Soccer!

As a Boston Redsox fan, I really thought I understood what it meant to be a fanatic. I come from a family that owns enough Sox shirts to clothe a small country, from a place where Yankees fans are ostracized from society, and where every October it is acceptable to doze off a little at school, because God knows the teachers were up past 2AM watching the game as well. So yeah, I'd say I thought I knew what being a real sports fanatic meant. Apparently, I'd never seen a pro-soccer game in Copenhagen, however.
Last Sunday, all DIS students taking Danish were fortunate enough to be given tickets to the F.C. København (the ones we cheered for) v. Brøndby game, which is apparently one of the biggest rivalries in Danish soccer. Indeed, upon arrival at the stadium, one of the first things we saw was a bunch of cops decked out in full riot gear standing outside the stadium. Once inside the game, the main sections of the fans were completely segregated be team affiliation, with Copenhagen fans in the main section (below, top) and Brøndby fans off in a side section (below, bottom).
Don't let the smaller number of Brøndby fans fool you, however. They were every bit as enthusiastic, if not more so, than the FCK fans. If you have any doubts, take a look at this picture below. Now, throughout the game, we kept seeing a bunch of smoke and small red flashes from the Brøndby section. I wondered what they were until the flashes continued to be bigger and more sustained. Finally we realized, that Brøndby was in fact lighting huge fires using big red flares in the middle of the crowd. Security tried to stop them, but the crowd pretty much just ignored them and kept the flames going. (I dare you to try to pull that one in the US and see what happens.)
The game ended in a tie, which was somewhat disappointing, but that didn't stop the fights in the streets after the game. The riot-ready police officers were needed to break up fights several times on our walk home. Even a half-mile from the stadium, when some of us stopped to get pizza there was a group of drunk FCK fans who were throwing beer cans at Brøndby fans who happened to be passing by.
I'll close with one last story from the game, unrelated to fan rivalries. The FCK goalie was injured in the last couple minutes of the game and had to be carried off the field on a stretcher. And what did the group of medics carrying the guy do? (Keep in mind this is in front of a huge crowd and on Danish National TV.) They DROPPED the poor guy right on to the ground. I don't really know what else there is to say about that, but I just wanted to share that story.

And here's a brief video I took of the FCK fans. The quality's not great, but you can kind of see them doing this cool weird jumping thing.