Nowadays, NBA is the most famous basketball league in the whole world. Every basketball fans watch it. Their favorite player must be an NBA player, whether they are still playing or retired already. 

 

What makes the NBA always interesting to watch and never run out of talent? Besides of taking talents from abroad, they keep regenerating new players every season in an event that they call as NBA Draft. Each team will select a basketball player from college and give contract to them and sign them as a rookie. And another thing, Americans who want to join the NBA practice real hard since they were a kid, that’s why they are really good. 

 

If you watch an NBA game, you will see a whole different level of basketball. Their movement is really good, both their offense and defense are well organized, and they are also really entertaining, especially with their skills. I can imagine why the USA national basketball team is always winning in the basketball World Cup or even Olympics.

 

Slam Dunk contest is a contest where 4 contestants try to give their best dunks. It consists of 2 stages, the preliminary and the final round. The contestants can show 3 dunks in the preliminary stage and 2 dunks in the championship round. Only 2 players can proceed to the championship round. The scoring system is by 5 judges and each judges can give a score from the scale of 1-10.

 

This contest is awesome because the contestants should be creative. They will only get low scores if they give a simple dunk. The creativity and the complexity of the dunk will be the key factor for them to win the contest. 

 

In the Slam Dunk contest 2016, the championship round was amazing and it was so tight. The battle between Zach LaVine of Minnesota Timberwolves and Aaron Gordon of Orlando Magic got the attention of everyone and it was considered as one of the best Slam Dunk contest ever. 

Watch the video below to see all the dunks from Aaron Gordon and Zach Lavine in 2016 Dunk Contest.

 

Moreover, the size of the cups are huge. Even the kids’ size cups are almost the same size as the medium size cups in Japan. Isn’t that crazy? Why do you have to give huge cups when you can refill the cups? But still I think it is amazing to have a free-flow soda. You can just be full because of the soda itself.

 

In contrast, I think this is one of the cause of the high percentage of obesity in the USA. Approximately 35.7% of adults in the USA are considered as obese. In my opinion, soda takes a big part in this, because of the sugar in it. What makes it worse, the soda in the USA is free-flow, so you can imagine how much soda the American consumes.

There are several ways to tip. In sit-down restaurants, customers will put the tip at the bill tray which the waiter brought to the table. In a coffee shops, bakeries or café, they have a tip jars on their check-out counters and we can put the tip there. Sometimes people don’t put money too. And in fast food restaurants, they don’t have tipping as there is no ‘table service.’

What makes it nice is that the Americans are not complaining about this. They gave tips without any hard feelings. It may be a burden for new people, especially for tourists. When they are not used to it and they were “forced” to give tips, they will feel uneasy. But people can give only a small amount of tip if they think the service is bad or the food is not that delicious. It all still depends on the customers.