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Don't be in the bar when these guys are drunk and hankering for a fight

on Sun, 08/31/2008 - 14:41

Traveling from Boston to Hungary for Drupalcon, I flew threw Paris CDG. These guys were on my second leg flight (CDG>BUD). They caught my eye first on the shuttle from the terminal to the plane, and then they sat as a group in the plane.

At first I thought they were rough ne'er-do-wells that had been hired as schwag-hander-outers (or other temporary labor) by Lotto for some event, and were traveling there. Wrong.... After a bit more watching, I dropped that idea, but was still struck by what appeared to be a serious streak of roughhousing in the guys. Every one of them was banged up in some way.... You can't see it in these pics, but each had either taped up pairs of fingers, gashes in eyebrows butterfly taped and stitched shut, or splints on arms, etc.

At the airport baggage pickup, I couldn't resist asking them what they were doing. Turns out they were the team handball team sponsored by Lotto. Turns out (also) that this is a pretty rough game; thus the hard-looking guys with injuries.

Turns out (again) that Team Handball is a reasonably big sport in Europe - that appears to be totally missing from the US sports scene. Another ethnocentric american behavior.

But, looking at these guys, they're big, strong, and appear to like getting busted up. (See the bandaged finger on the guy taking luggage out of the right overhead bin.) Don't be rattling their cage when they're drunk in a bar....

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