Seventy-five percent of the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches are being played in the United States, which means millions of international visitors are currently experiencing, for the very first time, the psychic event horizon of walking into a Buc-ee's. They are not okay. They are posting about it constantly. And honestly? Good for them.
Everything Is Big. Disturbingly, Wonderfully Big.
Ayoub Baghdad flew in from Morocco to watch his national team compete and has already been stopped cold by something that has nothing to do with football. "Everything is big, even the Coke is big," he told the BBC. The roads. The trucks. The buildings. The Coke. The man came to watch a sport and instead got a crash course in American excess, which is really the more authentic cultural experience anyway.
This is not an isolated reaction. The BBC talked to international fans from Scotland, Portugal, Ghana, England, and Morocco, and a recurring theme kept surfacing: people cannot get over the size of things here. Which, if you've lived in the US your whole life, sounds completely unremarkable until you remember that you have been slowly boiled in this particular pot since birth and have lost all sense of what is normal.
The Buc-ee's Incident
Shaun, a vlogger from Scotland, visited a Buc-ee's and posted that "a place like this could ONLY exist in America and I LOVE it," according to the BBC. For the uninitiated, Buc-ee's is a convenience store, gas station, restaurant, supermarket, and shrine to a cartoon beaver that has somehow accumulated a cult following in the American South. It is several acres of building. The bathroom alone has been rated the cleanest in the country. It sells smoked brisket next to novelty socks next to forty-seven types of beef jerky.
There is truly no way to explain Buc-ee's to someone who hasn't been. You just have to watch a Scottish man experience it for the first time and see the look on his face, which is the same look people get when they first see the Grand Canyon, except the Grand Canyon didn't give them a free sample of pecan pralines.
The Food Reviews Are Coming In and Americans Should Be Embarrassed by How Pleased They Are
Ire Balogun, traveling from Oxford, told the BBC he finds American food "significantly better than in England" and was stunned that even the fast food has more flavour. "I am sure it's not good for you in many other ways," he allowed, which is the most diplomatic phrasing of a known fact that has ever been uttered. But the flavour, he insists, comes through across the board.
A group of Portuguese graduate students traveling from Madrid told the BBC they have been hitting Chipotle and Shake Shack specifically because those chains exist in the movies and TV shows they grew up watching. "It's a part of the experience of coming to the US," said Lourenço Silva. Which is either charming or a sign that American soft-power exports have done more geopolitical work than any diplomat ever has. Probably both.
Christian Boateng, from Ghana but living in England, was undone by portion sizes. "The portion we bought, we couldn't finish everything," he told the BBC. "It's not like that in England." He also flagged the American habit of not including sales tax in the listed price of an item, which remains one of this country's pettiest and most inexplicable traditions. We have all just agreed, collectively, to lie about how much things cost until you get to the register.
Free Refills Are Breaking People's Brains
Multiple visitors have posted online about the free chips and salsa at Mexican restaurants, the free refills at basically every sit-down place, and the general posture of American food service, which apparently reads as aggressive generosity to people who are used to paying three euros for a glass of still water in Europe.
This is genuinely funny to sit with for a moment. The United States has tens of millions of people without health insurance, crumbling public transit, and roads that could double as archaeological digs. But you will never pay for a second Coke. That's the deal. That's the trade-off we made.
Meanwhile, Americans Barely Know There's a World Cup Happening
Here is the kicker. Balogun, who attended World Cups in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, told the BBC the mood in the US has been noticeably more muted than those tournaments, despite America hosting the largest share of matches. Because this is a country where football, the sport the entire rest of the planet has organized its emotional life around, competes for attention with baseball, American football, and apparently the New York Knicks.
Two England fans, Jason Barnes and Harry Beckley traveling from Portsmouth, accidentally wandered into a Times Square celebration because the Knicks had just beaten the San Antonio Spurs to win their first NBA title in 53 years. "It's the craziest celebration I have ever seen or even been a part of," Barnes told the BBC. He said he might start following basketball now. So the 2026 World Cup may end up being most memorable, for some visiting fans, as the trip where they accidentally became NBA fans. America is wild.
They Are Leaving the Stadium Cities. They Are Heading South.
International fans are not content to stay near the host cities. Portuguese travelers Tomás Soares and José de Araújo Vitória told the BBC their group is heading to Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. They want barbecue. They want a seafood boil. "That's the thing that most of us are looking forward to," Soares said.
Baghdad, the fan from Morocco, acknowledged that US prices are higher than what he dealt with in Qatar for the 2022 tournament, but said the experience is worth it. "You can make your own budget to come watch maybe one game or two games and have the experience with you for your whole life because it is not gonna happen again." That's either a beautiful sentiment about the rarity of sporting spectacle or a very specific warning about American healthcare costs. Either way, he's right.
The Dingo Take
Look, there is something genuinely disarming about watching people fall in love with this country through Waffle House and free salsa refills. The United States is a deeply, profoundly strange place, and most Americans have been here so long they've stopped seeing it. It takes a Moroccan man staring at a large Coke, or a Scottish vlogger losing his mind in a Buc-ee's parking lot, to make you clock how absolutely unhinged the whole operation is.
And yes, there is something a little uncomfortable about a celebratory piece on American cultural exports when the country is currently dismantling its own government agency by agency, cutting food assistance, and picking fights with every trading partner it has. The same America that is charming these tourists with its big trucks and bottomless chips is also, right now, having a vigorous national debate about whether poor people deserve to eat. The Coke is free. The insulin is not.
But the tourists are having a good time. The barbecue awaits in Georgia. The Knicks won their first title in half a century. And somewhere out there, a man from Morocco is standing in front of a gas station the size of an aircraft hangar, taking a photo with a cartoon beaver, and thinking: this place makes no sense at all, and I love it. Welcome to America, friend. We're glad you're here. Try the ranch dressing. Do not look too closely at anything else.
