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American Discovers That Football Is Played with Your Feet! “I’ve never considered that. It looks so weird, but it makes more sense than what I thought football meant,” said Hail Garry, a confused American after a week in Europe. Garry was an average American visiting Europe for the first time. He thought Europe was socialist; he thought Europe was a country; he also thought that football was played by hand. However, his trip to Europe destroyed Mr. Hail Garry’s preconceived notions. He arrived on a rainy Saturday evening in Paris — the only European city he had ever heard of. He’d encountered the name “Paris” a couple of times in Disney cartoons, and for some reason, he knew it was in Europe. That’s how he ended up there. He went to the airport, saw “Paris” on the departures board, and bought some tickets. When he arrived, he was unpleasantly surprised. He assumed Paris was the capital of the LGBTQ+ community and that there would be gay parades all around the city. However, what he found instead were a bunch of angry men and women snapping at him every time he asked them something in English. Garry had assumed that everyone in Paris spoke English, just like in his cartoons. After an hour of searching for directions to a hotel, a kind cab driver finally helped him. The driver, a pleasant, hardworking young man from Nigeria, had been working as a taxi driver in Paris for the past two years and claimed to know all the streets and hotels in the city — or so he told Garry. After a ten-minute ride in the cab, the driver showed Garry the fare: $80. Garry found the price high, but, then again, this was Europe, where he believed the “socialist regime” drained money out of you like hell. Once settled in his hotel room, Mr. Garry decided to watch some local television. Again, he did not understand a word. “What is this?” he wondered, failing to realize that people in Paris speak French. Finally, after finding a sports channel in English, he decided to see what Europeans considered a sport. A couple of men were running on a field after a ball. Mr. Garry found this activity quite bizarre. He did not understand the purpose of the game. For a moment, he thought it might be a rehearsal for an Islamic gay parade. But no — it was soccer, a sport only his distant relatives from Germany and Argentina liked to follow. He was surprised to find out that this is the most popular sport in Europe. Still, he was shocked. He couldn’t believe what Europeans called this “ball hunting on the field.” “I didn’t know Europeans called football that. But that’s not football. Football is a manly sport, played by men who break their bones. What is this?” claimed the man. After doing some research, things started to make sense to him. He finally understood the idea behind the term “football.” Now, he grasped why Europeans call it that and why they find the American version bizarre. Mr. Garry learned a lot from his European trip: → Europe is not a single country. → Gay parades aren’t the norm on European streets. → Europe is not a socialist dictatorship in which the state takes all your money. → People outside the USA speak other languages than English. → Football is not “football” everywhere in the world. Mr. Garry finally made the connection between the words “foot” and “ball.” He now knew that it referred to a sport played with a ball using the foot. Mr. Garry felt like an enlightened man. He went back to his town in Arkansas to tell the people about his discoveries. Unfortunately, his peers did not understand. They did not know what French was and assumed it was a curse. They also thought he had been brainwashed by communists, so they shot him with an all-American gun. At least in that small community in Arkansas, football is still played with hands and armor, and Europe is still a country, not a continent.