America has culture — just ask the World Cup fans discovering Waffle House
Forget the final score. The real World Cup upset this summer is how many international fans are discovering that America is, against all odds, kind of great — especially in a "why does this gas station have 40 kinds of jerky and also a Wi-Fi password printed on the receipt" way — and they're documenting their delightful experiences on social media.
The breakout star of the bunch is a German fan known on X as Freddy who has been chronicling a six-week road trip across the U.S. and Canada, following Germany's national team, and has picked up hundreds of thousands of followers in his trek.
‘The European mind can't comprehend this.’
Freddy's Atlanta stop hit the respectable tourist beats — Stone Mountain, the MLK National Historical Park, some "Stranger Things" filming locations — and then immediately abandoned all dignity for Taco Bell, which he called "the holy land."
A 1 a.m. Waffle House visit got a perfect 10/10 — food, prices, and staff included.
His Wendy's stop in Tennessee produced the single best exchange of the whole tour. His order somehow came back under the name "John," and when he posted his haul of burgers and fries, the official Wendy's account replied with one demanding question: "WHERE IS THE FROSTY."
He also fit in a Walmart run for water, socks, and USA soccer merch and somehow found time to watch the NBA Finals at Chili's amid all this.
Before a single World Cup match had kicked off, Freddy watched the War Eagle fly over Auburn's Jordan-Hare Stadium and called it the most "the European mind can't comprehend this" moment of his life.
One of Freddy's posts got enough traction that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shared it on X, writing: "There's no better way to see our country than on a road trip! Because to LOVE AMERICA you have to SEE AMERICA."
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) invited him back for football season. When he posted from the Gulf Coast, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis welcomed him to Florida — but couldn't let it go that Freddy had called the Gulf "the sea."
Freddy is not even the only German on this beat. Finn Agostinelli has been touring Chicago — the Riverwalk, "the Bean," and a visit to Portillo's so good that he posted a petition to get one opened back home in Hamburg.
His best moment came at Macy's, where he had ducked in to find a restroom and instead found himself staring up at an enormous American flag. "I respect how proud Americans are of their country," he wrote. "Unimaginable back home in Germany."
Texas, for its part, did not go unnoticed either. A group of Japanese fans told KDFW their assessment of the state in six words: "Texas is good — everything is big." Which checks out. Everything is bigger in Texas.
And in a tradition that has followed Japan's national team since its 1998 World Cup debut, Japanese fans were spotted picking up trash in the stands after a 2-2 game against the Netherlands in Dallas, a habit rooted in a saying that a bird leaves no trace when it flies. Stadium staff, presumably, were thrilled — and possibly a little confused.
Meanwhile, a young Swedish fan named Elsa Thora landed in Indianapolis and immediately discovered ranch dressing, which, by the tone of her posts on X, may have been a bigger moment for her than the actual soccer.
"Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack? EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP," she said.
Elsa screamed at a school bus in Indiana, posted a photo of Twinkies and Combos pretzels with the caption "I feel like I'm in a movie," and has been working her way through Trader Joe's ever since.
She also discovered that Amish people are, in fact, real.
Not every discovery has been a hit, though. Elsa also found shampoo locked behind anti-theft barriers at a store, a security measure uncommon in much of Europe, and called it her first negative experience of the trip.
She's not alone on the friction front. Scottish fan Shaun Cumming arrived in New York after flying from Edinburgh and was blunt about the cost of everything — especially after a $150 Uber ride into Brooklyn.
He also noted to Newsweek that Americans are noticeably more open than people back home.
"People here are very positive, enthusiastic, and they're not shy at all," he said. "They will tell you how they feel for good or for bad. And sometimes for British people, it can catch us off guard a little bit."
Cumming had no complaints about the food. He said American cooking is simply better seasoned than what he's used to: "Here, you get flavor, you get fed well, they put a lot spices, herbs and seasoning into their food in general, which just makes it really good" — and that the regional variety is what stuck with him most.
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Underneath all of it is something that keeps surprising people more than the food: the locals.
A tourism expert told Fox News that visitors driving nine hours across Texas are running into "overwhelming American kindness," often from small-town residents who have no idea why someone with hundreds of thousands of followers just pulled into their gas station.
A New Jersey deli owner gave a couple of British tourists a free lunch, and Alabama firefighters gave other British fans a station tour and sent them off with free gear.
Waffle House has been open at 1 a.m. for 50 years. Buc-ee's has always been enormous. Ranch dressing has been sitting in American refrigerators, unremarked upon, since the Reagan administration. Perhaps the deli owner who fed the British tourists wasn't doing anything he wouldn't do for a local who looked lost.
What's new is that someone finally pointed a camera at it.
For years, the conversation about America — at home and abroad — has been almost entirely about Washington: the politics, the division, the sense that the country is somehow failing itself. But that was never the whole country.
The actual texture of American life — the diners, the gas stations, the absurd portion sizes, the stranger who will drive you to a game because your Uber didn't show — was always there, underneath all of it, completely unaffected by whatever was happening in D.C.
This summer, a few hundred thousand people from somewhere else have seen the real America: big, weird, generous, a little much.
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Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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