Pick and Roll, Kick and Score, Angels and Devils and other Sports-related Ramblings

I now have about a month of events backlogged in the blog partition of my brain. That is why today's blog is about the Tour de Suisse, an event that happened a full month ago. With the Tour de France going on right now, cycling is still a valid topic of discussion- and you can talk about nose picking anytime. Well, maybe you should use some discretion about when you talk about nose picking, but it is a topic that never really loses relevance. Europeans are serious about their cycling, as evidenced by the number of events, teams, sponsors and fans. I've casually followed cycling as a sport and have enjoyed watching some of the races on TV. We thought it would be fun to see part of a race since we are here in Europe. We went to see the first day of the Tour de Suisse. The route on that day started and ended in the same place and made 3 laps that all passed through the starting town, making for an attractive stage to watch. I was disappointed to see that they don't explode out of the start but rather they made a leisurely lap around town and then gradually pick up the pace over the next few laps until the frenzied sprint at the end. Even after the first lap around town the main pack was dropping the Swiss Military Team. Poor guys. I think they need a better sponsor.
The one problem with seeing one of these races live is that you don't really see much of the action and even the sprint at the finish line is just a big blur of riders zooming by. Unfortunately we didn't discover that there was a large screen near the finish line broadcasting the whole race. That is because we didn't actually discover where the finish line was until about 20 min. before the end of the race. We thought the town seemed a little dead for such a big event. It turns out we were in the wrong place. I continued to follow the rest of the race with daily race updates. There was a spectacular crash by Frank Schleck while in the lead on Day 5 that you can see here. The crazy thing is that he lands in a tree, is not seriously hurt and continues the race.
If Europeans are serious about cycling, then they are absolutely rabid about football (what we Americans stubbornly refer to as soccer). Incidentally, I find it funny that the German word for football is Fussball, which is pronounced just like "foosball", the table top game commonly seen in pubs, sports bars and frat houses. The fact that Switzerland was one of the sponsors of the Euro '08, the european football championship games, for the entire month of June and I never wrote a word about it probably tells you something about my interest in the sport. Football fans shouldn't take it personally since I don't really enjoy any major organized team sports, including American football, baseball, basketball, hockey etc. On the way home from checking out the Tour de Suisse, we had to connect trains in Bern, one of the Euro '08 host cities. We decided that maybe we should also sample a bit of European football culture. Bern is a city of about 100,000 and the night before the city was overrun with over 100,000 additional fans from the Netherlands, all dressed in orange, for their game against France. The city streets were still quite crowded with visitors. All of the major cities in Switzerland, and some smaller ones, had "Fan Zones" set up where fans could go watch the games on large screens. We went to see what the Fan Zone scene was all about. There was a real feeling of celebration and camaraderie among fans on the street. My favorite scene was this group of girls making their way to one of the Fan Zones- one dressed in an angel costume pushing a shopping cart with a keg and a large box of fresh pretzels, offering beer and pretzels to passersby, while surrounded by a group of devils.

The last sporting event of the day that i'd like to discuss is nose picking. I have a hunch that nose picking is practiced all over the world, however, the cultural norms regarding nose picking are likely to vary from place to place. Today was the first time that I had witnessed public nose picking in Switzerland. I might not have thought too much about it but it happened both on the way to seeing the race and on the way back, on the same train leg. Both pickers were somewhat subtle about it, using the technique of rubbing the side of your nose with your forefinger, as if you have an itch, while probing with the thumb- but neither one cared to look around first to see if anyone might see them. I began to wonder if maybe public picking was more common in this region or if maybe we were on a special train where picking was allowed. After a little investigating I found that, although smoking and cell phone use is not allowed, picking is in fact allowed on some cars. Maybe now my eyes have been opened up to nose picking on the train because this past week I saw a girl on our local train picking away with the full forefinger up to the first knuckle. I'm willing to cut her a little slack since she has a nose ring and those things probably need a little extra cleaning. I've adopted a term for nose picking on the train, it is in keeping with our sports theme and is inspired by my basketball coach from age 13 who used to yell from the bench "Pick and Roll! Pick and Roll!"