Diane and I returned to our apartment in the morning and spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon nursing our sore horse riding muscles, (read as: sitting on the couch). We headed early to practice to run and help the pitchers. Practice was a fun one as we played 21 outs and then a modified softball game.
After practice, we headed home to get ready for a night with our teammates. We rode our bikes with a few other girls to an ex-softball player's apartment. The Swedish women's handball Olympic game was on, so we watched. I had never heard of handball before arriving in Sweden, but it is HUGE here, so I have been learning a lot about it since my arrival. A lot of the players are from Skovde, and some of the girls on my team had connections to the women on the Olympic team.
Handball is kind of a combination between basketball (you can dribble and there is a 30 second shot clock), ultimate frisbee (you pass to teammates and can take three steps with the ball) and soccer (you try to score goals in the net). Wikipedia might do a better job than I can at explaining the game. I had a lot of fun watching the sport, but I realized I could probably never play it. It is very violent and I was shocked that there were no foul calls. Women went down with injuries every few minutes and the plays just looked nasty! Take this image from last night's game for example:
Looks brutal, huh? Regardless, we had a fun time watching the game despite Sweden's loss, and it was interesting to ask the girls questions about the sport. (Although I had to wonder how a sport I had never heard of was in the Olympics while softball is not...) Overall, another fun night with the girls.
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