Hannover, and over again: Bosseln

On Saturday we played Bosseln. What is Bosseln, you ask? It's a game that people play in the middle of winter when there's not much else to do. Our friends Kaska and Thorsten (the ones who had Polish night) host a Bosseln tournament every year. It's a game that comes from the far north of Germany near Kiel, where they used to live. It's one of those games that people in cold places play in the middle of winter so they can entertain themselves and not go crazy indoors.... sort of like the St Paul Winter Carnival medallion hunt (or the Winter Carnival in general), or broomball, or ice fishing. They all happen in the winter, they are all sort of silly, and they all involve drinking.

In Bosseln you have two teams. Each team has a ball. One person from each team rolls the ball down a frozen path until it stops. Then you walk up to where that ball stopped and someone else from the team rolls it. The team that gets to the end in the fewest throws wins. It's actually a little more complicated than that. If your ball goes out of bounds, for example, you have to drink. And if it takes your team two throws to get past the other team's throw, you have to drink. There are more rules than that, but they were all explained to us in German and no one on my team seemed to care about them too much anyway.

So on Saturday about 30 of us showed up in the Eilenriede, which is the forest in Hannover. It's really more of a tree park - there are not a lot of wild plants or animals living there, but it's big and it has a lot of trees and some paths, which happened to be frozen. A lot of the Bosseln players had been a part of the event for years and came from out of town to play. They were all a lot of fun. And most of them spoke English really well, but unless they were talking directly to us it was all German. I am starting to understand a lot more, but it will be a long long time before I can join the conversation at a party, or a frozen ball throwing game. We had two games - one to the end of the path and one back. Then three hours later, in various stages of frozenness and drunkenness, we walked to a restaurant called the Schweinhaus and ate - you guessed it - a lot of pork. There was sausage, and smoked pork something, and pork belly. And there was a lot of green cabbage and potatoes. Once the feeling in our fingers and toes returned and our bellies were full I got really sleepy. I suppose all of those balls I rolled out of bounds didn't help.

There was no sleeping, however. Kaska would not hear of us going home. We all went back to the youth center in the woods where our game began to have a party. I lasted maybe an hour and declared time to go home and to bed.

I decided that Bosseln is a fun game to play once a year, and that's about enough. It's not really cold here for so many months that you'd need to play it often. If that were the case, maybe we'd take up broom ball.

Here are some of my photos from the event: