Quidditch on Boston Common - mission accomplished

When I first got to MIT I was MASSIVELY excited to pass a poster for the MIT quidditch team, the most-excellently named MIT Marauders. 

Quidditch is the sport from Harry Potter. You know - with a snitch? And bludgers, and beaters and a quaffle? Played on flying broomsticks?

Here's a video of Oliver Wood explaining quidditch and here is what it looks like in the films (I am sure both links will break soon enough, as they are clearly copyrighted material)

Now here is a video of it being played by muggles.

My friend Rita has seen the Harvard students playing (I think in the yard!?) and said it was very surreal. So, obviously watching quidditch had to be added to my list of things to do, but I kept failing to actually make plans to go and find a Quidditch practice. It also seemed kind of creepy to actively go to some random sports field to watch a bunch of undergraduates running around with brooms between their legs. Plus, they might talk to me and then I might find myself playing quidditch. Contrary to the impression you may get from blog title, I am not really very good at the whole "talking to people you don't know" thing, I am still more of a cowardly explorer at heart.

Watching quidditch got put on the back burner until I got brave enough to meet new people and have converstions and stuff. But fortunately, when I was meeting a friend from the other Cambridge and I was showing him around Boston (we went to the cupcake shop) we stumbled across muggles playing quidditch on Boston Common! I shouldn't really have been surprised, muggle quidditch is big in Massachusetts as this Boston.com slide show on the quidditch world cup proves.

Real life quidditch seems very complicated. There are as many officials as there are players on one team, the brooms have to be regulation in some way (tape was required to fix one before the beginning of what seemed like the second half), there are several balls involved and most confusingly the snitch is a real person. A real person wearing a yellow jersey, yellow tights and fairy wings with a ball in a sock hanging out of the back of his shorts. 

This looks like the snitch is returning to play

The first job of the snitch was to run of the pitch and down the road, only to disappear into the common. It was unexpected. While the snitch was not on the field quidditch seemed a bit like lacrosse and a bit like dodgeball and generally like quite hard work. When the snitch reurned to the field it became even rougher, as the seekers were trying to retrieve the sock. There was some kind of time penalty that would get applied to the seekers and so sometimes the snitch would be on the field but not being pursued and at that point he would try and interfere with the play of the other players.

The whole thing was remarkably complicated to watch, but lots of fun. It was also nice the way other spectators were so chatty, and were also fairly bemused by the whole experience. I think there is quidditch most Sunday afternoons from 1-3 on Boston Common, although I imagine it's fairly seasonal and is about to be replaced by softball. However, I highly recommend watching quiddditch! Especially in a public park, then you don't seem creepy and weird.