Bisquits in the Basket

I made my first covert penetration into a true "local" event: the Geneve-Servette Hockey Club game between the Geneva Eagles and the Zurich Lions.

The night started out with a simple dinner of spaghetti and Rivella. The prior, I've come to find, is pretty good (I think proximity to Italy is a big plus). The latter? Well, after much encouragement from my roommates back in the states to try Rivella, I snagged a bottle of it from the refrigerator in the restaurant. Rivella, apparently, is made from whey. It's clear in appearance, non-alcoholic, carbonated, and branded as a "sports drink". It tastes much like a flat Sprite would, with an energy drink aftertaste. Wasn't terrible, but I won't be running out to buy a case to bathe with either.

The hockey game was awesome. The game was played in a rink with a capacity of around 6000 people. In the Geneva rink, the sponsor / VIP seats are on the other side from the rest of the crowd - so on one side of the rink, you have 4500+ screaming fans opposite from a few hundred sponsors and their sycophantic friends. The Swiss announcers (speaking in both French and German to appease both the Geneva and Zurich crowds) seemed to be enrolled in the Michael Buffer "My First WWF Ring Announcement" class. Screaming "let's get ready to rumble" in French never sounded so amusing. So is hearing an entire crowd chant "PUSS-SSAAYYY" (poussez). I held back laughing out loud so that I wouldn't blow my cover.

They have cheerleaders, but they danced FACING the ice in the aisles of the lower levels and had moves apparently on loan from a local junior high. Watching these women slow-grind with their pom poms to I'm-so-depressed-please-lock-me-in-a-closet songs like those from Evanescence made me want to send them all anonymous Carmen Electra tapes or send them to XFL cheerleader camp. Apparently, it's an epidemic across Europe.

Unfortunately, Geneva and Zurich were playing in a series called the "play-outs", not to be confused with the "play-offs". The latter is reserved for the top teams to compete for the title of top Swiss hockey team, the prior for the bottom-most teams to determine who is going to be demoted to the lower leagues. Geneva won game 2 of a 7 game series, 4-3. Interesting Swiss hockey fact: only a certain percentage of hockey players on a team can be foreign nationals.