Kicking the butt of the Sweds

Wednesday is our day off from classes here at DIS.  Some Wednesdays have field studies that are designed to give us real world experience that relate to our classes, and some Wednesday are ours to do whatever we want with.  Since today was one of the latter, we decided to go out Tuesday evening and take part in a popular pastime: having a drink at an irish bar and watching a game of handball.
The Danish handball team is doing very well this year and so many Danes have been following the games.  We beat Croatia last week, and yesterday we faced Sweeden.  From reading my other blog posts you may know that Denmark and Sweeden harbor a long time rivalry in which Danes delight in any chance to tease and one-up the Sweds, so a friendly game of handball between the two countries seemed like a perfect way to spend our evening.
If you know nothing about how handball is played or even that it existed as a sport, you were like me before I got to Denmark.  From what we gleaned while watching the game, handball is a combination of rugby, basketball and hockey.  The players dribble the ball, which is about the size of a soccer ball but bouncy like a basketball, and then huck it to each other to move around the field, aiming to score in a goal about the size of a hockey goal.  Each goal is worth one point, and there are two 30 minute halves.
Watching a sporting event in an Irish bar, 'The Dubliner' with a group of Danes was quite the experience.  We chowed down on a place of delicious fries and got ready cheer.  When Denmark scored their first goal, I began to cheer loudly and immediatly stopped after quickly looking around and realizing that I was the only one cheering.  It's not that the crowd wasn't cheering for Denmark, they were, but Danes are more reserved than Americans in general and so too in their cheering for sports teams.  I'm sure some bars watching the game were more rowdy than ours, and the fans shown in the stadium, decked out in red and white Danish flag gear, were certainly cheering.  Every now and then a small cheer would go up from the crowd, during which I would gleefully join in, but I monitored my cheering in the future more carefully so as not to draw even more attention to the fact that we were Americans. 
Denmark ended up beating Sweeden 27-24!! It was an excellent night.