10 posts tagged “ultimate”
This post is going to be all pictures, because there isn't really much to say about the content of those pictures. That said, by the time I finish this post, I'm sure there will be plenty of text. Like that.
And that.
And that.
Just kidding, but I do want to say two things:
1) Janice, if you're reading this, I just wrote you a post card, got interrupted before finishing it, forgot that I hadn't finished, and mailed it. So sorry that it's weird and unsigned, among other things.
2) I shouldn't drink out of white mugs here. The water is yellowish in both the kitchen and the bathroom, but there are fewer specks in the bathroom water. Just a tip for y'all there.
(We won the Uni Tournament on Monday. We were the only non-gym-class team there. L to R: Back row: HaJu, Max, Ingrid, Moritz, Thomas. Front row: Michaela, me, Wolle and Clemens)
First, though, Mom: You were right about cheese. I should be eating cheese until my eyes pop out. And I think I just may. Also, it turns out that the grocery store in Regensburg (the one in the basement of the department store) carries peppered goat cheese rolls just like the one we got in Salzburg. Yay!
Onward to the frisbee talk!
For the first part of the drive, I was just kind of looking out the window and not really paying that much attention to the conversation, but I soon became aware that Johannes and Jakob were arguing about where a border was, and I started thinking "Is it really that important where Bavaria ends? Weirdos." Of course, within a few minutes, we crossed a bridge called "The Bridge of German Unity" and I realized that it was the former east/west German border that we were crossing. So that was actually pretty neat. At that point I'd been to the former east three times: twice to Berlin and once to the Baltic resort town Binz. I was excited to go to a NORMAL former east German city, though in the end we didn't see that much of it.
We got to Magdeburg in a little over three hours, and went straight to the Elbauenpark (German) where the tournament and campgrounds were. After looking into it a little bit, I can tell you that it was built in 1999 as part of a biennial German green-space revitalization project (German). It's really neat, and HUGE. It has a hershey-kiss shaped tower called the Millennium tower, a rose garden, a climbing wall, LINED frisbee fields, a butteryfly house, etc. It's a "Freizeitspark" or "Free time park", which is a fairly German concept.
Anyway, it was around 9-9:30 when we got there, and the storm clouds that had chased the car the whole way were closing in. Unfortunately, we then had to wait about 15 minutes for the gates to the park to be opened so we could get in to set up our tents. Working in pairs of two we set up our four tents as fast as possible, but due to poor tent design, the last tent took forever and it started pouring. It was around this time that we got the phone call saying that the other four team members were in Dessau, and were only going to get as far as Leipzig that night because of the bad weather. It ended up being a 13 hour trip for them. Eep. Meanwhile in Magdeburg, we finished setting up the last [stupid!] tent, and gathered under a big blue tarp for the walk back to the main tournament tent about three minutes away. We still got soaked. At one point someone shifted the tarp (they were all, of course, like a foot taller than me) and all of the water pooled on top went sloshing right down the back of my shorts. Yeah.
Inside the tent they had set up those sweet, orange beer garten tables and a bunch of frisbee players were already there hanging out. We grabbed some beers and rolls with meat on them (typisch Deutsch!) and sat at a table and talked for a while. I asked for a Radler (half beer/half sprite) instead of beer, because they only had Pilsner beer, which I don't really like. I got taunted and had the Radler taken away from me and replaced with a beer. I learned a very cool German language trick from Johannes. There is kind of a series of German word plays that Germans find clever, and people-learning-German think are really neat. One of the ones I learned in high school was "Die Männer, die hinder dem Laden laden laden, laden die Mädchen zum tanzen ein.", which means "The men who load shutters behind the store invite the girls to dance", but is cool because it uses "laden" four times in a row. Anyway, the one I learned from Johannes is this: "Mähen Äbte Heu? Nein, Äbte mähen nie Heu, Äbte beten." The neat thing about THAT sentence/exchange is that it doesn't sound like German. It sounds like either Dutch, or German spoken in a very thick dialect, but it's 100% proper German. It means "Do abbots mow hay? No, abbots never mow hay, abbots pray." Oh it's just super!
One of the Magdeburg players came over to show us "a disc golf disc". It was quite interesting to watch as my teammates were all "oh, cool, that's weird and different!", because I've owned a few golf discs for like four years. We ended up staying there until like 2:30am, most likely because we didn't want to go back out in the rain. The same Magdeburg player helped out by driving us back to the parking lot to get the rest of our stuff, and then back to the main tent where our tarp was. I offered to take the smallest tent, in an attempt to be nice, since I was the smallest person. It turned out that it was also the only tent that didn't leak. Plus 1 for Marianna.
It rained ALL NIGHT. I woke up in the middle of the night using my wet sweatshirt as a pillow and shivering like crazy. That was the first "why did I do this!?" moment I had this weekend. I ended up being able to adjust my blanket so I was warm enough to go back to sleep, but the point is that it was raining when all of this went down. The sun came up and woke me up, and it was still raining. I got dressed, and soon heard voices from the other tents, so I got out of my tent to find that the dripping I heard was from trees above my tent and it had stopped raining. I also discovered that we'd camped across the path from a deer enclosure!
By the time I got to the breakfast tent, the other four players had arrived from Leipzig and we talked a little over breakfast. The sun came out about ten minutes into our first game. It was unbelieveable. The tournament website had promised two sunny days, and the weather forecast had consistently disagreed, and then there we were!
We were playing 5 v. 5, with a gender ratio of either 4/1 or 3/2 on small fields. We played six games the first day, and I have to admit that most of them were kind of a blur. We got slaughtered, though, coming in 12th out of 14. To be fair though, we had fewer people than most teams, and two of us had never played with the team before. The playing style reminded me if a very unpolished Get Flat, though. I learned a little about the differences between American and German Ultimate culture. German players will say "hi!" when they're covering you, and expect you to shake their hand, which is really off-putting when you're trying to play the damn game! I'm sure I looked rude when it confused me. Then, after the game, both teams form a huddle (arms around shoulders and everything, every other person from the same team) and talk about how fun the game was and what each team did well and poorly. Then, you break the huddle and clap a little, and then one team goes into the inside of the circle and forms another circle and then the two circles rotate in opposite directions and you slap hands. Weird.
Our second-to-last game on Saturday was our best, by far. The Bay Bees (my team) had mentioned that it had only NOT rained for two of their practices the whole season, and the only substantial rain of the tournament came POURING down during that game. It was really something to see, though. We just worked like a well-oiled machine during the rain - really not skipping a beat. That was the one game we won. (Almost every tournament I've played in with the Wesleyan team has been pouring rain as well).
Jakob aggrivated an injured hamstring (?) after the first three games and had to sit out the rest of the tournament (and by sit out, I mean drink beer and fall asleep in the tents). The worst part of the tournament was our last game on Saturday, when Dominik hurt his knee. He started screaming like crazy, and I think eveyrone thought he'd torn his ACL. We had to end the game because he couldn't walk, and we ended up calling an ambulance (socialized medicine, for the win!). A couple of minutes later, an ambulance drove by and didn't stop, so a couple of guys ran off to fetch it, and it turned out that there had been a simultaneous injury on the basketball courts about 50 meters away. To save time/energy/money a medic from that ambulance came over to look at his knee and said it didn't seem like it was too bad, but he went to the hospital anyway. I'm not sure the logic of the whole thing, because everyone was spreading rumors and those rumors were in German, but a medivac helicopter ended up coming for the girl on the basketball court with (apparently) a broken collarbone.
This did lead to a series of good jokes throughout the rest of the weekend, though. Every time something went moderately wrong i.e. "oh crap, I don't have a pen!", Jakob would just say, "Hubschrauber!"
After we shipped Dominik off to the hospital, we all went looking for the showers that were supposed to be around somewhere. There was much wandering and inquring and confusion, but once we were inside the right building (which was only chance, there were like 15 buildings it could've been) there was a great big, clear sign that said "Showers." Dur. Another good cultural exchange was me learning what FKK stands for, and a bunch of German girls talking about how weird Americans are about their bodies and for not having group showers. FKK = Freie Körper Kultur = Free body culture. It seems to be translated to "nudism", but it's really more of an open-minded mentality about nudity.
After everyone was destinkified, we walked through the park a fair way to an exit so we could go "out on the town" (or something) and get dinner. In the process we passed the above event pavillion, where 'Ring of Fire' was playing as Germans square danced in front of an American flag! We ended up taking the first S-bahn we found to the second stop, and finding an inexpensive thai & chinese restaurant there. It was pretty much providence. Dominik met us there, in case you were wondering where he'd gone to.
That's Jan with the threatening chopsticks, and my food in the foreground...oh it was so gooooooood...
So now, tired from playing frisbee all day and entering comas from Chinese food, Alex, Tanja, Micha and I took the S-bahn back to the park while everyone else took a taxi with Dominik, who was freshly out of the hospital and walking, but barely. When we got back to the park gates, they were obviously still closed, and the keycards that we'd been given to get back in only worked in turnstiles that were beyond the gates. So we scaled the gates for the second time, as we'd had a similar problem coming back from the showers. It was very hardcore of us.
And there was yet a party to be had. There was a big tent with music playing and video footage from the tournament projected on the ceiling and everyone was dancing. It turns out that I'm not a bad dancer, I just dance like Germans! Unfortunately I was not able to dance very much at the time. The tournament was laid out so that the pools alternated, so even in a best-case scenario you had 30 minutes between games, and all the warming up and cooling down had totally wreaked havok on my legs. Tanja and I escaped the party to go to sleep on the early side, wisely.
The second day was more of the same, generally speaking. We played three games and got spanked again. In between the games we took down our tents and I had a delightful hot dog for lunch. They had pickles and onions and ketchup and mustard and I think my top-split bun and wild toppings may have looked weird to the Germans, but it was GREAT. Our games finished early so we had time to shower and then watch the finals between Endzone from Rostock and Drehst'n Deckel from Dresden. There was one girl on Endzone who was super fast and awesome. I was really glad they weren't in our pool! In the end Dresden won, and they also won the Goaltimate tournament and the party! Crazy, right?
Then there was a big award ceremony where every team went up and got applauded, from 14th to 1st. Germans are so obscenely nice about such things! And THEN one of the best parts of the tournament happened: We won the spirit award! That means everyone thought we were nice and friendly! Yay!
Then, sadly, we all had to go home. Tanja and I were supposed to take the train with Micha and Jakob, but then it turned out that the train wasn't going to get into BAYREUTH until 12:16, and that if we were going to make it back to Regensburg in time for classes on Monday, we had to go in the car. Which Tanja and I both felt rather bad about, but I keep telling myself that the Bay Bees would've felt bad if Tanja and I had had to sleep in Bayreuth and miss classes on Monday.
And that is my story.
Many of you may recognize the onomotpoeia above as being the sound that cute animals make when straining themselves. That said, today I woke up in a tent in Magdeburg, played three frisbee games, and was on the road in both car and train for a little over five hours, which isn't actually that long. I am nonetheless haggard.
So, I have made it back from Mückencup 2007. That is, Mosquito Cup 2007. I'm hoping to have a few photos within the week from others, and then maybe a whole bunch if I can get a copy of the photo CD from the Magdeburg team.
A few highlights:
- 48 hours of more German than ever before! It turns out my German-speaking brain has an automatic shutoff.
- The second time a helicopter has landed on a frisbee field during a tournament I was playing in!
- The first time I have combined camping and Ultimate successfully. Second time overall.
My apologies for not posting the promised updates about the family visit, and for not doing it this weekend either. Basically as soon as they flew home, all of my professors assigned the work that I would've like to be working on all semester, not just the latter half. I now have my topic for my term paper ("Development of the Horse"), the readings are finally being posted for "Literature and Electronic Media", and I've gotten a tutor for "Bavaria in the late Middle Ages", so I have to be on the ball so as not to insult him when we have meetings. Plus, I had JUST decided to sit down and start doing my thesis translation a little bit each day. I'm up to 12.5 pages!
The reason I will not be updating later this weekend is that I will be going to my first Ultimate tournament on German soil! A woman named Tanja from Regensburg and I are going to Bayreuth at 2 today, and from there we will drive the relatively-long-for-Germany haul to Magdeburg, which is horizontally halfway between Berlin and Dresden, and vertically halfway between Berlin and Hanover. It's supposed to rain all weekend, and we will be sleeping in tents, which we will only be able to set up at probably 10pm at the earliest. It should be fun?
And thus, my excuse for not being able to wish my father a Happy Father's Day on Sunday. Though now that I think about it, seeing as Boston is 6 hours behind, I can probably make it happen. Assuming I am not asleep by 5pm my time. Distinct possibility.
For the first time ever, I do not have classes on Fridays. It has been quite disorienting. The full impact of the magnitude of the weekday/weekend ratio change has yet to hit me, I think.
Lauren, Maya and I went to IKEA today, on a bus adventure! I bought this gorgeous medium blue (like maybe hex code #1378D7) half-liter thermos that I've been eyeing for like two years at the IKEA in New Haven. Yay for saving money bringing my own tea to class. I also got this silly easter mug that has a CHARTREUSE chick on it for 69 cents. You all know how I feel about green.
After we returned, I ate a Teddie peanut butter and jelly sandwich (strawberry, for those of you who understand exactly why we blog). It was pretty great.
THEN I had more frisbee practice. I kept very focused, and I played extremely well. It's such a pleasure to play when your not sucking wind (or in general). I even got a d[efensive] block, but it got called back for a foul. It was right on the goal line, though. (and the foul didn't affect the throw, for you skeptics).
Oh man, this day keeps getting better. AFTER practice, I made dinner! I boiled a few handfuls of spirelli pasta in salted water, and then drained the pasta and tossed it with about a half-tablespoon totes German garlic-infused butter (good call!). Then I plopped about three tablespoons of pesto (from a jar) on top and mixed it all around. THEN I dolloped something like a heaping 1/4 cup of ricotta cheese on top of all of that. I tasted it, and it was pretty insanely delicious, but to put it over the top, I lightly (and I do mean lightly) sprinkled it with granulated garlic and black pepper. I didn't take a photo 'cause I ate it pretty fast. Eh, it was ugly anyway. But with fresh pesto, it might be nice-lookin'!
I picked up an additional course at the last minute yesterday, called "Literature and Electronic Media". I thought it was going to be about e-books (which doesn't really explain why I went to it) but either way, it's not. It should be called "The Narrative and Electronic Media". The professor showed us an internet video of babies puking on their parents to demonstrate a new type of narrative, talked about Finding Nemo at length, and mentioned how blogs depart from the linearity of a narrative! I'm really psyched for it, and I REALLY hope it gets approved by Wesleyan.
Tomorrow we're going to Bamberg and then having a BBQ, and on Sunday a couple people are going to the Starnberger See, near Munich. Regina's great-aunt who is a nun lives in a cloister there, and we're tagging along on her visit. I think it will be really neat!
I have just realized that I play window-shade chicken every time someone checks into the hotel room across the way. As you can see from this photo:
My room looks directly into a hotel room. An EXPENSIVE HOTEL ROOM (ha ha!). THIS expensive hotel room. My ethernet outlet is right next to that window, and so my computer is too. Basically, when someone walks into that room, they set down their bags, and walk to the window to gaze upon their 200 Euro view of...an American reading boingboing. (I'm pretty sure my father's 43 Euro hotel room looked out onto a music studio with lots of plants in the windows). Either way, I effing live here, so unless I'm disrobing, my blinds are staying open. Usually their blinds close immediately. I have only once lost this little game of chicken. I don't want to talk about it. Modesty means different things in different countries.
If this were a book, there would be three spaced-out asterisks here to denote a change of topic.
I was moping around my room at four in the afternoon, and decided to respond to an email that A.J., a former frisbee teammate, had sent me while I was in Switzerland. Halfway through the email (about frisbee), I realized that I was missing ACTUAL frisbee practice, and went for the first time in two months. My German had improved (slightly), my playing had worsened (greatly). It was about what I expected, but it was fun, and we went out to a Biergarten afterwards. I think I have surmounted the language-barrier awkwardness, if not the language barrier, and feel better about going back next week. They're starting practices on Wednesday, in addition to Friday and Sunday, which is great because I will still be able to play twice a week if I'm gone on Friday.
3 x *
Gretchen and I left Berlin on Tuesday at 7:30, and arrived in Rügen around noon. I think. We weren't sure if the hostel was open for guests yet, so we locked our bags in large the train station. It wasn't actually large, in fact it was quite small, but not as small as that of the narrow-guage iron railway a few blocks down. The beach/boardwalk was only a few blocks away, straight ahead. On the walk there, we appreciated all of the soviet beach condos, which, ironically, make Binz (that was the name of the town: Ostsee-Bad Binz) look like every American beach-front city I've ever been to (Tybee Island, GA, Wildwood, NJ, Nantasket Beach in Hull, MA).
We were a little overwhelmed, because we wanted to see the beach, but we also wanted to see the Jagdschloss, which is a fancy hunting lodge from the early-mid 1800s on a hill overlooking the whole island. AND we had to eat seafood for dinner, buy snacks for our respective 9+ hour train rides the next day, and check into the hostel by 5pm.
We were going to get lunch from this "fresh fish" cart on the promenade, until we saw a) that the fish still had the shiny part on it, and b) the smoked eels, which looked like those giant novelty pencils dipped in tar. So we put that off, wandered around the boardwalk aka promenade a little, and then decided we should go to the Jagdschloss ASAP because it closed at 4pm, whereas the beach did not.
We were tricked (aka I forgot to read the guidebook) into taking this cute but absurd little train/car thing up to the Jagdschloss. It looked like a locomotive, but it was really just a car pulling two carts. The first...10? minutes of the ride was just bumbling around Binz very slowly while plugging restaurants and hotels. It was dumb. Very dumb. Eventually, we made it to the Jagdschloss ("hunting palace"), which is inside a nature reserve, and surrounded by (apparently) beautiful hiking trails.
I know this is a family blog, but I have to say - the Jagdschloss was a little phallic.
I say that mostly because the building is really oddly proportioned, in the sense that it has two floors - except when it has six. That makes the climb up the tower REALLY long. Also contributing to how long it feels, is the fact that the staircase is cast-iron and snakes around the inside of the tower, thus feeling rickety and leaving lots of room to look down. I was too nervous to take a photo, so here is someone else's.
Here are views from the top!:
Here are views from the inside!:
There were also a few museumy rooms on the first floor dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Schinkel (the architect of the Jagdschloss and other buildings, including the Neue Wache in Berlin, though he isn't responsible for the most beautiful parts of it), and two rooms full of truly heinous modern art that lacked an artist's name. Good choice.
We did finally walk on the beach and eat after we returned from the Jagdschloss. I had pad thai and Gretchen had currywurst. Woo, seafood...
Then, of course, we went looking for gelato. Because that's how they roll here. Gelato, all. the. time. We ended up getting waffles from a gelateria (because that makes sense). I had one with raspberry sauce and whipped cream, and Gretchen got one with Nutella all up on it.
I imagine that from there we staggered back to the hostel and went promptly to sleep. I think that sounds about right. Oooh, and then the next morning I took my first shower in three days because the apartment in Berlin had something wrong with the shower drain.
So I think that's it for Binz.
Ciao.
1) My hallway smells very deeply and movingly of a smell that I remember from my childhood but cannot place. On a more intellectual level, it smells like nutella and raspberries.
2) I am eating my first Döner Kebab. It is delicious. It's a Turkish Gyro.
3) I always told myself I was not buying a bottle opener until the perfect one found me. It did. In a German dollar store. Schau mal:
4) If you are a nervous frisbee player, and want to not focus on every mistake you make, TRY MAKING THEM IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE!
That's right, today was my first frisbee practice with Kreuz und Quer. The first thing I did upon arriving was slip in some mud and fall flat on my ass. But it was largely good. I forgot how to count in German briefly, that was fun. It was also a bit of a reality check to be around Germans who aren't speaking baby talk to you, and do not get paid to try to disentangle your verbal upchuck. Luckily, it was mostly playing frisbee. I had a decent game - it was three on three, though. I have this awkward problem, as well, that I am pretty good at throwing a frisbee, and almost NOTHING else. So I always start out getting compliments (only from the guys, because they don't think girls can throw), and then its just suckitude. Oh well. The only words I really needed to learn were stellen (stalling), ab (up!) and foul (foul). That said, I talked to the team a little bit after the practice, and it became clear that I cannot speak intelligible German. Sorry mom! Sorry dad! Thanks for the Under Armor! (really, though, it ruled). As time progressed I was able to express my self a little better. Thomas, the guy I'd been emailing, has this thing where he doesn't acknowledge that he understands what you've said. Like, at all. Which is probable no problem in general, but it is when one speaks a different language. At least I know that about him now. Another hurdle with the frisbee, is that the guy who checks IDs at the door to the Sportzentrum and a few of the guys on the team have THICK Bavarian accents. Oh Gott!
So now I'm more awake than I have been all week, and I'm itchin to go out. However, I am stinky and we are going to Munich at 8am tomorrow. I think I will still go out. Maybe. I dunno.
Also! My first piece of mail came in the mail yesterday! Thank yoooooo! I will leave a photo as a clue to its sender:
Alissa has just become among the first, if not the first, to actually ASK how preparations were going, rather than asking the leading question "Are you excited?". My answer of course, was "Every moment is like having a heart attack and gastro[enteritis] at the same time".
BUT
A quick trip through my facebook albums has reminded me that I have in the past, entered in good faith into situations where I knew nobody, and emerged victorious. Not even counting Wesleyan and camp, but even just among Ultimate teams.
I joined Flat because they emailed me about my BUDA free-agent listing, and I picked them of three teams because they emailed me first. Six months later, they are among my favorite people in MA to hang out with. I have been camping, swimming, partying, trivia gaming, soccer playing, BBQing, and of course frisbee playing with them. I have a bunch of their phone numbers, I know their kids' names, and I hung out with a few of them last night - I knew NOBODY going into it, and of course now I wouldn't change a thing.
Hi Marianna,
