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!
The tournament was in Magdeburg, but the team I went with was from Bayreuth (buy-ROIT). That meant that I and the other guy from Regensburg, Tanja, had to travel two hours to get to Bayreuth before we could START the trip to northern Germany. She brilliantly found a Mitfahrgelegenheit (which means basically 'carpool') driver going from Regensburg to near Bayreuth, so we got there in a car for eight euro each. The only problem was that we got there at four and we met the team at six. So we waited for a while in front of the train station.
Eventually everyone showed up: Johannes, Jakob, Micha, Jan, Dominik, and Alex (the third girl). Amongst much hemming-and-hawing it was decided that Jakob, Dominik and I would drive with Johannes and set up the tents while the other four suffered on the train. Little did we know the adventure to come.
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.
Thus, the second helicopter-landing-during-a-frisbee-tournament that I have witnessed. Last time it was a Chinook military helicopter landing on the fields in Savannah, presumably for the St. Patrick's Day festivities the following day. (For those of you who don't know the story, I had just returned from driving a cranky kid with jaundice to the Savannah hospital, and was paralell parking when the helicopter landed. I thought I was losing my mind.)
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.
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.
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