An Afternoon at the Game

Sunday afternoon is for football. Not the wife-beating, dog-fighting, muscle-brained NFL (don't tell them I said that) or the Roughie 0-24 pigs fly, hell freezing over, can't believe it could possibly happen CFL, but the football that seems quite popular to the other 7 billion people on the planet. We're trying hard not to use the "S" word for football because it kind of sounds like when people say "ice hockey" to us. Don't want to be an ignorant immigrant rube from the New World.

We went to the Lyngby vs Køge football game in the Lyngby suburb or district of Greater Copenhagen. This would be a Div 2 league with young professional players. Good football but in a stadium that holds maybe 6000 and with only about 1500 people at the game. When you buy the tickets, you need to choose the "type" of seating: do you want to be with the drunken-flag-waving hooligans, the regulars, the families or in the fenced-off enemy section? All sections allow smoking so suck it up like you did in the 1980's. We chose the family section because I don't want my kids exposed to any kind of swearing.

The food at the game is Pølser (big wieners) and Øl (beer). The pølser is sold as an exposed wiener (even in the family section!) with 2 small buns on the side. This was very confusing to the kids and caused much consternation. Mette spent about 3/4 of the game slicing buns and creating hotdogs to solve this painful dilemma.   

You can get a good deal on a pølser and øl or if you are really thirsty you get a simple piece of cardboard with 5 beer holes that folds up with a carrying handle so you can carry a rack of draft beers back to your mates in the hooligan section.

The game was pretty good with some nice football and only a couple of times did a player cry out in agony when he was bumped. Lyngby won 2-0 so the crowd was in a pretty good mood at the end. A little bonus for us was that the stadium is adjacent to the Danish Technical University where Mette studied so we got to see where she developed her diligent study habits and wallflower personality.