Dreaming of Ultimate

Playing Frisbee with Mother Tongue has got to be similar to drugs. You are up, up, up, and then you go through withdrawal and it is all downhill until you can even start looking forward to the next tournament. This past weekend was my fourth tournament and it was in Erlangen. The weekend actually started on Thursday night when I traveled to Potsdam to meet up with a teammate. Bob cooked lasagna and we had a pleasant evening chatting. The next morning we took the train down to Erlangen, and we had rain to meet us there. It rained the entire day, we both bought umbrellas, got really wet, then finally just got something to eat. That night we met up with some other Tongues, first Russ at the station and then Biscuit and Meike joined at the restaurant. After I said I played at Beachfest last summer, Russ then got excited and said, "I knew I recognized you! You were fastest on the sand!" I guess it is ok to have that as a reputation.

Saturday was great, woke up early, nearly woke up the entire hall with my bouncy-ness. The whole team didn't even meet each other until the second game. It was cloudy in the morning, but the rain held off (because Joe from Chicago gave me his umbrella just in case we would need it at the field, and since we had it, it didn't rain. Had it not been packed, it would have rained). We won all of our games on Saturday, but didn't win the beer race. This was a race for two players on each team, a three legged raced with army crawling and jumping over a table, then drinking a Frisbee with some beer in it, and throwing a frisbee through a hula-hoop. It was good for laughter.

For dinner we went to a typical German Brau house, and the friendly Turkish team met us up there. A team from Istanbul played in the tournament, the funny thing was they were almost all Americans, but did actually have one Turk. Their captain played for Notre Dame, and graduated two years ago. Which means he was at White Smoke (the ND tourney) when Valpo went for their first tournament, and that meant that Valpo played against ND at their tournament, which means I had seen him play ultimate already, but of course didn't know it. Most of Mother Tongue made it to the party, we played "Never, ever have I ever..." and once the music got a little better decided to dance. Sean, from Turkey, turned out to be a great dancer, so we danced together most of the night, things like swing, the cha-cha and waltzing.

Sunday was also wonderful, except for losing one game, which was the championship game. That was kinda a downer, but not too badly. In between games we played the animal sound game, where you pick an animal, do a sound and a motion, and then pass it along. Check out the pictures for the tournament on this one. After saying out good-byes, I went with the Frankfurt crowd back to Frankfurt. On the way home, we drove past the Turkish team, and traffic wasn't the greatest, so we were able to conduct a few conversations with them, they threw Reeses at us, a camera was passed between the cars to take pictures, and email addresses were exchanged. Also, Carsten's car (the car I was in) reached 100,000km! Woo, what an event! Once we were back in Frankfurt, Wayne, April, Joe and I went out for Chinese. We were all sore and tired, but still made dinner last about two hours, maybe a little less.

Like I said, now I am going through withdrawl, luckily I get to see a few of them tomorrow because of the holiday on Wednesday!