Saturday, December 13, 2008

Sports




For all the sports fans out there reading this blog, I felt it necessary to update you on all things athletic in Deutschland.

-Fußball (soccer) is king. Nothing else comes close here. There are two stations on tv dedicated to all things soccer 24 hours a day. In Germany the bundesliga (nation-wide league) is the premier soccer league and is basically like the NFL of Germany with each region, city, and some larger towns having its own professional team. People schedule their lives around the games (not unlike people back home scheduling weddings that don't conflict with football games or NCAA tournaments). Bars fill up and beers flow as fans belly up before all the games start. It's like an episode of Cheers when it comes to seats, with each regular having dibs on his familiar roost. Cover your ears when the home team scores...it's gonna get loud. (photo is of fans gathered outside a bar, huddled around a tv, during a game several weeks ago)
-Handball is a professional sport here and broadcast regularly. That's right Handball. Never seen it? It's like a mixture of basketball and soccer. Maybe waterpolo on land is a better description. Entertaining enough, but once you've seen one match-you've seen it all.
-Curling. I gotta admit, it's great. Like shuffleboard, bocce (some men playing in local park pictured above), or for all those 4th of July'ers out there, Cornhole, on ice. Great sport for those of us sweat averse.
-Cricket...I don't get it. If you can explain it to me in a comment using less than 1000 words, you can teach algebra to animals.
-Swimming, ya that's right. Since I've been here I've seen two meets broadcast on tv. Maybe, I need to make a comeback...the German Nicholas Cage of the swim circuit.
-Now, for those of you concerned that we will not get our fill of College Football bowl games, fear not. We have discovered http://www.myp2p.eu/ . This site will likewise be able to publish a testimonial on how it alone was able to keep Shea from going insane from having to watch March Madness on ESPN gamecast.

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