of both of them. We took a boat tour through the canals with a dozen friendly Moroccans who waved and shouted at everyone we passed by. (We now have tips on how to best tour Morocco when we manage to travel there.) There was estimated to have been over 40,000 Moroccans in attendance at that game.
At first, we saw quite a few Mexicans all over, many traveled with us from the United States. but then they all fled to Moscow for the Mexico versus Germany game. There are no games in St. Petersburg while we are here, but it is still quite full of people who are making it part of their exploration of Russia while they visit for the World Cup games. We have also met quite a few Egyptians, Colombians, Argentinians, and Peruvians.
On our first evening we watched one game at a restaurant with several local University students from Congo who shared hookah with us And took us salsa dancing till the sun started to come up (3am.)
We have been happily boggled by the intense intercultural convergence we’ve seen here. Our Russian skills are largely non existent. (We keep trying, it makes people laugh which is a good icebreaker.) But we’ve had many fruitful opportunities to speak American Spanish and know they will continue as we travel on to attend games with Colombia and Uruguay.
A note on the use of the word “American”…
People from the United States frequently call themselves “Americans”, not only in the U.S., but when traveling abroad. They are referring to the U.S. and overlooking the fact that “America” makes up two continental land masses within which 35 countries reside. We’ve taken this language for granted. We even go so far as to call people who move to our county “Mexican-Americans” and so on. Silly, all Mexicans are Americans. I am from the USA, сша, Estados Unidos, United States. I believe these words are important and so is the way we describe ourselves to the rest of the world.
My wife recently took a trip to Spain with her students, and in a few weeks, will be going to France and the United Kingdom. We find it easier to simply call ourselves, “Canadian”.
I hear you. We aren’t wearing flags and shirts around like half the people supporting our teams but we aren’t trying to hide our USA ness. 9 out of 10 times once we told people we were USA they were genuinely curious and wanted to know us more. Russians, Congo, Algiers, Iran, Poland. They havent met a lot of us and it’s one shot to show how much we all have in common. I think it helps that it’s the World Cup … all of us are ducking politics